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Archive for October, 2007

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Categories: Research Software Development Web Development
October 22nd, 2007 by Peter

Every year Gartner announces its opinion about future trends in industry technologies. Beside the fact that industry typically takes this as ‘god-given’ facts even research funding (like EU programs) seems to align itself to the typical hype topics. Therefore these Gartner publications tend to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Well-known examples are Web 2.0, Grid Computing, and SOA …

In 2008 there is a high probability that industry will be keen on these recently announced topics:

  • Green IT, especially power consumption-aware scheduling.
  • Business Processing Modeling, so SOA is still in the game.
  • Metadata management, but since Gartner’s usage of the word Metadata is different to the typical scientific understanding, I would name this as data consolidation.
  • Virtualization 2.0 (ouch). Add some policy and management features to ’simple’ virtualization and you confirm to the new hype.
  • Mashups. Sound like the old portal story, coming back again.
  • Web platforms.
  • Computing fabric. This one is interesting, since the article says:
    “The next step in this progression is the introduction of technology to allow several blades to be merged operationally over the fabric, operating as a larger single system image.

    Great, we get distributed operating systems back !

  • Real world Web. This is the upcoming (or continued) playground for all mobility research activities.
  • Social software. This fits to my personal observation about the relevance of LinkedIn and friends in the daily work.
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The rise and fall of CORBA

Categories: DRMAA Research
October 16th, 2007 by Peter

With all the bloated statements about CORBA, Web services, and the past development of middleware systems the ACM article by Michi Henning, who is a widely accepted CORBA guru, is really nice to read.

He describes why the main reason for CORBA’s fall was a lack in OMG’s standardization procedures. I share all his thoughts, even for WS technology, and his argumentation about standardization reminds me of my own DRMAA standardization work. It is good to see that our internal DRMAA group credo (focus on implementations, no unnecessary features, open source) fits to his suggestions.

Just read the article …

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Victory !!!

Categories: DRMAA
October 9th, 2007 by Peter

OGF recently announced that DRMAA has reached the final status of a grid recommendation. After several years of work by the implementors, the users, and the group members this is a very happy moment for all of us.

It must be noted that OGF needed more than one year to acknowledge the status change, which shows (at least to me) that the document process has still room for improvement. Greg Newby and all the other steering commitee members already work on this, but according to Andrew Grimshaw it will take time.

It is also a pity that OGF officials do not attach more importance to this event. While OGSA is hyped in every press release, the work of the still existing Non-OGSA community is more or less ignored by the PR division in OGF. Maybe it is time for some adoption rate analysis of all the different group outputs ;-)

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Fallacies of Distributed Computing

Categories: Research
October 9th, 2007 by Peter

Good thing to tell the students in the first lesson of a distributed computing lecture …

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Computing

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How to treat your battery

Categories: Administration
October 5th, 2007 by Peter

In my office I started to use my MacBook Pro as a permanent desktop computer. Since a friend of mine is a researcher in battery technologies, I asked him how to proceed with the battery – remove it or not ?

He said that the permanent conservation charging for a full battery is not an real issue. Today the most important thing is the temperature. You should try to keep your battery on room temperature, since it was also build at this temperature. Since the MacBook gets really hot in the battery area of the casing, this is a good reason for battery removal in office operation.

Another issue is the old battery memory effect discussion. Everybody knows that Li batteries, in contrast to Ni-Ca batteries, have no memory effect. Anyway it is a good idea to empty your battery before re-charge, instead of connecting the power chord whenever you return to your desk. The reason is simply to reduce the number of re-charge cycles – every time the battery needs to change the ‘direction’ of the power, it gets weaker. You should also follow the typical manual instruction for new hardware and do some full charge / re-charge cycles for the first times. This calibrates to only your battery status display, but also the battery itself.

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