Musings: Harish Arora's Blog

 

On Nov 12th at SC07, Sun launched  Constellation Systems.  Sun Constellation System is a tightly-integrated, massively-scalable HPC architecture. These systems are enabling TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center) to build a Petascale system. The specifications of this petascale system (called Ranger) are mind boggling.

 

Following is the list of Supercomputer systems at TACC. I got this from here. 

 

 

With all these quad core processors, Ranger has 63,000 cores and is expected to deliver more than 500 TerraFlop!!! That's half PetaFlop. Now its clear why Sun Constellation System is about Petascale computing. Josh Simon's blog has some very interesting stats on Ranger. Check it out. Currently Lonestar system in TACC places it as number 22 in the list of Supercomputer systems. When Ranger becomes operational, it has the potential to become number 1.

Now we come to Sun xVM Ops Center. Sun xVM stands for intersection of Virtualization and Management.

Sun xVM Server is based on the open-source Xen hypervisor and is an open, cross-platform, high-efficiency, open-source hypervisor family of servers capable of hosting Windows, Linux, and Solaris OS guest instances. For the first time, Windows guests will be able to benefit from Sun technologies like predictive self-healing and ZFS that are built into the product.

Sun xVM Ops Center will be the management component--a complete, highly scalable, management environment for the provisioning of thousands of physical and virtual machines running across multi-vendor x64/86 and SPARC systems.

Sun xVM Ops Center will be used on Ranger in TACC. Looking at the scale of TACC, this is the ultimate test of Sun xVM Ops Center. Currently a preview version of Sun xVM Ops Center in being used in TACC. Check it out.

 

So, preview of Sun xVM Ops Center is being used at TACC on potential number 1 supercomputer system. How cool is that?

 

 

 

There has been a lot of discussion on an article by Tom Friedman (of World is Flat fame) in which he suggested that Indian Govt should heavily tax the $2500 car that Tata is producing (In all probability it is going to be at least $3000 but that is besides the point for now) for Indian market. He believes that road infrastructure in Indian cities is stressed as it is and enabling exponentially higher number of cars will break it down.  He gives the example of how India leapfrogged the world by innovating in cell phone arena and going from a country with a handful of phone connections to the one which has more than 250 million phones.

He is quite right about the state of infrastructure but he is missing some obvious points.

• Cars in India are already heavily taxed. Honda Accord costs more than USD $40,000 and Toyota Camry costs more than $50,000 and these are not even V6. Any more tax will hurt the auto industry real bad.
  
• With cell phones, the idea was to enable the common man to afford a cell phone. Several innovations happened to keep the price low and as a result cell phones connections in India exploded. There was no govt intention of leapfrogging the developed world and avoid the cost of land line infrastructure. The intention was to make the phone affordable and the path of least resistance was that of cell phone.
• With $2500 car, it is pretty much the same story. The common man in India aspires to own a car and businesses have spotted that need and are racing to fulfill that need (and make tons of money in the process). However unlike phones, cars need real estate to run and yes we are looking at a massive problem in hand. However increasing taxes to slow it down unless an alternate is available, is not practical at all. By the time we run into that problem, there will be innovations to solve that problem. Already there is a lot more focus on mass transit than ever before. Even if Govt builds the most effective mass transit system the cars will still sell like hot cakes because cars are aspirational objects in India and not just a mechanism to go from point A to point B.

So Tom,  while your intention is definitely noble and comes from someone who has studied emerging economies, the suggestion isn't practical and it ain't gonna happen.

 

Sun is ranked in top 10 best IT employers.  This is amazing considering we weren't there in top 20 list last year. The article says

Sun Microsystems with an employee base of about 1,000 made its entry into the Dataquest-IDC Best Employers listing at No, 10 largely driven by a high employee satisfaction score. It scores high on compensation and topped the rank on the new age priority, work-life balance.

Following trend is heartening to know and IMO is indicative of progress in India. 

Women constituted 23.7% of the total staff employed by the surveyed IT companies. In the 2004 survey only 14.5% of the total IT professionals were women. This percentage improved to 19.7% in 2005 and 23.6% in 2006.

Go SUN!!!!

 

For last one month or so, I have been hooked to facebook in my spare time. Now that the initial charm of facebook is wearing off, I am back to the blog!

While I was away from the blog, lots of interesting things have happenned.

• IBM and SUN cooperate to run Solaris on IBM servers. How cool is that!! IBM customers will now have the choice of using the best Operating System on the planet.
  
• iPhone is finally unlocked. It was bound to happen and it was just a matter of time.
  
• JAVA is new stock ticker for SUN.
  

... and lots more to come.

 

 

Came across the post on top social networks for engagement. Interesting tidbits from this article.

• Orkut, generally thought of as a Brazilian and Indian focused site, has more pageviews per user per month from US users than even MySpace and Facebook.

• Myspace continues to dominate Facebook on all three key metrics.

Also check out the follow up of above article.

Social Networking is hot these days so no wonder these sites grab all the attention.
 

 

In villages of India, farmers have been using bullock carts for taking their yield to market and to ferry people. Over time, rich farmers bought tractors and other motor vehicles however those who couldn't afford these, innovated their way out of this.

It all started with one farmer who was savvy about technology. He put together his pump, which was used to irrigate his fields, with four tyres, wooden cart, a radiator, springs and old jeep clutch from junk yard and voila, he had a vehicle which could go up to 40 km/h and carry 25 to 30 people. This vehicle came to be known as Jugaad. While he was not using his vehicle, he could use the pump to irrigate his fields. Other farmers saw this and built their own. The cost of this whole contraption is less than Rs 40,000 (USD 1000). It is extremely fuel efficient and started to be used as taxis to ferry people.

  

	Bullock Cart
	Jugaad

 

 

Jugad or Jugaad is a Hindi word which means an improvised or jury-rigged solution; inventiveness, ingenuity, cleverness.

Soon Jugaad become quite popular but authorities clamped on them because these are not registered vehicles. Nevertheless, they still ply in some places. It is a great example of how farmers in India innovated and built something for them that is affordable to build,  cost effective to run and was good enough for their usage.

 
 

Acer slams Windows' Vista operating system: "The head of Taiwan-based personal computer maker Acer, Gianfranco Lanci, hit out at Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system, saying that the entire industry was disappointed by it. ... While the industry had waited for years for Vista, the software was not really ready when it was launched to great pomp at the start of this year, Lanci complained.

Stability is certainly a problem, he said. " - Economic Times

Hmmm....

Well, a lot of people that I know, buy new version of Windows after it has a chance to become stable. However, for a head of a PC maker to lash out at Vista, it must be really bad this time.
 

It all started with Reserve bank of India (RBI) letting Rupee appreciate against the dollar to curb inflation. Overheated Indian economy and rising oil prices caused inflation to rise dramatically. RBI took several measures to counter rising inflation. Several steps were taken to reduce the Money Supply and several were taken to bring prices down. Letting the rupee appreciate against dollar was an important step in that direction. Well all that worked to curb the inflation and now it is back in control.

The impact of rising rupee is now being felt by all the IT majors in India

Quoting from the article

"The rupee’s appreciation has taken the wind out of software industry’s sails during the June 2007 quarter, with the top four software services companies posting a revenue growth rate of 28.73 per cent - the slowest year-on-year growth in five quarters."

 
Now that companies are facing the heat it will now be felt by employees as well. The salary hikes will be much less and there is a talk of Indian IT majors asking employees to come and work on Saturday. Not sure how all this will pan out but one thing is for sure. Employees in Indian IT industry (and worldwide) will watch the Rupee value (with respect to USD) very closely.

 

Recently I read a fantastic National Geographic article on Swarm Intelligence. It is fascinating to learn that ants aren't smart, ant colonies are. Quoting from the article

One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one's in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb.

This article got me thinking. What would it be like to develop a product in such environment ? No managers, no bosses, all the engineers writing code and doing the right things. Sounds fantastic. Is it possible, especially in large companies ? I am not so sure. For starters while ants aren't smart humans are. They also have egos and opinions and their own interpretation of the collective goal. They are highly unlikely to do just their thing without aspiring to do something better. The very reason humans improvise or innovate, would be the reason for lack of swarm behavior in humans.

That said, there are practices that we can learn from swarm behavior and adapt those practices to make better decisions.

 

BMTC (Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation) has started a new service for the public transport buses which ply within the city. It is called Yelli Iddira which in local language (Kannada) means where are you ? So if you want to know the location of a bus at any particular time, just send an SMS with the bus number and within a minute you will get the status of various buses plying on that route. The information is accurate because it uses online GPS data for those buses. Pretty cool when one is planning to use public transport and waiting for the various buses.

Check out this two minute intro to Social Networking. A fantastic example of getting a point across in a very simple way. I came across this video on public speaking blog.

 

Quoting from the newspaper article, the number of Indians accessing internet through their mobile phones is now over three times those using the PC to connect to the Web. India has 9.27 million internet subscribers as against 31.30 million users who access internet through their mobile handsets—GSM or CDMA—to read and reply to mails, download content and for online transactions.

Some other tidbits from the article 

• There are 165.1 million subscribers to mobile services.
• India sold 65 million handsets in 2006, of which 35 million were Net-enabled.

Now read this excerpt from the same article "the propensity to use Net on the mobile is very high and the figures would be much higher if sufficient bandwidth (spectrum) is made available for high-end data services and more websites have mobile-friendly content"

This is a perfect example of what Greg Papadopoulos calls as Redshift. 

 

Finally the importance of this flight has dawned on powers that be and we have a hope of direct flight from Silicon Valley to Bangalore. When this flight starts, it will be shorter than San Francisco-Frankfurt-Bangalore flight from Lufthansa and hence will become the Bangalore Express.

 

Storage Magazine rated Sun NAS at number 2, ahead of NetApp, EMC and HP. Wow!

 

As part of Sun India Campus Ambassador program a few students delivered training on OpenSolaris to faculty from TamilNadu and Kerela. Apparently they got a lot of attention when they said, we are students representing Sun Microsystems. Check out Ganesh's blog for more details.