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IBM Breaks Big Data Record
IBM Labs claims to have broken a speed record for Big Data, which the company says could help boost internet speeds to 200 to 400Gbps using “extremely low power”.
The scientists achieved the speed record using a prototype device presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week in San Francisco.
Apparently the device, which employs analogue-to-digital conversion (ADC) technology, could be used to improve the transfer speed of Big Data between clouds and data centres to four times faster than existing technology.
IBM said its device is fast enough that 160GB – the equivalent of a two-hour 4K ultra-high definition (UHD) movie or 40,000 music tracks – could be downloaded in a few seconds.
The IBM researchers have been developing the technology in collaboration with Swiss research institution Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) to tackle the growing demands of global data traffic.
“As Big Data and internet traffic continues to grow exponentially, future networking standards have to support higher data rates,” the IBM researchers explained, comparing data transfer per day in 1992 of 100GB to today’s two Exabytes per day, a 20 million-fold increase.
“To support the increase in traffic, ultra-fast and energy efficient analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) technology [will] enable complex digital equalisation across long-distance fibre channels.”
An ADC device converts analogue signals to digital, estimating the right combination of zeros and ones to digitally represent the data so it can be stored on computers and analysed for patterns and predictive outcomes.
“For example, scientists will use hundreds of thousands of ADCs to convert the analogue radio signals that originate from the Big Bang 13 billion years ago to digital,” IBM said.
The ADC technology has been developed as part of an international project called Dome, a collaboration between the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), DOME-South Africa and IBM to build the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), which will be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope when it’s completed.
“The radio data that the SKA collects from deep space is expected to produce 10 times the global internet traffic and the prototype ADC would be an ideal candidate to transport the signals fast and at very low power – a critical requirement considering the thousands of antennas which will be spread over 1,900 miles,” IBM expalined.
IBM Research Systems department manager Dr Martin Schmatz said, “Our ADC supports Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards for data communication and brings together speed and energy efficiency at 32 nanometers, enabling us to start tackling the largest Big Data applications.”
He said that IBM is developing the technology for its own family of products, ranging from optical and wireline communications to advanced radar systems.
“We are bringing our previous generation of the ADC to market less than 12 months since it was first developed and tested,” Schmatz added, noting that the firm will develop the technology in communications systems such as 400Gbps opticals and advanced radars.
Venture Capaitalist Going Internet Again
January 30, 2014 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Venture capitalists invested more money into Internet companies last year than they have since the dot-com bust, according to a survey published last Friday.
Internet companies in the U.S. took in $7.1 billion from VCs in 1,059 deals in 2013, the highest level of Internet investment in terms of dollars and deals since 2001, according to The MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data from Thomson Reuters. In comparison, VC investment in Internet companies totaled $6.7 billion in 995 deals in 2012, another strong year, according to the MoneyTree report.
In addition, VCs invested $110 billion in 1,523 software industry deals last year, the highest level in both dollars and number of deals for the sector since 2000, according to the MoneyTree report. VC dollars going into software rose 27 percent year over year, while the number of deals increased 10 percent.
The amount of money invested in the software industry accounted for 37 percent of total VC investments in 2013, the highest percentage since the MoneyTree report was initiated in 1995.
All this is taking place against a backdrop of a generally strong VC environment, as VCs invested $29.4 billion in 3,995 deals across all sectors in 2013, a year-over-year increase of 7 percent in dollars and 4 percent in deals, according to the report.
Companies involved in big data, mobile apps, security, digital marketing, and medical and health software are among those that are especially interesting to VCs, according to Mark McCaffrey, PwC’s U.S. and global software leader.
Top deals in the fourth quarter of 2013 included a $225,000 investment in Pinterest, a site for sharing photos, recipes and other items of personal interest, and a $177,514 investment in Palantir Technologies, a government contractor in the systems integration business, according to MoneyTree data.
Going into 2014 a sense of optimism prevails, but this does not mean that the tech industry is going through a bubble of the sort that arose in 1999 and 2000, McCaffrey said.
Is The Tech Industry Going Independent?
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The tech industry is undergoing a shift toward a more independent, contingent IT workforce. And while that trend might not be cause for alarm for retiring baby boomer IT professionals, it could mean younger and mid-career workers need to prepare to make a living solo.
About 18% of all IT workers today are self-employed, according to an analysis by Emergent Research, a firm focused on small businesses trends. This independent IT workforce is growing at the rate of about 7% per year, which is faster than the overall growth rate for independent workers generally, at 5.5%.
The definition of independent workers covers people who work at least 15 hours a week.
Steve King, a partner at Emergent, said the growth in independent workers is being driven by companies that want to stay ahead of change, and can bring in workers with the right skills. “In today’s world, change is happening so quickly that everyone is trying to figure out how to be more flexible and agile, cut fixed costs and move to variable costs,” said King. “Unfortunately, people are viewed as a fixed cost.”
King worked with MBO Partners to produce a recent study that estimated the entire independent worker headcount in the U.S., for all occupations, at 17.7 million. They also estimate that around one million of them are IT professionals.
A separate analysis by research firm Computer Economics finds a similar trend. Over the last two years, there has been a spike in the use of contract labor among large IT organizations — firms with IT operational budgets of more than $20 million, according to John Longwell, vice president of research at Computer Economics.
This year, contract workers make up 15% of a typical large organization’s IT staff at the median. This is up from a median of just 6% in 2011, said Longwell. The last time there was a similar increase in contract workers was in 1998, during the dot.com boom and the run-up to Y2K remediation efforts. Computer Economics recently published a research brief on the topic.
“The difference now is that use of contract or temporary workers is not being driven by a boom, but rather by a reluctance to hire permanent workers as the economy improves,” Longwell said.
Computer Economics expects large IT organizations to step up hiring in 2014, which may cause the percentage of contract workers to decline back to a more normal 10% level. But, Longwell cautioned, it’s not clear whether that new hiring will be involve full-time employees or even more contract labor.
SalesForce Goes Hacking
Salesforce.com really wants to attract lots of developers to its Dreamforce conference next month in San Francisco. As in, really.
Last Friday, the cloud software vendor announced a “hackathon” would be held at the conference, with US$1 million going to the developer or team who creates the top prize-winning mobile application with Salesforce.com technology.
“It’s not going to be easy — $1 million is going to bring out the best of the best,” Salesforce.com said in Friday’s announcement. “So don’t wait until Dreamforce! You’re going to want to get started now. With Force.com, Heroku, ExactTarget Fuel, Mobile Services and more — you’ve got a killer array of platform technology to use.”
Salesforce.com will also be providing some “pretty amazing new technology” for use at the show, the announcement adds.
In order to participate, developers have to either register for a full conference pass or a special $99 hacker pass.
The hackathon reflects Salesforce.com’s long courtship of developers to its development technologies, its AppExchange marketplace and recent efforts to build out more tooling for mobile application development.
Developers taking part in the hackathon will have plenty of competition, with some 20,000 programmers expected to attend Dreamforce overall. A “Hack Central” area will be open around the clock, supporting coders who want to work until the wee hours on their application.
In order to qualify, an application can’t have been previously released. The entries will be judged on four criteria counting 25 percent each: innovation, business value, user experience and use of Salesforce.com’s platform.
The second-place finisher will receive $50,000, with $25,000 going to the third-place winner. Fourth and fifth place will get $10,000 and $5,000, respectively.
Some 120,000 people are expected to register for Dreamforce this year. While some of that total will be watching online rather than in person, Dreamforce is now operating at a scale rivaling Oracle’s OpenWorld event, which happened last month.