IBM To Become Cloud Broker

IBM is in the throes of developing software that will allow organizations to use multiple cloud storage services interchangeably, reducing dependence on any single cloud vendor and ensuring that data remains available even during service outages.

Although the software, called InterCloud Storage (ICStore), is still in development, IBM is inviting its customers to test it. Over time, the company will fold the software into its enterprise storage portfolio, where it can back up data to the cloud. The current test iteration requires an IBM Storewize storage system to operate.

ICStore was developed in response to customer inquiries, said Thomas Weigold, who leads the IBM storage systems research team in IBM’s Zurich, Switzerland, research facility, where the software was created. Customers are interested in cloud storage services but are worried about trusting data with third party providers, both in terms of security and the reliability of the service, he said.

The software provides a single interface that administrators can use to spread data across multiple cloud vendors. Administrators can specify which cloud providers to use through a point-and-click interface. Both file and block storage is supported, though not object storage. The software contains mechanisms for encrypting data so that it remains secure as it crosses the network and resides on the external storage services.

A number of software vendors offer similar cloud storage broker capabilities, all in various stages of completion, notably Red Hat’s DeltaCloud and Hewlett Packard’s Public Cloud.

ICStore is more “flexible,” than other approaches, said Alessandro Sorniotti, an IBM security and cloud system researcher who also worked on the project. “We give customers the ability to select what goes where, depending on the sensitivity and relevance of data,” he said. Customers can store one copy of their data on one provider and a backup copy on another provider.

ICStore supports a number of cloud storage providers, including IBM’s SoftLayer, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Rackspace, Microsoft Windows Azure and private instances of the OpenStack Swift storage service. More storage providers will be added as the software goes into production mode.

“Say, you are using SoftLayer and Amazon, and if Amazon suffers an outage, then the backup cloud provider kicks in and allows you to retrieve data,” from SoftLayer, Sorniotti said.

ICStore will also allow multiple copies of the software to work together within an enterprise, using a set of IBM patent-pending algorithms developed for data sharing. This ensures that the organization will not run into any upper limits on how much data can be stored.

IBM has about 1,400 patents that relate to cloud computing, according to the company.

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HP Retakes Server Lead

Hewlett-Packard reclaimed its server crown from IBM last quarter as the overall market contracted and Taiwanese vendors made big gains selling directly to Internet giants like Google and Facebook, according to an IDC report.

HP expanded its share of the market only modestly from a year earlier but IBM’s portion declined 4.5 points despite solid mainframe sales, to leave HP in the top spot. HP finished the third quarter with 28.1% of worldwide server revenue to IBM’s 23.4%, IDC said.

But the strongest growth was for the “ODM direct” segment which IDC broke out for the first time this quarter. It stands for original design manufacturers, which are Taiwanese firms like Quanta Computer, Wistron Group, Inventec and Compal, which sell partial and fully-built servers to the big cloud providers.

It’s a growing segment and one that threatens the incumbents. ODM’s accounted for 6.5% of server revenue last quarter, up 45.2% from a year earlier, IDC said. If the ODM category were a single vendor, it would be the third largest ahead of Dell.

Almost 80% of the ODM’s server revenue came from the U.S., primarily from sales to Google, Amazon, Facebook and Rackspace.

Overall, the server market declined 3.7% from a year earlier to $12.1 billion. It was the third consecutive quarter of declining revenue but IDC predicts improvement with a refresh cycle early next year. In terms of units shipped, volumes were about flat year over year, meaning average selling prices dropped.

Volume systems — mostly x86 servers — picked up slightly from last year, with 3.5% revenue growth. But sales of midrange and high-end systems dropped 17.8% and 22.5%, respectively, IDC said.

IBM fared worst of the top 5 vendors, with revenue down 19.4% due to “soft demand for System x and Power Systems,” IDC said. Dell retained third place with 16.2% of revenue, about flat from last year, while Cisco Systems and Oracle tied for fourth.

Cisco saw the most growth of the top vendors, with a nearly 43% revenue jump, IDC said.

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Intel’s Cherry Trail Forthcoming

The next generation desktop and mobile Atom is Cherry Trail in 14nm and the first parts are expected in late 2014. Intel has been working hard to accelerate the introduction of Atom parts based on the new architecture and in 2014 it will finally ship Broadwell notebook chips and Cherry Trail Atoms in the same year, both using the new 14nm node.

The Cherry View is a notebook SoC version of a chip based on new Airmont core, while Cherry Trail is the part meant for tablets. The phone version is based on Moorefield architecture and they are all expected to show up in late 2014, most likely very late Q3 2014.

The TDP should go down compared to Bay Trail platform as the new 14nm needs less voltage to hit the same speed and should produce less heat at the same time. With the 14nm shrink Intel’s new Atoms will be able to get more fanless design wins.

The significance of 14nm products for mobile phones and tablets will be in the fact that ARM alliance lead by Qualcomm, Samsung, MediaTek and a few other players will be struggling to get 20nm designs out of the door in 2014, and Intel can already get to a 14nm.

However, Intel still has to integrate LTE inside its mobile phone SoCs, which has traditionally been proven to be a tough task. At this time only Qualcomm has on-die LTE and its LTE enabled SoCs are under the bonnet of almost every significant ARM based high-end phone out there.

Only time will tell how successful Intel’s mobile push will be. Even with these 14nm parts, once they show up roughly a year from now, it might be really tough for Intel to get some high-volume design wins in the phone space, despite the transition to 14nm.

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App Stores For Supercomputers Enroute

A major problem facing supercomputing is that the firms that could benefit most from the technology, aren’t using it. It is a dilemma.

Supercomputer-based visualization and simulation tools could allow a company to create, test and prototype products in virtual environments. Couple this virtualization capability with a 3-D printer, and a company would revolutionize its manufacturing.

But licensing fees for the software needed to simulate wind tunnels, ovens, welds and other processes are expensive, and the tools require large multicore systems and skilled engineers to use them.

One possible solution: taking an HPC process and converting it into an app.

This is how it might work: A manufacturer designing a part to reduce drag on an 18-wheel truck could upload a CAD file, plug in some parameters, hit start and let it use 128 cores of the Ohio Supercomputer Center’s (OSC) 8,500 core system. The cost would likely be anywhere from $200 to $500 for a 6,000 CPU hour run, or about 48 hours, to simulate the process and package the results up in a report.

Testing that 18-wheeler in a physical wind tunnel could cost as much $100,000.

Alan Chalker, the director of the OSC’s AweSim program, uses that example to explain what his organization is trying to do. The new group has some $6.5 million from government and private groups, including consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, to find ways to bring HPC to manufacturers via an app store.

The app store is slated to open at the end of the first quarter of next year, with one app and several tools that have been ported for the Web. The plan is to eventually spin-off AweSim into a private firm, and populate the app store with thousands of apps.

Tom Lange, director of modeling and simulation in P&G’s corporate R&D group, said he hopes that AweSim’s tools will be used for the company’s supply chain.

The software industry model is based on selling licenses, which for an HPC application can cost $50,000 a year, said Lange. That price is well out of the reach of small manufacturers interested in fixing just one problem. “What they really want is an app,” he said.

Lange said P&G has worked with supply chain partners on HPC issues, but it can be difficult because of the complexities of the relationship.

“The small supplier doesn’t want to be beholden to P&G,” said Lange. “They have an independent business and they want to be independent and they should be.”

That’s one of the reasons he likes AweSim.

AweSim will use some open source HPC tools in its apps, and are also working on agreements with major HPC software vendors to make parts of their tools available through an app.

Chalker said software vendors are interested in working with AweSim because it’s a way to get to a market that’s inaccessible today. The vendors could get some licensing fees for an app and a potential customer for larger, more expensive apps in the future.

AweSim is an outgrowth of the Blue Collar Computing initiative that started at OSC in the mid-2000s with goals similar to AweSim’s. But that program required that users purchase a lot of costly consulting work. The app store’s approach is to minimize cost, and the need for consulting help, as much as possible.

Chalker has a half dozen apps already built, including one used in the truck example. The OSC is building a software development kit to make it possible for others to build them as well. One goal is to eventually enable other supercomputing centers to provide compute capacity for the apps.

AweSim will charge users a fixed rate for CPUs, covering just the costs, and will provide consulting expertise where it is needed. Consulting fees may raise the bill for users, but Chalker said it usually wouldn’t be more than a few thousand dollars, a lot less than hiring a full-time computer scientist.

The AweSim team expects that many app users, a mechanical engineer for instance, will know enough to work with an app without the help of a computational fluid dynamics expert.

Lange says that manufacturers understand that producing domestically rather than overseas requires making products better, being innovative and not wasting resources. “You have to be committed to innovate what you make, and you have to commit to innovating how you make it,” said Lange, who sees HPC as a path to get there.

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Will Intel’s Tablet Gamble Work?

Earlier this year Intel caused quite a stir when CEO Brian Krzanich announced the company’s ultimate goal is to make $99 tablets a reality. So far Intel has failed to gain much market share in the tablet space, dominated by cheaper ARM application processors and Android.

However, Bay Trail-T has a good chance to turn things around. The new chip can easily take on high-end ARM parts and in most cases, wipe the floor with them. Since it’s an x86 part, it can also be used in Windows 8.1 tablets. However, the price was a problem. Intel’s official Bay Trail-T prices range from $32 to $37, making the chips significantly more expensive than mid-range and low-end ARM parts. However, many vendors are said to be getting discounts and paying a bit less, in the $20 to $30 range.

Things may be about to change. According to Digitimes, Intel is planning to spend up to $1 billion on tablet chip subsides. The cash should sweeten the deal for vendors willing to give Intel SoCs a go. Since we are talking about relatively low average selling prices, Intel could use the cash to practically halve the prices and offer Bay Trail-T parts for as little as $10. This would make them competitive overnight, as high-end ARM SoCs like the Exynos 5 and Tegra 4 are estimated to cost well over $20.

Intel has a long tradition of overspending on marketing. A few years ago it showed Ultrabook vendors with $300 million worth of market development funding and it has a huge Core marketing program. Intel recently announced that it would start treating Atom and Core equally, hence the move would make sense. Since Core lifecycles are getting longer, Intel could simply shift some of the funding to Atom products, namely tablet parts like Bay Trail-T.

The only problem? Well the report comes from Digitimes and the site’s hit and miss track record has been on the “miss” side lately, so take it with a grain of salt.

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Is The US & UK Lacking In Broadband?

The US and UK are stragglers when it comes to consumer broadband download speeds and appear far down in table rankings.

This puts the countries, swaggering authoritarian surveillance monsters that they are, rather low down on the satisfaction scale.

The ranking produced by Ookla is based on results from Speedtest servers, and is called the Net Index.

“Based on millions of recent test results from Speedtest.net, this index compares and ranks consumer download speeds around the globe,” is the explanation.

“The value is the rolling mean throughput in Mbps over the past 30 days where the mean distance between the client and the server is less than 300 miles.”

Hong Kong takes pole position and it is credited as having download speeds in the area of 71.03 Mbps. There is a big drop of around 20 Mbps down to Singapore in second place with 52.85 Mbps and third is Romania, where speeds are 50.82 Mbps.

You have to look a long way down the list before arriving at the UK, which is in 25th place. Here, or there depending on where you live, consumers get a rather meagre sounding 23.55 Mbps.

The United States weighs in at 31st place and has download speeds of 20.77 Mbps. This puts it below the UK, Germany, Estonia, Hungary, Greece and 25 others.

Closer to home the European Commission has published its report on Broadband Coverage in Europe (2012) and reveals progress on broadband coverage targets. It found that while broadband has improved, it could be faster.

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Will Computer Obtain Common Sense?

Even though it may appear PCs are getting dumbed down as we see constant images of cats playing the piano or dogs playing in the snow, one computer is doing the same and getting smarter and smarter.

A computer cluster running the so-called the Never Ending Image Learner at Carnegie Mellon University runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week searching the Internet for images, studying them on its own and building a visual database. The process, scientists say, is giving the computer an increasing amount of common sense.

“Images are the best way to learn visual properties,” said Abhinav Gupta, assistant research professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. “Images also include a lot of common sense information about the world. People learn this by themselves and, with [this program], we hope that computers will do so as well.”

The computers have been running the program since late July, analyzing some three million images. The system has identified 1,500 types of objects in half a million images and 1,200 types of scenes in hundreds of thousands of images, according to the university.

The program has connected the dots to learn 2,500 associations from thousands of instances.

Thanks to advances in computer vision that enable software to identify and label objects found in images and recognize colors, materials and positioning, the Carnegie Mellon cluster is better understanding the visual world with each image it analyzes.

The program also is set up to enable a computer to make common sense associations, like buildings are vertical instead of lying on their sides, people eat food, and cars are found on roads. All the things that people take for granted, the computers now are learning without being told.

“People don’t always know how or what to teach computers,” said Abhinav Shrivastava, a robotics Ph.D. student at CMU and a lead researcher on the program. “But humans are good at telling computers when they are wrong.”

He noted, for instance, that a human might need to tell the computer that pink isn’t just the name of a singer but also is the name of a color.

While previous computer scientists have tried to “teach” computers about different real-world associations, compiling structured data for them, the job has always been far too vast to tackle successfully. CMU noted that Facebook alone has more than 200 billion images.

The only way for computers to scan enough images to understand the visual world is to let them do it on their own.

“What we have learned in the last five to 10 years of computer vision research is that the more data you have, the better computer vision becomes,” Gupta said.

CMU’s computer learning program is supported by Google and the Office of Naval Research.

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Is SAP Searching In The Clouds?

Esoteric business software maker, which no one is really certain what it does, SAP is debating whether to accelerate moving more of its business to the cloud.

The move would be a change in strategy which might initially have only a small impact on its sales. Co-chief executive Jim Hagemann-Snabe said the change would generate more sales by 2017 particularly in markets like the US where there is a big push onto the cloud.

Talking to a Morgan Stanley investor conference this morning, Hagemann-Snabe said that this would have impact on the 2015 level, I don’t expect enormous impact but it would have some impact because you are delaying some revenues. In the long term however it makes a lot of sense, which is not the sort of thing people expect from SAP.

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Is Intel Expanding?

Even if it means that it will be the first to make ARM’s 64-bit chips, Intel said that it wants to expand its contract foundry work. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said he would expand his company’s small contract manufacturing business, paving the way for more chipmakers to tap into the world’s most advanced process technology.

Krzanich told analysts that he planned to step up the company’s foundry work, effectively giving Intel’s process technology to its rivals. He said that company’s who can use Intel’s leading edge and build computing capabilities that are better than anyone else’s, are good candidates for foundry service. Krzanich added that the slumping personal computer industry, Intel’s core market, was showing signs of bottoming out.

Intel also unveiled two upcoming mobile chips from its Atom line designed interchange features to create different versions of the component. A high-end version of the new chip, code named Broxton, and is due out in mid-2015. SoFIA, a low-end chip was shown as an example of Intel’s pragmatism and willingness to change how it does business. Krzanich said that in the interest of speed, SoFIA would be manufactured outside of Intel, with the goal of bringing it to market next year.

Intel will move production of SoFIA chips to its own 14 nanometer manufacturing lines, Krzanich added.

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3D Printer Goes Retail

MakerBot, a 3D printer maker which opened two new retail stores last week, is among the companies trying to bring the cutting-edge digital manufacturing technology to Main Street consumers, but skeptics say the debut may be premature.

MakerBot, a unit of Stratasys Ltd, opened retail stores this week in Boston and in Greenwich, Connecticut, both of which are twice the size of MakerBot’s first store, 1,500 square feet in downtown Manhattan.

The company offers designs for more than 100,000 items through its “Thingiverse” online user community. The products range from knick-knacks like zombie sculptures to jewelry, sink drains and even medical devices. They are printed using its line of corn-based plastic fibers in more than a dozen colors.

“For most people 3D printing is futuristic science fiction. We’re here to make it real,” said CEO Bre Pettis, who cut the ribbon at the store on Boston’s fashionable Newbury Street using scissors made on one of MakerBot’s Replicator printers which start at $2,199.

Pettis, who has purchased splashy magazine ads to promote 3D printers as holiday gifts, believes there could soon be a 3D printer on every block in America.

Yet some technology experts say 3D printers may not be ready for prime time because they are still much less user friendly than most modern consumer electronics.

“There is so much hype,” said Pete Basiliere, an analyst at technology research firm Gartner. “People are getting a little bit misled as to how easy it is,” he said.

Some investors also are skeptical of 3D printing’s readiness for the market. Short-seller Citron this week published an article questioning the earnings of Germany’s voxeljet AG’s, and shares in the sector fell, including those of MakerBot parent Stratasys and rivals 3D Systems Corp and ExOne Co.

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