Top Computing Problems

The 7 Millennium Prize Problems don't resonate for me...

These are the areas that do engage me:

• Datacentre Hardware organisation, power, cooling and interconnect fabric
• Multi-level memory and impact on Operating Systems. Flash as RAM, disk cache or SSD?
• Flexible Hardware and supporting Systems and Software
• Internetworking protocols. IPv4 isn't secure, IPv6 is overblown.

The piece for the second item, "Multi-level memory" is old and not specifically written for this set of questions. Expect it to be updated at some time.

Internetworking protocols

Placemarker for a piece on Internetworking protocols and problems with IPv4 (security and facilities) and IPv6 (overheads, availability).

"The Internet changes everything" - the Web 2.0 world we have is very different to where we started in 1996, the break-through year of 'The Internet' with IPv4.

But it is creaking and groaning.
Around 90% of all email sent is SPAM (Symantec quarterly intelligence report).

And since 2004 when the "Hackers Turned Pro", Organised Crime makes the Internet a very dangerous place for most people.

IPv6 protocols have been around for some time, but like Group 4 Fax before them, are a Great Idea, but nobody is interested...

What are the problems?
What shape could solutions have?
Are there (general) solutions to all problems?

Systems Design

Are these new sorts of systems possible with current commercial or FOSS systems?
What Design and Implementation changes might be needed?

How do they interact with the other 'Computing Challenges' in this series?

Flexible, Adaptable Hardware Organisations

Placemarker for a piece on flexible hardware designs.

I'd like to be able to buy a CPU 'brick' at home for on-demand compute-intensive work, like Spreadsheets.
I'd like be able to easily transfer an application, then bring it back again.

Secondly, if my laptop has enough CPU grunt, it won't have the Graphics processing or Displays (type, size, number) needed for some work... I'd like to be able to 'dock' my laptop and happily get on with it.
The current regime is to transfer files and have separate environments that operate independently and I have to go through that long login-start-apps-setup-environment cycle.

I prefer KDE (and other X-11 Windows Managers) to Aqua on Snow Leopard (OS/X 10.6) because they remember what was running in a login 'session', and recreate it when I login again.

In 1995, I first used HP's CDE (IIRC) on X-11, that provided multiple work-spaces. This was mature technology then.

It was only this year, 15 years on, that Apple provided "Spaces" for their uses.
Huh??

We already have good flexible storage options for most types of sites.
Cheap NAS appliances are available for home use, up to high-end SAN solutions for large Enterprises.

For micro- and portable-devices, the main uses are "transactional" web-based.
These scale well already, and little, if nothing, can be done to improve this.

Systems Design

What flows from this 'wish list' is that no current Operating System design will support it well.
The closest, "Plan 9", developed around 1990, allows for users to connect different elements to a common network and Authentication Domain:

• (graphic) Terminals
• Storage
• CPU

The design doesn't support the live migration of applications.

Neither do the current designs of Virtual Machines (migrate the whole machine) or 'threads' and multi-processors.

Datacentre Hardware organisation

Related posts:

• Everything Old is New Again: Cray's CPU design
• A Good Question: When will Computer Design 'stabilise'?

Senior Google staffers wrote The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines, which I thought showed break-through thinking.

The importance of this piece is it wasn't theoretical, but a report of What Works in practice, particularly at 'scale'.

Anything that Google, one of the star performers of the Internet Revolution, does differently is worthy of close examination.  What do they know that the rest of us don't get?

While the book is an extra-ordinary blueprint, I couldn't but help asking a few questions:

• Why do they stick with generic-design 1RU servers when they buy enough for custom designs?
• How could 19-inch racks, designed for mechanical telephone exchanges a century ago, still be a good, let alone best, packaging choice when you build Wharehouse sized datacentres?
• Telecommunications sites use DC power and batteries. Why take AC, convert to DC, back to AC, distribute AC to every server with inefficient, over-dimensioned power-supplies?

Part of the management problem with datacentres is minimising input costs whilst maximising 'performance' (throughput and latency).