Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has joined forces with Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to build what it claims is the world's first solar-powered supercomputer, dubbed Hikari.

HPE said that the computer is currently being used to calculate biology applications' in a bid to help solve the Zika virus crisis.

HPE claimed that it teamed with TAAC, as well as the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) and NTT Facilities to ensure that Hikari did not require the huge amount of energy that traditional supercomputers usually require.

Nic Dube, chief technologist for high-performance computing at HPE suggested that Hikari is built using solar panels which are wired directly to the computer, meaning that it runs "on free energy, in the most efficient and sustainable way".

Traditional supercomputers produce a huge amount of heat, and the companies decided to use the Apollo 8000 warm water cooling system, which eliminates the need for Computer Room Air Handlers (CRAH). HPE claimed that this reduced the amount of cooling energy that would normally be required.

Dube explained that during the day, energy produced by the solar system feeds straight into the computer, while at night, when the photovoltaic array does not create energy, the Apollo system switched to an AC-based grid.

The supercomputer runs on about 200,000 watts of DC power, and its other components include DC battery systems, DC air-conditioning, DC lighting, DC supply and solar panels.

HPE claimed that since the Hikari team launched the measurement phase at the end of August, more than 30% of the total power used by supercomputer was supplied by renewable energy sources.

Dan Stanzione, executive director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center has called on other companies to switch from using AC power to DC power in servers, adding that HPE had embraced the idea of investigating and exploring alternative technologies.

"Without their partnership, we could never have built one of the world's greenest supercomputers," he said.

Picture Credit: HPE

Intel has announced the acquisition of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology firm Altera in a $16.7bn deal, to help the chip maker become a leader in Internet of Things (IoT) and data centre technologies.

Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel said: "Intel's growth strategy is to expand our core assets into profitable, complementary market segments. With this acquisition, we will harness the power of Moore's Law to make the next generation of solutions not just better, but able to do more. Whether to enable new growth in the network, large cloud data centers or IoT segments, our customers expect better performance at lower costs."

Altera's technology will allow Intel to build chips faster than it is currently able to, making it perfect for such a rapidly changing industry as the IoT.

John Daane, President, CEO and Chairman of Altera added: "We believe that as part of Intel we will be able to develop innovative FPGAs and system-on-chips for our customers in all market segments. Together, we expect to drive meaningful value for our customers, partners and employees around the world."

Intel expects to use these jointly-developed programmable chips in smart cars rather than using ASIC chips that need to be pre-programmed in advance. FPGA chips can be programmed later and are faster and cheaper to manufacture.

News that Intel was likely to acquire Altera broke back in March, via the Wall Street Journal and although the deal looked like a great bet two months ago is it still the case now?

General purpose x86 chips are all well and good for most circumstances but the trend is towards more customisable compute infrastructure the kind Altera can offer with its Field Programmable Gate Array technology (FPGA).

What is FPGA and why is it important?

A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit that can be programmed or configured within a computing infrastructure after manufacture. These semiconductor devices feature configurable logic blocks connected via programmable interconnects. FPGAs can be configured to suit particular application and functionality requirements. This configuration can be done without human intervention, so the infrastructure can optimise itself to process workloads.

Originally FPGAs were used when prototyping circuits as they tended to be slow to run. However, the technology has now speeded up enough to be used instead of ASICs (application specific integrated circuit). The approach is not as space-efficient as ASIC but can be a lot cheaper and quicker. Another argument is that while not as capable as ASICs, FPGAs are far more capable than general purpose CPUs found in servers.

Who uses them?

The oil and gas industry has been at the forefront of using FPGA technology as well as GPUs. The financial industry has used them to speed up the parsing of market data feeds and high-frequency trading systems.

The technology is increasingly being used in the cloud to help cloud service providers increase performance and change infrastructure in accordance with changing application needs.

The low power requirements of some FPGA chips also makes them useful in small embedded devices that will be used as part of an Internet of Things network.

What's in it for Intel?

In 2013, Intel signed a deal to make 14-nanometer wafers and FPGA chips for Altera. By acquiring the firm, Intel would be able to make all the chips Altera designs. By combining FPGA into its own CPUs, Intel gains a market advantage in making processors for datacentres and diversifies away from its traditional PC business. Altera gets to expand into the datacentre market and gain the upper hand over longtime rival Xilinx.

Bernstein Research's Stacy Rasgon told Bloomberg that the deal makes sense for Intel to grow parts of its business. "There are synergies, say, in Intel's datacentre business," said Rasgon.

"On the surface, Altera is one of the only semiconductor companies with better gross margins than Intel, and with about two-thirds of its revenue from telecom, wireless, military/aerospace, it definitely fits the bill of diversifying revenue beyond Intel's legacy computer markets," Cowen & Co. analyst Timothy Arcuri wrote in a research note to clients, according to a Reuters report.

IHS analysts Tom Hackenberg, principal analyst, embedded processing at IHS, said that such a deal would make both companies "well poised to target a growing telecommunications market and IoT applications," he said in a research note.

Getting embedded with Altera

The deal will be money well spent by Intel, according to Clive Longbottom, service director at Quocirca.

"Altera's FPGAs would play well in an "embedded" software defined compute architecture. Intel can change parts of its code on the fly through having the FPGA talking at the highest possible speed to the CPU itself," he says.

Certain functions could be abstracted from the CPU itself to the FPGAs, and the use of ASICs could be minimised, providing much greater flexibility for Intel itself.

"It will also allow for Intel to better keep up with changes in the market - a lot of the top level, less speed dependent software to CPU calls can be routed via the FPGA, allowing for better overall security (the security layer can be adapted and updated on a more regular basis), greater capability to "shape" different data packets and so on," adds Longbottom.

Gaining control

Although Intel has been making Altera's FPGAs for it over a period of time, gaining full control allows Intel to define exactly what the FPGA design should be to match the capabilities and needs of the CPU, adds Longbottom.

"It can then look at optimising the on-board busses and other technologies to give the speeds required to move more functions into the FPGA - it could even look at making parts of the FPGA a core part of the CPU, so providing programmable CPUs. It could also look at making FPGAs that can be used as off-load chips, enabling certain workloads to be moved off the CPU itself."

I've got the power (issues)

If anything, Intel needs Altera and FPGA to combat a growing threat to its datacentre dominance from ARM. ARM's low-power computing technology has started to make inroads into the datacentre as priorities have changed for datacentre providers. These priorities being the need to lower the power requirements of their compute infrastructure. One way to combat that threat is for Intel to incorporate FPGA into its chip architecture.

If anyone has showed why FPGA should be used in these incidences, it is Microsoft. It demonstrated thorough its Project Catapult that it could increase ranking output of its Bing search engine by deploying hybrid processor FPGA computing. This increased throughput by 95 per cent compared to using a software-only solution. The use of FPGA only increased power consumption by 10 per cent.

If it worked for Microsoft, you can be sure that Google, Facebook, Amazon and others are also thinking very carefully about using the technology within their infrastructures. The power savings could be huge for hyperscale operators.

The move for Altera gives Intel ample protection of its datacentre business from ARM and its licencees while giving it breathing space while it figures out what to do about the loss making parts of its business.

ARM has launched a free operating system aimed at powering Internet of Things (IoT) devices, as well as tools to help developers create them.

The software is offered for free in a bid to boost uptake of IoT products.

The mbed OS is an open source operating system designed to run on ARM's 32-bit Cortex-M and contains security, communication and device management features to enable the development of production-grade, energy-efficient IoT devices, according to the firm.

The OS will also support a number of wireless standards, such as Bluetooth Smart, 2G, 3G, LTE and CDMA cellular technologies, Thread, Wi-Fi, and 802.15.4/6LoWPAN along with TLS/DTLS, CoAP, HTTP, MQTT and Lightweight M2M.

The OS forms part of ARM's mbed IoT Device Platform and also features the mbed Device Server that required server-side technologies to connect and manage devices in a secure way. The firm said this would also provide a bridge between the protocols designed for use on IoT devices and the APIs that are used by web developers.

It claimed this would simplify the integration of IoT devices into cloud frameworks that deploy big data analytics on the aggregated information.

"ARM mbed will make this easier by offering the necessary building blocks to enable our expanding set of ecosystem partners to focus on the problems they need to solve to differentiate their products, instead of common infrastructure technologies. This will accelerate the growth and adoption of the IoT in all sectors of the global economy," said ARM chief executive Simon Segars.

The mbed IoT Device Platform is free for developers and for deployment, supported by an ecosystem of more than 100 OEMs and major chip vendors.

Launch partners for the mbed IoT Device Platform include Atmel, CSR, Ericsson, Farnell, Freescale, IBM, KDDI, Marvell, MegaChips, MultiTech, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP, Renesas, SeeControl, Semtech, Silicon Labs, Stream Technologies, ST, Telenor Connexion, Telefonica, Thundersoft, u-blox, wot.io and Zebra.

The platform will be available to mbed partners in the last quarter of this year for early development, with the first production devices due in 2015.

A team of Microsoft Research engineers developed an artificial intelligence system that claims to have beaten Google in tests for accuracy.

Project Adam is Microsoft's attempt at building deep neural networks more effectively. It said the system is built using commodity hardware and is very good at telling breeds of dog apart.

The inspiration for Project Adam was a project carried out by Google in 2012, which used 16,000 machines to teach itself to identify cat pictures from YouTube.

The engineers said the project was 50 times faster than current image recognition systems and twice as accurate. It also uses 30 times fewer machines to carry out the task.

Project Adam is capable of distinguishing between different dog breeds even if two breeds are the same colour and virtually identical. It does this be scanning parts of an image that do not match when it looks it up in its large dataset.

"The machine-learning models we have trained in the past have been very tiny, especially in comparison to the size of our brain in terms of connections between neurons," said Trishul Chilimbi, one of the Microsoft researchers who lead the Project Adam effort. "What the Google work had indicated is that if you train a larger model on more data, you do better on hard AI [artificial intelligence] tasks like image classification."

The project used 14 million images from ImageNet, an image database divided into 22,000 categories. According to Microsoft, the aim of Project Adam is to move computers beyond being simple number crunchers to teaching them to be pattern recognisers.

"Marrying these two things together will open a new world of applications that we couldn't imagine doing otherwise," said Chilimbi.

"Imagine if you could help blind people see by pointing a cell phone at a scene and having it describe the scene to them. We could do things like take a photograph of food we're eating and have it provide us with nutritional information. We can use that to make smarter choices."

Chilimbi said how the deep neural networks inside Project Adam work is still very much a mystery.

"How does a DNN, where all you're presenting it is an image, and you're saying, This is a Pembroke Welsh corgi'how does it figure out how to decompose the image into these levels of features?" he said.

"There's no instruction that we provide for that. You just have training algorithms saying, This is the image, this is the label.' It automatically figures out these hierarchical features. That's still a deep, mysterious, not well understood process. But then, nature has had several million years to work her magic in shaping the brain, so it shouldn't be surprising that we will need time to slowly unravel the mysteries."

Microsoft said the project is still in its early stages and looks unlikely to be released to the public. However, some of the technology could eventually find its way into its Bing search engine.

Government departments are beginning to get on-board with the G-Cloud, as the first customer confirms its purchase from the CloudStore.

The Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) told IT Pro's sister title Cloud Pro it has purchased Agile education services from the CloudStore, to deliver its Future Coastguard Programme. This is one of three Agile pilot programmes/projects in the Department for Transport to help reduce waste and project failiure in IT when moving to a new system.

"Our experience of the CloudStore catalogue was that it was simple and fast," James Findlay, Future Coastguard programme director at the MCA, told Cloud Pro.

"With support from the Cabinet Office G-Cloud team and MCA procurement team, we were able to identify potential service suppliers and award contract in less than 24 hours, which in terms of our aim for doing things differently without the need for lengthy and costly competitions for commodity services, I can definitely say that the CloudStore delivered for us.

We are really happy to have our first G-Cloud customer through the door and for the process to have run so smoothly.

Chris Chant, head of the G-Cloud project in Whitehall, told Cloud Pro he was very pleased with the way the first sale had gone for the CloudStore.

"We are really happy to have our first G-Cloud customer through the door and for the process to have run so smoothly," he said.

"This is the key to the CloudStore; a lot more choice for Government departments with a fast deployment time to get going with the service straight away. Here's to many more customers following the MCA's example."

Version one of the CloudStore officially launched in February with 257 companies offering 1,700 applications to public bodies.

Hosted on Microsoft's Azure platform, the store was hit with an outage last week thanks to a leap year bug' taking down the whole service.

However, the second version due out later in the year is set to be built on an open source platform so may circumvent any of Microsoft's issues at that time.

AMD has purchased cloud micro-server manufacturer Sea Micro for $334 million (211 million) in an attempt to find its place int he ever-booming cloud market.

The chip manufacturer has always come second in the server space against major rival Intel, but hopes the new addition to its portfolio will bolster its position and get more AMD chips into cloud environments.

AMD specifically wants to help companies with web content, social networking, search and video workloads and aims to reduce complexity within the data centre, lower cost and energy consumption and increase performance.

By acquiring SeaMicro, we are accelerating AMD's transformation into an agile, disruptive innovator.

"By acquiring SeaMicro, we are accelerating AMD's transformation into an agile, disruptive innovator capable of staking a data centre leadership position," said Rory Read, president and chief executive (CEO) of AMD.

"The unmatched combination of AMD's processing capabilities, SeaMicro's system and fabric technology, and our ambidextrous technology approach uniquely positions AMD with a compelling, differentiated position to attack the fastest growing section of the server market."

SeaMicro claims its servers use only 25 percent of the power of traditional servers, whilst only taking up one sixth of the room in a data centre. It also touts 12 times the bandwidth per core.

Andrew Feldman, CEO of SeaMicro CEO, added: "SeaMicro was founded to dramatically reduce the power consumed by servers, while increasing compute density and bandwidth."

"By becoming a part of AMD, we will have access to new markets, resources, technology, and scale that will provide us with the opportunity to work tightly with our OEM partners as we fundamentally change the server market."

Feldman will become general manager a new Data Centre Server Solutions company at AMD to incorporate his firm's technology.

The Government is far from its goal of having high-speed broadband covering most of the UK by 2015, uSwitch.com has claimed.

According to body, the average broadband download speed across the UK is 6.742Mbps, but a third of postcode areas receive speeds even lower than 5Mbps.

One in ten UK postcodes are operating at a snail's pace with download speeds less than 3Mbps, uSwitch said. This is at least six times lower than the basic superfast broadband speed of 20Mbps.

The data is based on over 1.68 million broadband speed tests carried out by home and business users over the past six months.

Those who live in the village of Winchelsea, in East Sussex, inhabit the slowest postcode in the UK, with an average broadband download speed of 1.11Mbps.

The study also took into account population size in a city relative to the average download speed in that location.

"Hereford has a population of more than 55,000, and yet average download speeds are a pedestrian 3.196Mbps, more than 50 per cent slower than the national average," the report read.

"Lancaster, with a sizeable population of almost 134,000 and home to two universities, is also below the national average speed, at 5.479Mbps. At this speed, it would take just under 24 minutes to download a standard quality 1.5GB movie.

"These figures bring into sharp focus the challenge the Government faces if it is to fulfil the pledge made back in December 2010 that everyone in the UK would have access to superfast broadband by 2015."

BT poking fun

Yet BT has mocked uSwitch's research. "As for uSwitch's claim that 49 per cent of homes have speeds below the average, hey, that's math for you," a spokesperson told IT Pro.

According to BT, the uSwitch.com survey mixed up current broadband speeds with the availability of superfast broadband.

"It isn't as simple as that," a spokesperson said.

"Just because users in a certain area have an average speed of say 6Mbps, it doesn't mean that customers in that area don't have access to much faster speeds."

BT explained that the current average broadband speed is due to the fact that most users will be on older copper broadband whereas fibre optic broadband may be fairly new to the area or not even available yet.

"Just because the average speed in a city is 6Mbps it also does not mean that customers in that area can't order a much faster service should they want to," a BT spokesman commented.

Are you looking to move to cloud but still have a few concerns? Are you still confused as to what cloud computing is? How do you feel about cloud security do you think it's good enough? How do you plan a cloud project?

IT Pro's sister title Cloud Pro is introducing a new series, Ask the Cloud Expert, where you get your chance to ask any question about cloud computing, its definition, implementation and its future. We're going to have regular meetings with industry experts who will be able to answer questions on any subject related to cloud maybe questions that you're too embarrassed to ask your regular supplier? Or maybe questions that you know your regular supplier won't answer.

The first expert is Dave Chalmers, CTO for servers, storage and networking with HP. The company recently announced its first move to public cloud and Chalmers has been involved in bringing those to fruition in the UK.

He'll be answering questions in a live Q&A this Friday (24 February) between 10.00 and 11.00am. You'll be able to ask questions by tweeting @CloudProUk using the hashtag #askcloudpro or by sending in questions by email to editor@cloudpro.co.uk, using the subject line Ask Cloud Pro.

But don't worry, if you're not around on Friday, you can send questions in advance by using the same subject line.

SkyDrive is due to enter into a new realm of user friendly functionality as a device cloud' app.

Plans are afoot for the storage solution to become more intricately weaved into Windows 8, improving usability.

The news was announced earlier this week on the Building Windows 8 blog by Mike Torres and Omar Shahine, group programme managers at SkyDrive.

Given our goal to be the world's hard drive, we will need to continue to build out the service.

The developers detailed their plans to evolve SkyDrive into a device cloud' for Microsoft customers, saying they intended to develop a "fast, fluid, touch-first version of SkyDrive that makes it quick, easy and even fun to browse and access your files."

The plan is to seamlessly connect' SkyDrive into Windows 8, allowing users to easily access files from any device.

The developers said that, "rather than using a patchwork of services, people can use one service to connect to their files with no compromises."

"Given our goal to be the world's hard drive, we will need to continue to build out the service, and you can expect our pace of improvements to continue through 2012," they added.

By integrating SkyDrive into a conventional Windows Desktop, users will be able to connect to files from other desktops running SkyDrive, by method of a drag-and-drop. They will also be able to keep the contents of their folders synchronised in the same manner in which DropBox functions.

The app will be compatible with Windows Vista and Windows 7 but won't be available for Windows XP users.

One of the major suppliers selling wares on the G-Cloud CloudStore today raised concerns over confusion potentially hampering the good intentions of the new service.

Huddle, a British start-up and one of the major cloud suppliers to Government, said there was a risk that with so many vendors to pick from the G-Cloud Services Framework, public bodies may simply revert to using larger, better-known suppliers.

One of the chief aims of the CloudStore, launched on Sunday, is to open up Government contracts to more SMEs. Approximately half of the 257 suppliers included in the Framework are SMEs.

There are concerns, however, that the large number of suppliers and the 1,700 services on offer could lead Government IT managers to punt for trusted names rather than innovative products from lesser known vendors.

What this does is put further pressure on the incumbent suppliers to look to the cloud and start to make cloud services users actually want.

The CloudStore catalogue in its current form may not help. Some companies, the worst offender being Capita, have chosen to flood the catalogue with adverts for their services, taking up numerous pages in doing so.

Furthermore, many have not provided descriptions of their services as yet, which may befuddle and deter buyers too.

"Effectively the best services should win out in the long run, but the risk is that there is too much choice and it makes it hard for Government departments to choose," Alastair Mitchell, CEO of Huddle, told IT Pro.

"But I think you have to have a large list because this is designed to be a marketplace and if you limited it to a few suppliers we'd be back into the old paradigm of a limited number of suppliers controlling the market."

Mitchell claimed smaller providers could be better for Government than bigger players, saying it would be positive for innovation.

"I think SMEs can provide a better service because the Government is a very big client for them and they are going to work extremely hard to deliver great services," he added.

"The fact that they have made such an overarching framework and it is such a big announcement shows the Government's emphasis is on buying cloud services... What this does is put further pressure on the incumbent suppliers to look to the cloud and start to make cloud services users actually want.

"It's a very big turning point. First this is them acknowledging the cloud. Second it is an acknowledgement that a more open procurement and market framework actually yields benefits. This is absolutely revolutionary."

The Government has already shown its willingness to work with SMEs on cloud projects, recruiting UK provider Solidsoft to build the CloudStore, although it is hosted on Microsoft's Azure platform.

The government has taken the wraps off CloudStore, the G-Cloud apps store that it announced earlier this month, and made 1,700 apps available to public bodies.

For the first time, organisations will have a choice of apps to be delivered on demand, a move that is expected to bring greater cost savings across the public sector.

Among the 257 companies whose software will be available on CloudStore are major cloud vendors such as Microsoft and Google, major IT suppliers such as HP and IBM, service providers such as BT, C&W and Virgin Media, specialist cloud operators like Virtustream, open source companies including Red Hat and some British providers such as Memset and Logica.

The speed of change will be much faster in G-Cloud and it will make it much easier to move individual applications into the cloud.

A full list of providers is available from the G-Cloud website.

Much of the impetus of CloudStore has been to provide British SMBs with the opportunity to compete for government tenders. CloudStore itself has been built by one SMB Solidsoft, who constructed the site in just four weeks. Naturally enough, CloudStore itself is hosted in the cloud the site has been built on Microsoft Azure.

Karl Deacon, European MD of one of the selected suppliers, Virtustream, said that the G-Cloud would throw open a host of opportunities.

"It will allow the non-mainstream companies to offer innovation as well as being able to deliver huge efficiencies to the public sector. For us, it means we will be able to participate in government computing, something we wouldn't have been able to do without the G-Cloud framework," Deacon said.

He said that public sector bodies would be able to benefit greatly.

"The speed of change will be much faster in G-Cloud and it will make it much easier to move individual applications into the cloud," he added.

Another company that has been selected as a G-Cloud provider is content management specialist Huddle who also emphasised the flexibility that G-Cloud would bring to government computing.

"The Framework enables organisations to make the move from costly on-premise legacy ICT systems to innovative cloud-based technologies much faster and creates real competition in the government cloud services marketplace. Securing government technology deals has long been an area dominated by integrators and technology goliaths and this Framework has now levelled the playing field," said Alastair Mitchell, CEO of Huddle.

Citrix today revealed its fourth quarter results, as well as its figures for fiscal year 2011, showing positive rises in revenues and earnings.

For the fourth quarter of the year, revenues rose to $619 million (394 million) up 17 per cent from $530 million in 2010 leaving smiles on the executive's faces.

But the grins grew wider when the full year results came in, showing revenues of $2.21 billion for 2011 up 18 per cent from 2010's $1.87 billion.

This was a great quarter to cap another record year.

Net income also saw substantial rises, with Citrix bringing in $109 million for the quarter up for $94 million in 2010 and $356 million for the year up from 277 million.

"This was a great quarter to cap another record year," said Mark Templeton, president and chief executive (CEO) of Citrix.

He claimed a broader range of products and more channel partners has provided his company with more opportunities to bring in the deals.

"I'm pleased with how the team's great execution across strategy, innovation and operations has delivered growth in both revenue and profit."

Other figures revealed in the earnings call included a 21 per cent rise in revenue from its Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings, a 34 per cent rise in technical services revenue and a 12 per cent rise for revenues across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region.

Citrix also unveiled its predictions for the upcoming year, saying it expected between $555 million and $565 million of revenue in the first quarter and between $2.49 billion and $2.51 billion of revenue for the whole of 2012.

Amazon has launched DynamoDB, a fully-managed distributed non-relational database designed to satisfy a growing need for massive yet simply-structured data stores.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is betting that there are lots of data-intensive tasks now that require massive scalability, but not relational capabilities. It says that tasks suitable for DynamoDB include storing e-commerce shopping carts, session data for websites, and user records for online games or social networking sites.

The service is priced according to how much data you need to store, and the number of database reads and writes you require per second. It is also available free via AWS's free usage tier, this gives 100MB of free storage, plus five writes/second and 10 reads/second of ongoing capacity.

DynamoDB is a NoSQL database, meaning that it does not use SQL, the structured query language that is now pretty much standard for relational databases. Being non-relational. it cannot handle complex queries such as joins; instead it uses simpler key-value storage technology developed at Amazon five years ago.

DynamoDB takes that existing technology and turns it into a fully managed service which can scale extremely quickly by pulling in more resource from the AWS platform and automatically spreading data over multiple servers to meet throughput needs. It runs on solid-state storage for better performance, and data is replicated synchronously across at least three Amazon data centres for high availability.

The big wins from leaving SQL and the relational model behind include scalability and predictable performance, said Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. He said that Amazon's engineers have done "groundbreaking work" to make DynamoDB both distributed and scalable with "low, predictable latencies, typically in the single-digit milliseconds".

Vogels added that "DynamoDB is already in use by many teams and products within Amazon, including the Amazon.com advertising platform, Amazon Cloud Drive, IMDB, and Kindle." It has also been beta-tested by a number of AWS customers.

"I love how DynamoDB enables us to provision our desired throughput, and achieve low latency and seamless scale, even with our constantly growing workloads," said beta-tester Don MacAskill, CEO of photo-sharing site SmugMug. "Even though we have years of experience with large, complex architectures, we are happy to be finally out of the business of managing it ourselves, and to be using DynamoDB to get even higher performance and stability than we can achieve on our own."

"DynamoDB solves our problem of distributing and storing high-volume writes in a straightforward and cost-effective way," added Rob Storrs, head of engineering at social network Formspring, and another beta-tester. "Our rapid growth meant that we were spending significant resources managing our own large-scale database systems. DynamoDB gives us low latency and easy scalability, which allows us to keep our costs low and our engineers focused on building what our customers want."

Local public service providers remain unconvinced about the G-Cloud's prospects, according to a report.

A Socitm survey of 600 local authorities discovered there was little enthusiasm for central Government's G-Cloud project, saying it was "too immature to make a significant impact."

The G-Cloud has been slow in arriving, leading to a lack of excitement amongst local Government bodies, Socitm's Roger Marshall told IT Pro.

It's much tougher to deliver those things than talk about them.

"[G-Cloud] hasn't yet gotten anywhere for our base of users," Marshall said. "It has been slow to emerge."

Marshall said big announcements expected later this year could galvanise excitement surrounding the G-Cloud.

"It seemed to have taken a bit of a backseat but that looks set to change this year," he added. "People are much more comfortable with cloud now."

John Serle, the editor of the Socitm IT Trends report, said local bodies were concerned about whether the Government would deliver on its promises.

"When the Government announced its intentions, everyone said 'great,'" Serle added.

"But it's much tougher to deliver those things than talk about them."

The G-Cloud has stuttered into life. Announced by the Labour Government in 2010, it looked as though the initiative had come unstuck in the early stages of the Coalition's tenure.

When HP's UK managing director said G-Cloud was to be canned and replaced by straightforward datacentre consolidation it looked as if the initiative was set for the scrapheap.

The Government subsequently refuted the claims and the G-Cloud project gained some momentum again in the second half of 2011.

A G-Cloud tender was put out late last year and received so much interest the deadline was extended twice. A website promoting the Government's cloud plans and linking to the G-Cloud strategy was also recently set up.

Nevertheless, the Government was criticised by cloud tsar and Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff in September for taking too long to get cloud going.

Where did all the jobs go?

The Socitm report also detailed a shocking decline in public sector IT jobs.

Over the past two years, 5,000 jobs have been lost as local authorities spend more money on contractors.

Just 38 per cent of local authorities' IT budgets are going on permanent staff, far lower than in previous years.

Meanwhile, locally authority budgets are set to be cut by an average of four per cent in 2012, hindering any hopes of innovation in councils.

"Everyone has got their heads down and attempting to cut costs," Serle said.

In more positive news, local Government IT departments have taken a big U-turn on acceptance of workers using their own devices.

Over 90 per cent of respondents said they were happy to let the workforce use their home PC to carry out work functions.

"Just two years ago, there was fierce resistance to it," Serle said. "But it's a great solution to the high cost of technology."

Vivek Kundra was today named the new executive vice president of emerging markets at cloud giant Salesforce.com.

Kundra made his name as the first chief information officer (CIO) of the US Government, controlling an $80 billion IT budget.

He then became synonymous with cloud computing, writing and championing the Cloud First' initiative, making cloud computing the number one consideration for any new technology investments by the Federal Government.

Now, he is leaving his public sector career behind him and joining one of the private sector's cloud computing cheerleaders.

"Vivek Kundra is an amazing technology visionary who opened the eyes of millions to the transformational power of cloud computing," said Marc Benioff, chairman and chief executive (CEO) at Salesforce.

"His disruptive leadership is just what the industry needs to accelerate the social enterprise."

Kundra called his new employer an "industry disruptor, adding: "I am excited to join the most innovative company in the world that is pioneering social, mobile and open cloud computing technologies for the enterprise."

This isn't his first association with Salesforce, however. At this year's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Cloud Pro attended a session with Kundra, who confirmed he would be advising the European Union on its cloud computing policy.

Google today announced a new member for its board of directors, bringing in the co-founder of virtualisation giant VMware.

Diane B. Green was one of the five founders of VMware in 1998, which also included her husband Mendel Rosenblum. She ran the company as chief executive (CEO) from the beginning, through its EMC acquisition and up until 2008, when she handed over the reigns to Paul Maritz.

However, it is not just her experience with virtualisation that Greene will bring to the board. She has a Master of Science degree in computer science from Berkeley, a Master of Science degree in naval architecture from MIT and a BA in mechanical engineering from the University of Vermont.

Greene was also CEO at VXtreme and held technical positions at Silicon Graphics, Tandem Computers and Sybase.

"Diane is a special person who combines a sharp business acumen with a brilliant technical mind," said Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google.

"We know she will be a great contributor and we are grateful to have her insight."

Greene also showed her enthusiasm for joining the board, adding: "Google is an asset to society because of its relentless focus on improving users' lives through pioneering technology, and it is also a standout growing business."

"It is incredibly exciting to have the opportunity to support this as a board member."

She will take her seat on the board this month, joining other high profile tech industry heavyweights such as Paul Otellini CEO of Intel and Shirley M. Tilghman president of Princeton University.

Google today announced its largest contract for Google Apps for Business to date, revealing Spanish bank BBVA has signed up to the public cloud offering.

The deal will see 11,000 employees of one of the world's largest financial institutions migrate over to the likes of Gmail, Google Docs and Google Calendar, by the end of 2012.

Although a deal of this scale is impressive for any firm, Google claimed it was particularly telling of change in perception of public cloud that a financial organisation had taken the plunge.

"Companies of all sizes, including those with tens of thousands of employees, are now embracing cloud computing," said Sebastien Marotte, vice president of Google Enterprise in EMEA.

Companies of all sizes, including those with tens of thousands of employees, are now embracing cloud computing.

"[The BBVA deal] shows that cloud computing is now a reality and leading organisations are already realising its potential to transform their business."

However, the bank's customer information will remain in-house and the tools will be used for collaborating on business operations.

"We were looking for a technology that would transform our business operations, not just make our workers more efficient," said Jos Olalla, chief information officer (CIO) at BBVA.

"Integrating the Google Apps for Business suite with our own tools will allow us to introduce a new way of working where employees have access to all the information they need with just one click, no matter where they are, and can reap the benefits of using advanced collaboration tools."

BBVA has employees in 26 countries around the world. However, the roll-out will start with the 35,000 employees in Spain before the rest of its global offices get the cloud productivity suite.

Oracle today announced a partnership with Cloudera in order to leverage its skills with the Apache Hadoop platform.

The tie-up will see Cloudera's Distribution including Apache Hadoop (CDH) integrated into Oracle's latest hardware the Oracle Big Data Appliance along with Cloudera Manager software.

Both firms hope the inclusion of the open source software within Oracle's hardware will boost capabilities to analyse unstructured data, which in turn will help companies get a better view of their operations.

"The blending of Oracle Big Data Appliance with CDH and Cloudera Manager is a natural and highly complementary fit," said Mike Olson, co-founder and chief executive (CEO) of Cloudera.

"Together, our products form an exceptional solution that is poised to transform the marketplace."

Although it won't be a hosted system, the appliance has companies without the in-house skills to build their own Hadoop environment in mind, giving them all the software and hardware to analyse big data in one box.

They will also get support from both firms, with Oracle taking on any kit issues and Cloudera handling Hadoop problems.

The hardware for the Oracle Big Data Appliance includes 18 Oracle x86 Sun servers, 216 processor cores, 864GB of memory and 648TB of disk storage.

The Oracle/Cloudera partnership comes a few days after the official launch of Apache Hadoop version 1.0. Although the project has been around for six years, it was only decided at the end of December it was enterprise ready and a formal announcement was made to the press last week.

CIOs and other senior business and technology decision makers are time poor, yet suffer from increasing levels of information overload.

Rather than add to that sea of data, every quarter we will produce the IT Pro Report. Our aim is to bring together the key information and insight you need to help make strategic business decisions. You can view it on your PC, read it at your leisure on a Kindle, or simply print it out.

In this first report, we focus on cloud computing. What is it? What do you need to know? How can it impact your business?

With so much noise in the industry about the cloud, this report seeks to highlight what you really need to know and how to ensure your business gets maximum reward with minimum risk.

Download the IT Pro report here

The deadline to submit a tender for the Government's 60 million G-Cloud has been extended for the second time today.

This means companies wanting to be involved in the project now have until 3pm on 19th December to get their proposals in.

The first deadline was pushed back from 23 November to 5 December, following confusion from applicants and the need for more questions to be answered.

The Government has dubbed this latest extension "the 12 days of G-Cloud" over Twitter, with the Cabinet Office saying it was lengthened "due to popular demand."

A statement from the department said it had already received 532 "expressions of interest" since the tender was announced in October - which Chris Chant, director of the G-Cloud, told Cloud Pro was 10 times what they had expected - and believed G-Cloud was one of the most "SME friendly frameworks to date."

This sticks with the overall Government strategy of encouraging more small and medium sized businesses to enter the public sector procurement progress, which has previously been dominated by large IT vendors.

"SMEs have been considered at every point possible and the excellent response shows it's the right way to go with hundreds of suppliers registering interest, many of them SMEs," said Stephen Allott, the crown representative for SMEs.

"This is the most innovative framework I've seen since working at the Cabinet Office Things are really starting to change."

SAP has acquired Californian company SuccessFactors in a deal worth $3.4 billion (2.18 billion).

SuccessFactors is known for its Human Capital Management (HCM) software delivered over the cloud, with 15 million users on its books.

It is also the toast of the town with its impressive growth numbers, reporting a 77 per cent year on year rise in revenues during the third quarter this year and a further 59 per cent growth in the first nine months of 2011.

The cloud is a core of SAP's future growth.

SAP already offers much of its software as a cloud service, even trying to make the phrase "business processes as a service or BPaaS" a common term. However, the acquisition will extend its portfolio further with the increasing attraction of cloud HCM.

"The cloud is a core of SAP's future growth and the combination of SuccessFactors' leadership team and technology with SAP will create a cloud powerhouse," said Bill McDermott, co-chief executive (CEO) of SAP.

"Together, SAP and SuccessFactors will create tremendous business value for customers, with potent synergies to accelerate our growth in the cloud."

Just last week, SuccessFactors announced a partnership with Tata Communications to offer HCM in India, showing its appeal in the merging markets, as well as Europe and the US.

"This is a revolutionary combination of proven capabilities that will allow SuccessFactors to accelerate our roadmap by 10 years and bring the world's leading application knowledge and intellectual property to our customers through the cloud, and the largest applications customer base, instantly," said Lars Dalgaard, founder and CEO of SuccessFactors.

Dalgaard will stay with his company following the acquisition, leading the cloud business as a whole at SAP, as well as continuing to run SuccessFactors as an independent firm. He has also been recommended to join the SAP board.

"The business world is ready for enterprise-class cloud applications and together, we can deliver incredible new innovation for global businesses," Dalgaard concluded.

Next year will be the battle ground for cloud companies trying to assert their dominance on the market.

So claims analyst firm IDC in its 2012 prediction report, which says the "third platform" built around mobile computing, social networking, big data and the cloud had grown substantially this year, claiming the next 12 months will see it responsible for 80 per cent of IT spending growth up until 2020.

With such large figures, the IDC believes it will now become a "year of mobile and cloud platform wars," with vendors vying to become leaders of the significant technology spaces.

"The industry's shift to the 3rd Platform will accelerate in 2012, forcing the industry's leaders to make bold investments and fateful decisions," said Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC.

"Companies like Microsoft, HP, SAP, RIM, and others including Apple will face 'crossroads moments' in 2012. By the end of the year, we should have a good idea which vendors will and won't be among the industry's leaders at the end of the decade."

The cloud market won't stay the same, however, with further forecasts from Gens claiming it would change focus from building cloud infrastructure to providing Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Many analyst houses have now predicted Amazon Web Services will reach $1 billion in revenues for its cloud services, but Gens added to this prophesising Google Enterprise would also reach this figure a further 18 months down the line.

What all the cloud vendors will be doing though is looking to smaller technology firms and start-ups to buy in a "competitive edge."

Gens said Microsoft would look to buy a content cloud company, such as Netflix, whilst others would look to Software as a Service businesses, such as Workday and Netsuite.

The most significant figure he claimed, however, was that 80 per cent of new commercial enterprise applications would be deployed via the cloud.

"Even though the IT industry will follow along the same transformational path as it did in 2011, the events, the choices, and the stakes will be very different in 2012," he concluded.

"The urgency to act and to make the right decisions will dramatically increase. By the end of 2012, we should be able to see much more clearly which players have successfully positioned themselves in the 'lead pack' of the marathon-like race for industry leadership in the decade ahead."

Richard Davies, chief executive of ElasticHosts said Gens' predictions of battles between providers were "no surprise" as the cloud becomes such as dominant model in the IT industry.

However, he warned customers not to trust everything with the phrase "cloud computing" attached to it.

"Before cloud-adopting businesses get too excited, it's important to note that we're increasingly seeing things being associated with cloud that simply don't fit into the model of cloud computing," he said.

"Some early adopters have found that the cloud' service they've been sold is not actually cloud at all. Therefore, before rushing in and signing with a service provider, businesses need to check that what they are signing up to really is cloud."

The cloud equipment market is set to exceed $33 billion (21.1 billion) this year alone, according to the latest quarterly report from Synergy Research.

The forecast, comes as part of its Cloud Market Share Report, which includes the networking, computing, and storage platforms deployed for private cloud, virtual private network (VPN) based public cloud, and non-VPN public cloud.

The report found the cloud equipment market for the first half of 2011 exceeded $17 billion (10.9 billion) in sales.

Although public cloud platforms represented the biggest share of cloud equipment spending, representing 56 per cent in the first half of 2011, the private cloud platform segment is the fastest growing at over 30 per cent a year.

Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group founder and chief analyst, said: "From small start ups being able to access massive scale computing facilities to new cloud-based consumer services, cloud will continue to open up a wealth of opportunities for innovation."

The analyst firm defines a private cloud platform as a virtualised data centre, which resides behind an organisation's firewall.

Despite accelerated private cloud adoption, the report also said public cloud deployments could grow exponentially in coming years as infrastructure, platform and software-as-a-service (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS) become more widely used by both consumers and businesses.

From a regional perspective, the US leads in cloud equipment sales, with 39.7 per cent of the market in the first half of 2011 according to the report.

But the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region was the fastest growing at a rate of 30.3 per cent a year, with the UK leading the charge.

"The countries that follow [US] cloud equipment sales in ranked order include Japan, Germany, the UK and China," added Duke.

Across the different cloud equipment market segments, the report found that the leading vendors varied. For example, Cisco continued to be the dominant networking infrastructure supplier for cloud deployments with a nearly 50 per cent market share.

In virtualised computing systems segment, HP and IBM represented over 50 per cent of the market share combined. And Dell, NetApp and HP accounted for half of the storage segment.

By sales, the top five cloud equipment vendors in the first of half of 2011 were HP with 19.9 per cent; IBM with 17.9 per cent; Dell with 14.7 per cent; Cisco with 10.4 per cent, and Oracle with a 5.2 per cent share.

A tender to provide cloud computing services as part of the Government's G-Cloud has attracted 380 bids, according to the programme's director.

The 60 million tender was announced last month after the Government published its Strategic Implementation Plan (SIP) for its new ICT strategy first revealed in March this year.

The Guardian reported the Government's chief information officer (CIO), Andy Nelson, claiming between 250 to 300 bids had been made, but Chris Chant, director of the G-Cloud programme, told Cloud Pro the total had actually reached 380.

With exactly two weeks to go until the bidding process closes, Chant has been encouraging small and medium businesses (SMBs) to put themselves forward for the contracts.

In a blog last week, the senior civil servant admitted it was a slow process to get Whitehall to accept this new way of thinking looking to SMBs for IT offerings rather than larger legacy firms but, despite the change not happening "overnight" he said it was "unacceptable for things to remain the same."

We will just have to wait and see who the winners are

AMD has launched its first 16-core Opteron chips, designed with cloud servers in mind.

It has been a long wait for the chips, which contain more cores than any other x86 chips on the market today, as the industry has known about them for a year now.

With more cores on board, AMD is hoping cloud-focused manufacturers will jump on the new chips, which the vendor believes are the "natural choice for heavy-threaded cloud computing environments."

The wait for the most anticipated new product and architecture for servers is over.

Designed on AMD's new Bulldozer architecture, the Opteron 6200 will appear in Acer, Cray, Dell, HP and IBM servers in the "coming days and weeks," the vendor said.

There are 10 different models of the Opteron 6200, ranging from four cores to 16, with the maximum clock speed hitting 3.3GHz. AMD's Turbo CORE Technology allows for an extra power boost of up to 500MHz.

AMD claimed the new chips offered up to 89 per cent greater performance than other server processors costing the same price.

"Our industry is at a new juncture; virtualisation has provided a new level of reliable consolidation and businesses are now looking to the cloud for even more agility and efficiency. We designed the new AMD Opteron processor for this precise moment," said Paul Struhsaker, corporate vice president and general manager for Commercial Business, AMD.

"The wait for the most anticipated new product and architecture for servers is over. Leading OEMs are now offering cloud, enterprise and HPC customers a full suite of solutions based on the industry's most comprehensive server processor portfolio, the new AMD Opteron family of processors which deliver an inspired balance of performance, scalability and efficiency."

The chip maker is looking to make a big impact on the x86 market, which Intel still dominates. Much emphasis has gone on the power savings of the Opteron models.

"When these energy efficient processors are used in servers, the server power savings can be dramatic as much as a 20 per cent reduction in server active idle power and an 18 per cent increase in server performance-per-watt," said Andy Parma, a product marketing manager for at AMD, in a blog post.

AMD also announced its new Opteron 4200 chips, claiming it is the "world's lowest power-per-core server processor built to deliver unparalleled efficiency for complex, technical workloads."

There are eight different models for the Opteron 4200 design, with a top clock speed of 3.3GHz. Customers can choose between six and eight-core models.

Citrix has introduced a new product family called CloudPortal, designed to improve the customer facing side of a cloud provider's business.

Whilst the likes of Amazon and Google have spent a lot of time and money on ensuring they have the right infrastructure out back, Citrix believes in order to grow, they need to improve margins and keep a good level of customer service.

The company said by introducing CloudPortal into their systems, the likes of account management, billing and service provision can become automated, making the tasks less time consuming for the provider and speedier for the customer to access.

Sameer Dholika, group vice president and general manager of the cloud platforms group at Citrix, said cloud providers had the multi-tenant infrastructure sorted and were now interested in "building the business."

"In order to scale they have to make it easy for organisations to manage and administrate that cloud," he added during the press briefing at Citrix Synergy 2011.

"It needs to plug in seamlessly to their support systems, CRM, account management all of these are required to deliver a business and that is precisely what the CloudPortal product line is offering."

The announcement today saw the introduction of two versions of the product.

CloudPortal Services Manager focuses on the traditional applications delivered in the cloud, such as Microsoft Exchange and Office. Citrix claimed the product allowed providers to add and change services, as well as manage users and their controls, without wasting "IT expertise" on business tasks.

CloudPortal Business Manager hones in on the customer relationship side instead, such as pricing, billing and reporting.

The two releases are both based on CloudStack Citrix's enterprise server virtualisation platform it acquired from the Cloud.com buy in July which also saw an update unveiled today.

Citrix CloudStack 3 is the first version to have the Citrix' branding and the only one to have XenServer 6 built in despite still being compatible with rival hypervisors. It also includes more support for NetScaler's "networking as a service" products and OpenStack specifically for Swift object storage.

"If you look at the way clouds like Amazon, SoftLayer, Terremark they are designed around big data, massive scale and thousands of physical servers," added Mark Templeton, chief executive (CEO) of Citrix, during his keynote.

"They are designed around an open architecture [and] this is the thinking and technology behind Citrix CloudStack with [the product's] new integrations."

Whilst CloudPortal Business Manager is available today and Service Manager is set to follow in December, the only information of CloudStack 3's release date is it will be coming at some point in the fourth quarter.

Citrix has acquired AppDNA in an effort to strengthen the application management side of its virtual desktop offering.

The UK-based AppDNA is best known for its AppTitude product, enabling businesses to monitor which applications they have running in their environments and the best way to migrate them onto new systems.

During his keynote speech at his company's annual conference, Citrix chief executive (CEO) Mark Templeton said the acquisition would help businesses "beat the big countdown clock" to 2014 when Microsoft stops offering support for Windows XP.

"Millions of customers have millions of apps linked to Microsoft XP the problem is migrating them forward," he said. "Some [apps] work, some don't, but the biggest problem is you can't predict what is going to work."

"So we decided we were going to do something about this and bring on-board what has been a fantastic partner of ours."

Although Citrix did not reveal the price it paid for AppDNA, a statement on the London Stock Exchange website claimed it was $92 million 32 times the amount investment to kick-start the firm earlier this year.

It was born from its parent company Camwood and was reported by The Sunday Times as bringing in 8.8 million in sales. The acquisition is expected to be finalised by the end of November.

Cloud Pro was due to meet with the company during this week's Citrix Synergy event but received a cancellation email this morning before the announcement. The firm was also unable to give us comment on the acquisition.

VMware is making a bigger push for the SMB space with the launch of two new products for that market.

In a presentation at VMWorld, Vmware CTO, Steve Herrod said that the company had launched VMware vCenter Protect Essentials Plus and has made enhancements to its VMware Go Pro service.

VMware Go Pro, which was first launched in January of this year, is a cloud-based management tool that has been developed to allows SMEs to manage both physical and virtual machines.

VMware has developed a range of new features for the product including: IT Advisor for scanning a customer's physical and virtual infrastructure to provide guidance on customers' virtualisation environments. According to Herrod, the product will scans the environment, it will provide new options, recommendations and alerts to help customers quickly identify and solve problems.

In addition to this, the updated asset and patch management capabilities will allow users to create and label groups of machines and then schedule patch scans and deployment for these groups.

For VMware vCenter Protect Essentials Plus, VMware is bulding on technology it acquired when the company bought Shavlik in May.

Unlike Go Pro, this is an on-premise management system offering agentless, easy-to-deploy and cost-effective management of physical and virtual machines.

New features in VMware vCenter Protect Essentials Plus will include: new scripting capabilities allowing users to execute scripts across the entire network. A scripts catalogue will help administrators automate tasks such as configuration, maintenance, support and network information.

In addition, the product will offer a "Power Status" scan to examine the power status of machines across the network and a new console to allow multiple administrators to simultaneously perform different tasks at the same time.

Fujitsu has announced its return to the UK high performance computing (HPC) market having secured a 15 million deal.

As part of an agreement with HPC Wales, an initiative designed to help the country with its supercomputing efforts, Fujitsu will provide a distributed grid with two primary hubs in Cardiff and Pembroke Dock.

Fujitsu and HPC Wales will also carry out research together, exploring the use of supercomputers in key industries such as advanced materials, manufacturing and the low-carbon sector.

The Japanese tech giant believes fresh opportunities lie in the UK HPC segment, not just in the public sector but in the private sphere as well.

HPC Wales is expected to bring in an extra 22.8 million to the Welsh economy over 10 years, as well as create more than 400 jobs.

Joe Duran, Fujitsu's account director for HPC Wales, said the project would help a wide range of companies access IT infrastructure with considerable "horsepower."

According to Duran, the HPC Wales team expected the project to last for the next 10 to 20 years.

"They see having research-centric development of IT and intelligent society as critical to growth over an extended period of time," Duran told IT PRO.

"I would say this is the embryonic stage of a much, much bigger programme."

The initiative was announced in mid-2010, although the project was effectively given the go-ahead in late 2009 after receiving funding from a variety of bodies, including 10 million from the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

HPC Wales will consist of 1,400 nodes across eight linked sites, providing a combined performance of 190 teraflops.

Other tech giants taking part in the project include Microsoft, Cisco and Symantec.

Duran predicted similar collaborative work would appear across the world, but claimed the Welsh programme remained the most ambitious project to date.

IBM's Watson supercomputer has resulted in a huge boost to the tech giant's World Community Grid.

Watson recently came out as winner of a three-night long marathon of US gameshow Jeopardy!, beating two of the show's best-ever contestants.

The World Community Grid, which uses the collective spare power of computers from across the world to assist scientists and researchers, subsequently saw a 700 per cent spike in the number of volunteers who supply the additional juice.

The huge virtual supercomputer is designed to help those scientists working on humanitarian challenges, such as HIV/AIDS treatments.

To become part of the World Community Grid, users simply need to install a software program on their computers, as long as they are running Microsoft Windows, Macintosh or Linux operating systems.

"Watson's performance on Jeopardy! has captured the imagination of millions of viewers who understand the power of computing to benefit humanity," said Stanley S Litow, IBM vice president of corporate citizenship and corporate affairs and president of Big Blue's Foundation.

"Like Watson, World Community Grid is also a game changer. We're grateful for the skyrocketing interest in World Community Grid as a result of Watson's achievement."

Elsewhere, six different organisations will share $500,000 (308,000) prize money, which IBM has announced as part of the community project.

IBM has also teamed up with Nuance Communications to explore how Watson's analytics capabilities could be used in the healthcare industry.

The pair will explore how the supercomputing capabilities can be matched up with Nuance's speech recognition solutions to help diagnose and treat patients.

It's been a rough year for hardware, with the recession hitting IT budgets and delaying upgrades. But that hasn't dissuaded Intel, which claims the Nehalem effect has helped spur server sales.

Launched in March, Nehalem is the latest microarchitecture from the chip firm, and Richard Curran, director for enterprise server for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), believes its arrival has helped the market recover.

Speaking to IT PRO at the CERN physics lab in Geneva, Curran also explained how his firm works with early adopters like the famous physics lab, and tells us why he thinks cloud computing isn't all that complicated it's just like renting a car.

It's been a rough year for hardware. Earlier, Intel said PC shipments weren't all that bad and recovering. How are servers and the enterprise market faring?

Server [shipments] are actually picking up. We've had a very challenging first quarter and but getting better into the early part of the second quarter.

We had a great Q3. So far, Q4 is looking fairly good. We've seen some demand come back into the market. One thing that's pretty generic is most recessions we tend to lag the US. The US has seemed to come out of it a lot stronger, especially in IT. So we've seen very, very strong results in North America in Q3, and there started off Q4 quite well. So in actual fact, their market has recovered faster than EMEA.

There is a good and a bad side. The bad side is, we're still not there. The good side is we generally lag them by two or three quarters so if we're seeing a good Q3 and good Q4, we're more optimistic about 2010, as the business tends to lag, generically.

And I suppose really you could typify it in one respect. If I had to be selfish, I'd call it the Nehalem affect, that we launched the product on March 30 and all of our partners had products ready to just launch very soon after that, within a week or so.

Some had actually [launched] slightly before. Apple launched in February and Dell were probably mid, late march but all of our partners had products ready to launch...

Because of the Nehalem effect, we've seen a dramatic acceptance of Nehalem in the market. It's the fastest transition of a product in the market I've seen since I've been at Intel for 10 years.

What's driving take-up of Nehalem?

What we tried to do is make customers understand that it's about your total cost of ownership, it's not just about buying the latest gizmo or the latest server. So even when certain markets were still growing remember, 57 per cent of budgets in IT were never reduced this year they were actually held the same, despite the economic situation... It may be difficult to spend them, but at least the budgets were made available.

So what has happened is people started looking and saw, "wow, I can get so much performance by actually upgrading". Now some of them have already paid off their servers over a three four year business cycle, some of them had one or one and a half years to go, so there's still some depreciation of those products.

But we found even with depreciation on those products, it was still more cost effective to buy Nehalem. You see, one of the things about the Nehalem architecture, every time we shrink the die we're able to add more functionality into the die. It's not just pure raw CPU. So we have this performance effect but then what we have is the ability to get better virtualisation capabilities and there's about a million transistors in there alone, of the 780 million transistors, that actually manages the power.

So when you have this single threaded application or workload, it actually starts to turn off a lot of things around it. And when suddenly it flicks over to a multithreaded environment it fires up the core.

The previous quad core product had five, sorry, three power states. We now have 15 power states. In other words, it has various different power levels. Before you could go high, medium, low. Now you've actually got 15. So at any time, given the status of the workload coming in, it would actually fit to the right state dynamically.

As a result, customers were seeing brilliant energy efficiency savings as a result. Customers were seeing, even through tough times, it was actually worthwhile investing because the net savings were just so spectacular. That's what I've seen as we saw Nehalem ramping. We saw more and more customers actually buying it, because of the net savings from it plus they were able to refresh their data centre and were able to drive more efficiencies.

How do you work with CERN? We're here at their labs, how do you support their work, and how do they support yours?

It started many, many years ago, when they started working on their first ATLAS project. Obviously they need all the technology, but one of the things they wanted to do is, given their requirements, and engineering capability they have, they wanted to understand how much data can they actually transact through their server technologies.

So in discussions with them about their types of servers, one of the relationships we've built up [is like] "if you guys can go and analyse and work those servers and feedback to us the conditions of those servers..." In other words, they might come back and say, "we're going to see a bottleneck" or "I think your compilers could be optimised better if you do this" or "if you had drivers so and so"...

They got in touch with our software division - we have 6,500 people in our software division - and what we have done is started to collaborate way, way back many years ago with CERN so that they could become sort of the night watchman for us, say "you know something, this is really good, but if you were able to do this in your next generation of your technology, this is when you're going to start seeing some real performance."

Now they're not the only ones we work with. We work with the financial sector, we work with some of the manufacturing [industry], BMW and so on. We work with a couple of different types [of companies] to get an overall view because we're a manufacturing company, you know?

So when we create and develop CPUs, we have to make sure that those CPUs can actually be absorbed and the benefits can be seen in all communities SMB, SME, and all types of veritcals. But certainly for high performance, CERN is a great partner of ours.

They started the openlab, which is a number of partners they'd like to work with in collaboration, to understand how they create an environment. You've heard the amount of data transactions that they'll have coming from the experiment? They don't have enough in the data centre to be able to manage the amount of information coming through.

So what they've decided to do is open up a grid compute capability. Getting universities and scientific research entities around the world to connect via a grid so that when they take the data. [And] they're going to take slices of the data and distribute them to various different centres around the world to actually analyse. They'll be able to understand then, as a collaboration, as a community, how they can actually diagnose the data coming through.

Obviously they're looking at grid computing capabilities and clustering capabilities, the ability to transfer large blocks of data and compute them quickly and get the results back. It's not just the analysis and computational analysis, there's the feedback and so on and so forth.

How does Intel come into this?

From that, we've got a really good relationship with them. We give them early access to our products. In our process and manufacturing, we're already working on Sandybridge, which we come out with in 2011. But we're already working on 2014, and 2015, and 2016, so we would have some of our engineers come around and listen to people, asking "if you could think about your compute needs in 2015, what would they look like?"

So we need some really bright people to work with, who can actually understand that. We take that feedback and say "this is how we think the market will respond, here's the compute needs of the future". And it's not just pure performance because we would imagine performance is going to be endless, but in so far as encrypting capabilities, security capabilities, virtualisation capabilities, and energy efficiency capabilities.

In other words, [we think] about trying to drive energy efficiency when the computer is fully loaded, but what about when the computer is not loaded, the idle states? Can we get to a different idle state so when the data centre is partially used or not used, what is the energy consumption of the server?

We're working on various different projects with people like that to help us understand how we can develop better technology.

What is CERN testing now?

What they're doing right now is looking at trying to make their data centre more and more dense because what you heard from Sverre [Jarp, openlab CTO] is they have a very old fashioned data centre.

Now, the one thing about CERN is they're different from some others... if for instance their servers are down for the day for some reason, it's not like a bank. They're mission critical, but they're not business critical. Now when they start doing the testing, it'll be business critical to a degree.

They've got a very old data centre. Now the thing we're trying to understand is, if for instance, you were a CFO and you were on a board, and you're going to say you need a new data centre, if you're going to build a new data centre, how long will that data centre last? 10 years, 12 years, 15 years? In other words, if you were building a data centre today, that data centre has to be functional in 2020. What are my compute requirements in 2020? You don't know, I don't know.

But it's a very expensive investment, with an element of risk. What you've got to do is think "what if we didn't build out a new data centre, what if we were to manage within that data centre envelope?" This is why a lot of companies want to talk to Intel "where are you guys going investing $5 billion a year, because I'd like to work out [whether] I'm good for one data centre, or do I have to build another data centre, and can I live within that one data centre?"

So the likes of CERN, what they're looking to do is continue to look at how dense their compute capability will be without having to modernise their data centre.

They're looking to what the data centre of the future will be?

You can do two things, you can build a new data centre, or you can actually add more power, more megawatts to it. If you add more power, it's going to cost you. If you build a new data centre, it's going to cost you.

So if you can actually manage your business requirements within that one envelope it's great. What they're looking for is [the] need [for] more energy efficient, high compute capabilities more densely packed compute capabilities so that they can meet the needs of their business.

Now, if I was going to build a data centre, what does that data centre actually look like. How big does it have to be?

That's sort of the challenges a lot of CTOs have moving forward. Where's the world global market going to be? How is my IT going to add value to my business? What is the size and compute capability of my IT moving forward in a global environment and how flexible does it need to be?

And that's where I think cloud comes in. Cloud is a business model. Us techies like to confuse it, make it more complicated than it really is, it's PaaS, it's SaaS, it's this, it's a business model, it's the ability to be able to get a transactional compute capability to support my business, when I need it.

How would you explain the cloud, then?

Some people have said all different types of analogies, the analogy I use is: it's like going to a rental car company.

I've got my own car at home, my car meets my needs... but when I go to a rental car company, I actually get the car that I need, to meet my requirements And if I'm with my family, or on my own, or if I'm going on a long journey or going on a short journey, I decide on the capability for the specific task at hand.

That's what you'll start seeing: businesses being able to utilise a particular capacity to be able to meet their needs. And that's the opportunity companies have and the ability of dynamic computing to be able to meet the needs of their business moving forward.

If you have an infrastructure today, that is proprietary, or inflexible, you're going to run into serious problems, because the business dynamics are becoming much shorter and much more dynamic and the lifecycles of those are much shorter. So, if you haven't got an IT infrastructure that is as dynamic as your business requires it to be, it becomes a real burden a cost burden.

You need a very flexible environment. Wouldn't it be great to have utility compute environment, where you'd just be able to say, "I need capacity because it's critical at Christmas because I'm going to sell some toys," but on January 1, I'm going to do something else...

You have this very dynamic world, where business cycles are much shorter, more dynamic, and if your IT infrastructure is not dynamic enough, or flexible, then you're going to struggle. So what your seeing is a real pressure on the proprietary environment, the legacy environments, because they're not they're very rigid, they're single task orientated.

And that's why you're seeing a lot of people migrating away from RISC platforms and legacy platforms, to be able to do the job. What they want is seamless dynamic compute environments faster, cheaper, more energy efficient, more virtualised, more dynamic and more scaling out capability.

Plus you have the ability to think maybe when my data centre is full, maybe I can go to another data centre, vis a vis, maybe I can buy that utility capacity as a service. So you're going to see those dynamics play out.

We're at a major inflection curve in the market and it's probably one of the more exciting times in the market. This is what makes it so interesting, because all these business dynamics are actually playing out. And the IT needs to be able to support that. And those that haven't, are actually going to lose. And those that have are actually going to win.

So those trapped by legacy systems need to make a move now?

Absolutely. Now there are companies that run a specific task there was a mention of IBM using Cobol. There's a particular application there that'll be running for the next 10 years, but what you hear from customers [is] that application and that function, is just left there.

But anyone looking to grow their business, you could be looking today's infrastructure and if you move out four or five years, that infrastructure could be the same. But by and large, purely your data centre will look different in so far as the types of flexibility you're going to need in your data centre is going to be a lot more different.

So it's the new business opportunity that I see that will actually drive a new dynamic in the market. But if you're not flexible, and you haven't got an open standards platform, and you haven't got the ability to scale with your business and look at private clouds as well as external clouds, you're going to be in serious trouble.

Is that where companies are at the moment? And is it really time to make a move to the cloud?

The cloud is still immature. Virtualisation is, to a degree, immature. The way I describe it to a lot of people, virtualisation is like a marathon, we're probably at about 5k. We're coming down to virtualisation 2.0, maybe thinking what 3.0 looks like. Virtualisation will mature.

Two years ago, you couldn't put two un-identical servers together, and actually match them and be able to seamlessly manage the workload. Now you can, you can mix and match servers with our technology called flex migration... the systems themselves will be able to move the workload, to be able to do the workload. That is a feature that has only really come in the last two years.

You'll see all these things maturing over time... Say if you said, "this is great, we'll move to cloud", you'll move all your applications or all your data onto a cloud, what happens if this company goes bust, what happens if you lose the data, what happens if they haven't got a good DR? What happens? Are you completely exposed?

From a capability perspective and a common sense approach, from multi-tenancy, to security, to the ability to manage... say for instance, you go to a particular cloud partner and they decide to hike their prices? You decide that's not cost effective can I actually move my data onto another service? Probably not, not at the moment.

But I can tell you one thing, it's maturing fast and is a model that will succeed. We're right now at the top of the hype cycle, and I think you'll see in 2010 people will be blowing holes in it, but what you'll see, as we come out of that, it will actually become a very viable platform.

The biggest science experiment in the world is about to kick off (again) - and it's bringing a lot of IT with it.

Last year, the particle smashing Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN lab near Geneva started up, and promptly broke down. But another beam is set to be sent around the 27km track within weeks, with a tsunami of data set to follow.

There are several parts to the IT that backs up the massive experiment, and everything else CERN does - click here for the full story on CERN's IT. There's the IT behind CERN itself, as well as the LHC experiment. That's so huge that the world of academia has created a massive computing grid to process it all.

And then there's CERN's openlab. This is where the tech of the future is tested. The physicists working on the four main LHC experiments need cutting edge technology, but they need reliability, so it falls on openlab to test everything out first.

We spoke to openlab's chief technology officer, Sverre Jarp, while at CERN with Intel this week, about his job, the future of multicore, graphics processors and more.

What does the CERN openlab do? What's your day to day work?

Openlab is trying to look at new IT technologies. This means following the Xeon line and making sure that we understand new implementations like Westmere and Sandy Bridge and all the Intel codenames that were mentioned today.

But then we also look at things that are more exotic, more risky. So I think our mission is to take risk. If you've heard about Larabee and graphics processors, we also try to look at those.

Most physicists will say, "well, they don't look ready to go". So it's sort of our job to maybe understand porting issues, performance issues obviously, but also reliability issues.

Is it important to have ECC [error correction code] memory for instance, is one question that comes up when you go in the direction of graphics processors, because if you do graphics you don't care about having a red pixel in a blue sky. But if you do physics you don't want necessarily to have indications of Noble Prizes that turn out to be fakes.

So you're effectively working a step ahead of the rest of CERN's IT?

The LHC computing grid has to run on reliable, trusted evaluated mainstream technology. So we look at the fun stuff.

That must be a fun but daunting job.

It's very exciting it's also frustrating. I'm at a certain age, and of course, every year, every five years, every 10 years, you have to put yourself in question, say "everything I learned during this decade, is it either already obsolete or is it still valid?"

So fortunately, most of what we acquire is valid. But we still have to put ourselves in question. Take graphics processors. How do we go about harnessing the sheer compute power that they promise but still keep them related to the physics computing that we have here at CERN?

The LHC experiment has been delayed for over a year. What technology upgrades have happened in that time?

We've been very pleased with results we've found on mulitcore systems. We started with the Woodcrests, but already when Clovertown came, we actually had an event here in the Globe [a building at the CERN campus] when Intel was ready, exactly three years ago with the Clovertown.

And so right now we're so happy with the multicore strategy that we jump on every incremental improvement because it's so important to us, so we expect to be equally enthused with the Westmere.

What other new technologies is openlab looking at?

We're sort of in starting blocks for these kind of technologies, we're in the fortunate situation that a lot of our programmes are written in house, so they're in source format.

So we're actually spending a lot of time just making sure we understand them and are able to parallelise them across mulitcore systems, for instance. So we're preparing the grounds for some future stuff.

What tech do you see being big in the future, and maybe filtering down into enterprise or other areas?

Well I don't think we can pretend we are the forerunner for all industry. We're not always in agreement with people that rely on very high reliability systems. But if you're a bank, that's your obligation.

So we expect that we will go down the road of many-core parallelism, so maybe 16 core, 32 core, who knows. Maybe in certain cases, that means a certain risk of less reliability, now this still shouldn't be red pixels in a blue sky, but it might mean the mean-time between failures not being thousands of hours but maybe being a bit shorter.

Those are some of the issues we have to evaluate before we live with certain breakaway technologies because they are interesting but they also carry some element of risk with them.

What other technology challenges do you face?

In our case, it's performance per watt and dollar, and also things like reliability. A big issue in discussion at CERN is ease of programming, since all the applications are built in house.

As you know vector hardware is coming back with a vengeance, after the days of Cray and NEC and the others. And the big debate inside our community is whether vector computing can be utilised and should be utilised.

Should particles be strung out in a vector? Today they're not. Today we're more in object oriented programme. A particle is an object, the next particle is an object. It's not just an array element.

What do you see happening? Will physics go back to vector systems, or stick with object oriented?

The big difference, if you think about it for two minutes, is that cray and the super computers used to be very exotic machines.

You personally will have vectors on your laptop whether you like it or not. This time, whether we like it or not, they're going to be everywhere. They're going to be hard to avoid in the longrun.

People are saying "they're here already, why don't we use them". In the past, you asked, "should we really invest $10 million in a supercomputer" and many people would vote against it.

I think that omnipresence of vectors will force everybody to rethink whether it's for high energy physics or car crashing or whatever it is.

With the LHC set to be switched on in days, or at least very soon, what changes when that happens or do you just keep motoring along?

In openlab, we keep motoring along. In the CERN IT department, of course there will be an increased emphasis on reliability, stability and all the things that allow the physicists to get as much useful computing out of the center - and not just the centre, but this is in the context of the whole computing grid. So everybody is very much focused on stability and reliability.

How closely do you work with the scientists?

For instance, in the field of programming, we try to have a very close collaboration because depending on the way they express the physics problem, either in a object oriented way or in a vector way, then that will hit Intel's or AMD's microarchitecture or Larabee's architecture in a given way.

And we're trying to find out how can you keep the physicists happy the way they programme and make sure the machines are kept happy in the way that compiled results hits the microarchitecture.

So every experiment is an IT experiment for you?

Yes, it also becomes a mapping onto the IT. Today we have issues like the amount of memory being used by a physics job, the amount of time being spent, the parallelism expressed either explicitly or implicitly and many of these questions we work closely with physicists to understand what are the free parameters what can we move, what can we change.

What advice would you pass on to IT managers working in the business world?

Well personally I would say that the advice is never rest on your laurels, there's always something new.

You have to come in every morning and think "what I thought yesterday will probably be put in question today". That is a good motto.

Click here for photos from the LHC experiment.

It seems as though not much new is happening in enterprise IT development that doesn't involve the cloud.

The uptake of outsourcing and software-as-as-service (SaaS) based delivery models has softened end-using organisations to the idea of not necessarily owning the IT infrastructure their business may rely on. The advent of the cloud has even encouraged blue-sky thinkers to declare it will, one day, render the IT department redundant.

But, despite the advent of more and more data centre-as-a-service-type launches, recent security issues involving the likes of vendors such as Salesforce.com and Google Docs have thrown a spotlight on the security risks associated with running IT in the cloud.

"There's been a lot of hype around cloud computing recently," said Ian Osborne, project director of the Grid Computing Now! initiative of IT trade body, Intellect. "It offers enterprises the opportunity to flex their IT infrastructure more dynamically to meet demand."

Open challenges

But he told IT PRO there were inherent challenges in extending cloud infrastructures out to enterprises in an open, virtual or utility' based way. "With very little agreement on standards, the issues of provisioning, security and ownership of the data could be major inhibitors to adoption," Osborne said.

In response, both enterprise IT suppliers and consumers have stepped up attempts to close security loopholes and offer best-practice solutions and guidance on governance, standards and compliance. In fact, it was just over a year ago that Gartner first warned IT organisations that alternative delivery models like cloud computing would make the governing principles that worked with the traditional models of buying, building and accessing IT irrelevant.

David Mitchell Smith, vice president and Gartner Fellow, said: "Why pay to build it and maintain it, if you can buy it in at a fraction of the price?"

But he added that one of the main challenges for IT organisations in adapting to this next technological revolution will be dealing with the cultural impact both internally and in the way IT interfaces with other functional areas, which is exactly where loopholes around data governance can open up.

Jericho looks to best practice

Earlier this month, the independent security expert group Jericho Forum announced it was focusing its activities on establishing best practices to meet the challenges of collaborating securely in the cloud. As a result, it has published a cloud cube model designed to provide clarity of vision on the essential areas organisations need to consider when evaluating a cloud-computing environment. "The cloud approach to organising business can be both more secure and more efficient than the old-style silo structure," said Adrian Seccombe, Jericho Forum board member, who is chief information security officer and senior enterprise information architect at healthcare giant Eli Lilly. "Viewed from a different perspective it opens a potential Pandora's box of security nightmaresnot least of which is loss of data confidentiality and integrity."

He explained how the cloud cube model provides a framework for exploring the nature of different cloud formations and understanding the key characteristics, considerations, as well as the benefits and risks that must be taken into account when entering clouds. And he stressed that the path to success is to architect security in from the beginning.

Guy Bunker, chief scientist and distinguished engineer at Symantec, endorsed the forum's work: "Jericho's next phase, which addresses secure collaboration in the cloud, is seen as a big step in the right direction. Bringing together enterprise, system integrators and application vendors has resulted in a practical approach to security in the next generation of collaboration architecture."

Working together

At the same time, other collaborative industry efforts include the creation of the Cloud Storage Technical Work Group (TWG) by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), aimed at developing SNIA architectures and best practices related to cloud storage technology. Gene Ruth, Burton Group senior analyst confirmed a number of vendors were rushing to offer cloud storage services, either as a focused storage offering or as part of a compute cloud and therefore, security would be a key consideration.

"Confusion over definitions, positioning and concerns over service delivery are slowing acceptance," commented Ruth. "The Burton Group believes that a strong industry association can provide a focal point to bring the many cloud players together. SNIA's efforts to define what cloud storage is and how it fits into the cloud compute paradigm will help spur its acceptance."

In addition to industry wide activity, individual vendors have also taken steps to improve security in the cloud, with the most recent being Cisco. The networking and software vendor made a number of cloud-related security announcements this month that looked to expand its hosted security service offerings and deepen the integration of security-as-a-service applications with corporate network infrastructures.

And Cisco chief executive, John Chambers hit the headlines at RSA this week by describing the cloud as a "security nightmare".

Cisco has said its new offerings would protect data and communications in support of the increasing extension of connectivity outside the walls of the enterprise walls. From the Cisco Security Intelligence Operations centre, it manages an extensive threat-monitoring network called SensorBase' that it uses to monitor and collect security data from hundreds of millions of client-side device and computers.

"Security needs to capture the latest threat intelligence to mitigate shifting threats," added Tom Gillis, vice president and general manager for Cisco's Security Technology business unit. "Our vision for security is based on a balance of protection and enablement, which integrates security from the network through to the endpoint and the user."

So the industry has begun to answer the security challenges faced in the cloud. But the emerging challenges around data integrity, recovery, privacy and governance, not to mention areas like e-discovery, regulatory compliance, and auditing, demand that cloud adopters must fully qualify the vendors, services and security processes they use to ensure its survival.

With IT responsible for as much carbon emissions as the aviation industry, according to Gartner, more energy efficient or green' IT has risen up the corporate agenda.

In a survey conducted in September of last year, 72 per cent of IT managers said they had plans to implement green technology initiatives to reduce carbon emissions over the next few years.

And, of the 100 UK IT managers polled, the majority said they were planning hardware-based projects in the near future that focused on virtualisation to consolidate servers and so, save energy in data centres.

Too narrow a green focus?

But Tom Weston, executive chairman at Sunrise Software, the IT service management vendor that carried out the survey, said IT organisations were missing a trick.

"It seems strong messages about green strategies are not getting through, at least with regards to the office environment," he said.

The research found that, of those firms that had already implemented green initiatives, 83 per cent recycled IT equipment and 69 per cent turned off printers and computers at night, while 36 per cent also used virtualisation in the office.

But the survey findings proved that there is even more scope for green IT projects focused outside of the data centre, where 71 per cent of respondents asked thought turning off printers and computers at night was their most energy efficient option.

Going green for the greater good

A more recent study published earlier this month suggested that, although many companies talk about going green for the good of the environment, many organisations only consider it a secondary benefit.

The Echo Research survey of more than 250 IT decision makers at large companies in the US and UK published by CA earlier this month found the biggest influences to adopting green technology were the cost-saving implications.

Other influences on green IT procurement considered by IT executives were disruptive IT failures, as well as corporate and social responsibilities. But in the US, regulatory pressures were also a factor, and UK IT executives were also influenced by depletion of natural resources.

The CA study suggested that, as IT executives consider green solutions, they are realising that replacing existing hardware with more energy efficient technology is often cost prohibitive.

UK overlooks software, delivery options

Don LeClair, senior vice president at CA, said: "While many have looked to hardware and power systems as part of these solutions, this study confirms that software plays a vital role in helping to manage energy efficiency."

In fact, 80 per cent of the survey's respondents in the UK had already factored energy efficient software in IT budgets and 70 per cent said they considered software to be very important to their ability to promote energy efficiency.

But US firms were more likely to budget for software for the virtualisation and consolidation of servers, storage and data centres than their UK counterparts. And UK companies were more likely to budget for software to implement PC and server power management.

Finding the right balance

"Our customers have seen that better management of the IT infrastructure can bring both cost savings and environmental benefits," he said. "To reap true cost-savings, IT executives must look to implement software management technology that enables better measurement and performance of the IT infrastructure."

The majority of companies CA surveyed were currently using software systems for network, database, systems performance, configuration and asset management. But more US companies had taken on software to improve the efficiency of their data centres overall than in the UK.

Approximately 60 per cent of those polled in the US had applied software in their data centres or to servers to help manage energy efficiency and more than half managed efficiency by applying management software to their mainframes.

And US firms were also more likely than their UK counterparts to currently be using network management software and virtual machine software.

Putting your money where your mouth is

The transatlantic survey also measured the contribution of green IT initiatives and found virtual machine software, application performance management and database management were the software areas UK firms reported as above average for budget and for current contribution.

But even CA's research found that UK organisations are limiting the scope of their green efforts, as virtual machine software was the only area that UK IT executives considered to be above average for budget and provide above average satisfaction ratings with their current software's contribution to green initiatives.

It seems as though that some areas like videoconferencing and remote working slip under the radar. Ian Osborne, director of the Grid Computing Now! initiative run by IT trade body Intellect, told IT PRO organisations should also be looking to cloud computing as an enabler of many future green IT deployments.

"On the green side, you have the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft that are working to obtain carbon neutral IT infrastructures," he said. "And it may well be that the carbon footprint of the most energy hungry IT infrastructures are chock full of non-efficient legacy and data centre kit. But, where servers can make up 40 per cent of an IT organisation's electricity bill, you might as well as look at using the cloud."

Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is one of the many vendors investing in the cloud for its green capabilities. Tony Reid, HDS UK services director, added: "There's a huge amount of hype around cloud at the moment, with a lot of vendors claiming to be doing things in the cloud'. But from my perspective, it offers the opportunity to flex IT infrastructures more dynamically to meet business demands it's because of demand that IT organisations have to look at energy as well as cost."

Between the data centre and desktop, it seems as though for every power-hungry element in an average IT infrastructure, there's now a green IT solution in development out there. The only factor is how motivated you're organisation is to get out there and find them.

While most people think of computer graphics chips as being just for games, Nvidia's latest graphics processing units (GPU) are actually being used to search for aliens at part of the SETI@Home project.

SETI@Home is one of several projects from Berkeley's Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) that use PCs across the internet to process and analyse data - a form of grid computing.

SeTI@Home is the largest BOINC project with nearly 200,000 active users. Their efforts will be boosted by the release by Nvidia and BOINC of an optimised client for Nvidia's latest graphics chips.

The client is written in Nvidia's C based CUDA programming language to make the best use of the parallel nature of Nvidia's GPUs to greatly speed processing time.

Nvidia claims that the the SETI@Home client running on its GeForce GTX 280 is twice as first as a system based on the current fastest desktop CPU a 3.2GHz Intel Core i7 965. Compared to a more standard dual-core CPU system based on a 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E8200, Nvidia says its GPU processing is up to eight times faster.

"NVIDIA CUDA technology opens up processing power for scientific research that was previously unavailable and impossible for researchers to afford," said Dr. David Anderson, research scientist at Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory and founder of BOINC.

"CUDA technology makes it easy for scientists and researchers to optimize BOINC projects for Nvidia GPUs and they are already using it for applications in molecular dynamics, protein structure prediction, climate and weather modeling, medical imaging, and many other areas."

Other BOINC projects that make use of Nvidia GPU's are GPUGRID which performs molecular simulations, and Einstein@HOme, which uses distributing computing to search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from gravitational wave detectors.

He comes from academia most recently as the dean of engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago - but Prith Banerjee, senior vice president and director of HP Labs, also founded two companies, including AccelChip which he sold to Xilinx. So he knows the corporate side of R&D, too.

Since taking over HP Labs earlier this year he has refocused the researchers on a smaller number of projects in five main areas. We asked him why those areas are so key, what this means for basic technology research and what products he's looking forward to.

What have you changed at HP Labs and why?

HP Labs is one of the last remaining corporate research labs in the world and our new plan allows us to maintain HP's technology leadership well into the future. The plan in essence sharpens the focus onto the grand challenges and opportunities we believe our customers will face in the next decade.

In the past, HP Labs, which consists of some 600 really brilliant minds, top researchers, PhDs in various fields... they were distributing their efforts on large number of smaller projects and I felt that you have to channel the energy. Essentially, each project was not being resourced well. With two to three people per project, no matter how successful they were, you would never see a real product or service that would be game-changing to a company the size of HP. It just resulted in interesting papers, interesting prototypes but not ever a product.

I told my team we need to focus our energies into a smaller number of big bets and create an environment where truly innovative ideas from any researcher in the labs will be listened to.

And who decides which are the big bets' to work on?

There is no way I would have the knowledge of every detailed aspect in all the processes at HP. So I created a really formal structure where these innovative, big bet ideas could come in. They have to clearly articulate Here is how I am going to advance the state of the art'.

And that proposal has to say if it is successful, who cares? Not exact numbers, but generally gauging the size of the market. That forces these researchers to rethink things; they never did this kind of soul searching before.

The ideas come to a board that's one-third lab directors, we're organised into 23 labs so there are 23 directors; then there are 23 technologies drawn from all across HP and 23 business unit people from across the various businesses HP that has.

Why is that the right mix?

I come from the world of academia and I used to be submitting research proposals to the National Science Foundation or DARPA but those research proposals are only looking at advancing the state of the art. They didn't cover the commercial aspects.

Then I worked in a couple of startups; as a startup founder I had to pitch business plans. They weren't anything to do with advancing the state of the art; it's here is an idea, here's how to monetise it. You talk about the size of the market, the business plan, the operational plan.

Essentially I wanted to combine the two aspects: the review panel from DARPA and the idea of the managing partners in a VC [venture capital] firm.

So is HP Labs more focused on short-term product research now?

Actually, the boards were given some guidelines; I said I want you to pick projects that have a balance of basic and exploratory research, some applied research and some advanced product development'. That's shorter-term research that's tied to existing product. With applied research we have an application in mind but it's not directly tied to an existing product so it's a slightly longer timeline, two to four years.

People were worried that business centre people would only support product development - not at all! And technologists you'd think would only care about research but we went through our first round of proposals and we were able to select projects with that mix and this is amazing. This is HP Labs running its own experiment and the initial results are very exciting.

What kind of basic, blue-sky research will HP be working on?

We're doing really fundamental things in chemistry that, if we can solve it, will revolutionises the ink industry but it's not tied to particular ink product. We're doing fundamental research in chemistry and processes. We're doing fundamental things in quantum sciences and photonics. We're trying to develop technologies that will allow us integrate large computers with photonic interfaces.

And generally, what are the main areas of research?

Information explosion every five months, information doubles so how do you access information in this massive haystack of information? Our researchers are working on technologies allows users and customers to analyse info and deliver it at the right time and in the right place.

Face Bubble facial recognition technology that allows you to search for that picture of your son's fifth birthday party where he's wearing a hat.

Dynamic cloud services cloud computing services that will anticipate your needs based on who you are where you are and what your preferences are. The Adaptive Infrastructure Lab in Bristol is working on really creative way of composing services dynamically from the cloud. A wine merchant in Italy wishing to market wine could come to the HP site and dynamically compose and create services to get the business up and running in matter of days.

There's content transformation. Firstly creating digital information from analogue, then transforming content from various devices. We all own multiple devices, TVs, laptops how do you transfer information between the different devices you own? And content transformation also about transforming digital content into physical; one way is by printing. We want to reduce the cost per page and the speed of printing to enable digital printing to be a lot more cost effective than world of analogue.

Intelligent infrastructure is about creating smarter devices, networks and architectures that are more scalable with Internet speeds. Our vision for the next-generation data centre is tens of thousands of processors with hundreds of cores connected through photonics and parallel distribution grid computing environments.

And then sustainability what is HP's future vision of the carbon footprint, which is so important I put it as a project. It's not just things like dynamic smart cooling putting sensors in large data centres so we can keep the environment at a much higher temperature and have severs work perfectly. The data centre is an energy hog.

If we take copper out, we can improve efficiency by 100 per cent using lasers. And we are talking about developments in sustainability that will reduce the cradle to cradle cost starting from production for servers, laptops, printers, supplies and so on. The currency will no longer be dollars but joules and everything will have a carbon footprint and an energy footprint. So this product, from inception to recycling, consumes 300 joules; this other product consumes 900 joules.

What about the process of turning the research results into actual products? HP has had some really interesting projects that have never gone anywhere...

The experience I have had in my combined worlds of academia and in the startup world is that tech transfer best happens when the people transfer along with the technology. I have seen so many cases where the researcher does the work and says I don't want to get my hands dirty, I'm not interested in building a product, it's somebody else's problem here, I'll just shove it over the wall' and the person in the business unit has to catch it and try to figure out what's going on. If you look at all the startups that have succeeded, it's the people who created the technology and were actually involved in building the product.

Think of it as a seriously-funded startup team. Their role is turn it into a product, do an alpha, a beta and talk to customers. We want them to show five referenceable customers.

After the research prototype is done we will invest in this so we make sure technology transfer really sticks. After one or two years, these researchers come back to HP Labs.

Sometime this technology transfer will happen to an existing business unit; we call that type a' internally. Research on next-generation inkjet printing to make it faster and cheaper would be type a'. Sometimes it will transfer to a division like the Personal System Group; that's type b'.

And then if there's something that's so creative, so disruptive that it doesn't fit within any business unit but it's still related to IT and we want to support it, that's type c. That's done under Shane Robison, the chief strategy and technology officer; he has an organisation called Corporate Ventures that funds technologies like BookPrep, where we want to bring back into print every book ever published and MagCloud for personal magazine printing. When we do basic research on digital signal processing, databases, search or whatever; the technologies we transfer there will be type c's.

Not all technologies will be productised by HP. In the past, many of those technologies just did not see the light of day. It was not fair to society that all these creative ideas came out of HP Labs and never saw the light of day. The d' option is IP licensing to startups and other companies.

A recent example is Memory Spot, that came out of Bristol Labs a wireless chip for communications and storage that we think will revolutionise way people interact but HP today does not see a business model. But we don't want to see this fantastic technology go to waste, so we're in the process of licensing to a startup company.

We do really creative things on nano-jets and very, very thin jets that were originally developed for printing. Our researchers came with on application to drug delivery. Imagine patches that will selectively control the amount of drugs delivered to you throughout the day and provide much better healthcare to patients. Now HP is not in the pharmaceutical business so should we give up on that? No, we will license it to a company in Europe.

Are there nanotechnology projects HP might develop itself?

There's a really fundamental technology called the memristor'. This is a device that was postulated 50, 60 years ago by a professor who said we have an inductor, a capacitor, a resister; if the world had this thing called the memristor that would be really interesting'.

Many people have tried doing this but with macro-scale phenomena it was very difficult to come up with devices that would have the memristor properties. By pushing at the nano-scale, our researchers came up with an actual demonstration of a memristor.

There's a couple of applications, including neural networks, neural computing. And we believe the memristor can fundamentally change the dynamics of non volatile RAM; this flash memory that we all use could be significant transformed by several orders of magnitude, in terms of size and access times and so on. In the future, say five ten years in to future, we will replace the solid state drive with, potentially, things that come out of memristors.

The network of computers which will manage and analyse the deluge of data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has been unveiled, three weeks after the first particle beams were sent around the giant physics machine.

The LHC Computing Grid (LGC) will be used to analyse the 15 petabvtes of data created annually by the world's largest physics experiment. The grid spans 33 countries and offers computing power equivalent to 140 computing centres, Cern said.

"The worldwide LHC Computing Grid is a vital pillar of the LHC project," said Jos Engelen, chief scientific officer for the LHC project. "It is an absolute necessity for analysis of the LHC data. It is the result of a silent revolution' in large scale computing over the last five years."

The data collected from the LHC is pumped out over special fibre optic networks to eleven Tier One' computing facilities one of which is Rutherford Appleton Labs in the UK. There, initial processing begins and the data is further distributed to another 140 labs around the globe.

"We can routinely process 250,000 jobs a day," said Ian Bird, leader of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid project. "And we can achieve peaks of 500,000 jobs without problems." These jobs would take several days on a single processor, hence the need for the combined power of distributed computers.

Despite the initial success of the project, the grid will effectively remain unused until next year, as a helium leak shut down the LHC after just a few weeks. The project also saw trouble from Greek hackers, who attacked the network and took down their website last month.

For more on this massive IT project, read our feature about the UK contribution here.

Will the LHC experiment smash particles in 2008? The LHC project has been advancing, but not fast enough due to technical setbacks and the challenge of handling vast amounts of data.

5 April 2007: The Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) extended its funding of the grid computing project, GridPP, by giving an additional 30 million. UK researchers designed the system to help analyse data that would be captured by the major experiment of a Large Hadron Collider (LHC), developed by The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN.

18 October 2007: The UK's GridPP project leads in analysing the data about the CERN particle accelerator. The LHC@home project, an extension of GridPP that allows the public to donate spare computing power to CERN scientists, was moved from Geneva to Queen Mary, University of London. The extra space is used to run simulations of the LHC, ensuring that protons stay in their orbits while travelling the 17 mile circuit.

8 September 2008: CERN's LHC is a massive IT project linking hundreds of thousands of computers. When the LHC goes live data will be sent to thousands of scientists around the world. The machine has been built to test the "big bang" theory of the evolution of earth as well as to find the so-called god particle, dubbed Higgs Boson, which will explain how mass-less elementary particles allow matter to have mass.

9 September 2008: A mass of wires and metal combine to make the LHC, which includes some 100,000 CPUs linked over a massive grid to process and analyse data from CERN's experiment. The system includes huge detectors and magnets, sensitive sensors, and other high-tech science equipment and shows just how beautifully engineering and IT can coincide.

12 September 2008: A group named the 'Greek Security Team' hacked into the LHC's network and posted a warning about weaknesses in the infrastructure. The hackers stated that the technicians working on the project were "schoolkids" and that they were not to be messed with. CERN scientists were concerned as the hackers were only a "step away" from the computer control system of one of the machine's magnetic detectors.

22 September 2008: A large helium leak in the tunnel of the LHC caused the machine to be shut down 19 September 2008. A faulty electrical connection between two of the machine's 30-ton super-conducting magnets was the cause of the problem, which will take two months to fix. The temperature of the area affected needs to be raised for repairs and then lowered to minus 271.3 degrees Celsius again for the experiment to work properly.

Nestled in the Alps near lovely Geneva is a feat of engineering and technological ingenuity on par with few others created in the name of science, and it's about to awaken.

When the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) goes live at CERN along the Swiss-French border in just a few days, it will produce an awesome amount of data which will be fed to thousands of scientists around the world assuming the thing doesn't create a massive black hole and kill us all in a horribly cool sci-fi sort of way.

CERN's big baby isn't just an overwhelming science experiment; it's a grand IT project, too. And the last time CERN's band of boffins had tech trouble, some guy named Tim invented the web.

This time, CERN's tech team is focusing on distributed computing, also known as grid computing, leaving some to wonder if the LHC could lead to innovation on the scale of the web project pioneered by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Given the scale of this project, it's hard not to think something new and shiny will come out of it.

Indeed, trying to describe the project both the IT and physics in numbers is mind-boggling. They're all too huge to get your head around: 100,000 CPUs crunching 15 petabytes of data at hundreds of sites around the world what does that even mean?

Simply smashing

For the past few years, engineers at CERN the French acronym for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research have been putting together a 16.77 mile tunnel, lined with sensors and 1,600 superconducting magnets across eight sectors, which are held at an operating temperature some 271 degrees below zero. The accelerator, which is accurate to a nanosecond, will be used to slam particles into each other to try to recreate the conditions at the beginning of time as in, the Big Bang.

While cynics have suggested this will create a black hole that will destroy the universe, CERN's (hopefully-not-evil) geniuses have said that's just not very likely.

Even without the peril of death, it's pretty exciting. CERN's geeks are looking for the so-called god particle, dubbed Higgs Boson, which will offer clues about dark matter and other missing links of physics.

This week, despite 10 September being pushed as the official start-up, no collisions will take place. That date simply marks the first time a beam will be sent all the way around the track; the smashing is set to start up on 21 October. As the wee particles are slammed into each other, sensors will take all that data, filter it for useful bits, and then start spitting it out to scientists to work with.

"It's not the flip of a switch, but a long-planned process," said David Britton, project manager of GridPP, the UK side of the distributed computing system which will allow all this data to move around and be analysed. The collider itself has been cooling for some six weeks, and the data testing has preceded this week, too. "We have been turning on the grid all this year," he said, adding that it's been tested with fake data to ensure success.

"It's an ongoing process, and next week, we will start to see a trickle of real data," he said. While that data will be more interesting than the fake stuff, it doesn't start to become really important until the beams collide, he said.

An avalanche of data

And when the real data does start coming from the Alpine lab, it will be an avalanche. The data output about 15 petabytes a year will require some 100,000 CPUs across 50 countries with some tens of thousands of those in the UK, which will also hold 700TB of disk storage across 17 sites.

The data sharing for the project is tiered and spread out over a grid managed by the LHC Computing Grid (LCG) project. The LHC's detectors will stream data straight to tier zero', which is CERN's own computing centre. The farm' features processing power equal to 30,000 computers, including storage to five million gigabytes of spinning disk space and 16 million on tape.

Raw and processed data will be sent from there over 10GB/sec lines to tier one' academic bodies, which will act as back-up to CERN and also help disseminate the data to 150 tier two' organisations and tier three' computers which could be a basic PC sitting on a scientist's desk.

Organised by the UK grid computing group GridPP, that lab and 16 others in the country will offer tens of thousands CPUs to the effort. The tier one set up at RAL is one of the top ten for bulk processing. RAL will supply streaming data, backups and help process the nearly-raw data being pumped out of CERN. The various distributed computers will be connected using private fibre optic cable links as well as high-speed sections of the public internet.

Tripping the light(path) fantastic

Neil Geddes, a director at RAL, told IT PRO that the data is processed in real time from CERN, and is streamed mostly raw to sites like his own over "not quite standard internet." While certain sites will have a hard-wired network, the 10 terabytes of data a day the lab expects to see will travel over dedicated lightpaths on fibre networks designed for academic use.

"Certain colours of light on optical lines are guaranteed for our use," Geddes explained. This allows the huge amounts of data to flow without interruption to either the lab or to the rest of us using the internet. "It's one of the more novel aspects, but it has been around for a while," he added.

While it may not be truly new tech, CERN's team have still pushed the envelope, and have set new landspeed records' in data transfers ahead of the LHC experiment, Geddes said.

Once the data hits places like RAL, it is backed up, reprocessed and sent on to other sites. At RAL, it is shoved onto tape for backup, and then send out for archiving (and therefore additional backup) to tier two sites around the world, where it receives more detailed processing and where scientists extract the signals they need for their work.

RAL will also be doing reprocessing and "serving it to other physicists around the world." For example, if a physicist in California needs access to RAL's data, it needs to be accessible and organised for what Geddes called a "glorified data base query."

Just as the LHC experiment has been ramping up for years, so has RAL's computing set-up. The site uses tape-based backup and has a "few" petabytes of spinning disks, as well of hundreds of racks with several thousand CPUs. In the past year, RAL spent some 2 million on tech equipment for the lab in the past year, much of it going to support this project.

Because of the nature of the computer equipment RAL requires - big and powerful - and the sheer scale of the project, buying kit is a six month process. Installation isn't any easier. "You can't just wheel it in and turn it on," he said. Across the twelve major tier one sites, "not one has had an incident free installation," he noted.

But they're ready now, Geddes hopes. The lab has been running 100 terabytes a day for a long time, he said, and as far as what they're receiving from CERN, not much is expected to change when the beams first collide. What will change is the scientists from around the world clamouring to get at the data, he said. "We've not had several thousand physicists trying to access the data for real," Geddes said. "Being faced with many more demanding users, accessing it in an ad hoc way, is our biggest challenge it's large-scale processing on top of that we have to be ready for a large-scale user community. That's the real challenge."

At home

GridPP was also last year put in charge of the global LHC@home project.

Similar in idea to the famous SETI project, it lets people without server farms in their homes take part by downloading a bit of screensaver software to their computer which lets physics information be processed when the machines aren't otherwise being used. Based at Queen Mary at the University of London, it essentially allows some bits and pieces of the analysis to be farmed out.

"Like its larger cousin, SETI@home, LHC@home uses the spare computing power on people's desks," said Dr Alex Owen, who runs the project in the UK, at the time the project moved last year. "But rather than searching for aliens, LHC@home models the progress of sub-atomic particles travelling at nearly the speed of light around Europe's newest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider."

As of last year, 40,000 people had run the LHC@home programme, contributing the equivalent of 3,000 years of computing on a single machine. At the moment, the system is focused on understanding the machines optics systems, GridPP's Britton explained.

The future of grid computing

Just as Sir Tim Berners-Lee came up with a world-changing solution when he created the World Wide Web to organise information, some believe the work being done because of the LHC project could propel distributed computing into the mainstream. Contrary to what some believe, the grid is not a replacement for the internet; it's a different way of sharing and analysing data, especially large amounts, using networks such as the internet.

Grid computing is already used for medical and meteorological modelling, for example, as well as by some financial firms. But the move to cloud computing such as hosted apps by enterprises and consumers alike could signal a change in the way people expect to access their information.

And that's how grid computing comes in. The grid is middleware which sits on a network such as the internet and automates machine-to-machine interactions, thereby allowing computers and systems to connect and collaborate when it comes to managing data and running applications. The middleware used by the LHC is an unsurprisingly open source piece called Globus.

And if that can be scaled up to manage the biggest experiment across the most complicated computer link-up the world has yet to see, surely it can handle a few piddly online apps, too assuming we live past this week to try it out.

Cloud computing is the next big thing, and most of the big players are in some way involved. Google, whose stated mission is "to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" is an obvious candidate.

Other leaders in the field include IBM, HP, Sun. Dell and Amazon. Red Hat is offering beta solutions based on RHEL and JBoss, which are on offer from Amazon running on HP hardware. Even Microsoft is reaching into the cloud, in the hope of not being left behind. But although cloud computing may be the next big thing, its definition remains vague and hazy.

At its most generic and ambitious, the objective is to put everything on the network. The cloud is the network, and the network is the computer.

When so many organisations are dispersed across national and international borders - and so many personnel are on the move or working from home - why not farm out at least some of your data and processing needs to a third party, and access everything across the Net using cell phones, mobile computers, or other gizmos? Your data will be protected by passwords, just as it is within the local network, and can be encrypted across the Net. The processing can be done by third-party virtualised computer farms, maximising the use of processor power, and massively reducing the carbon footprint of both the organisation and the wider community.

Cloud computing is an area that has been made possible by technologies associated with the rise of Linux, high-power computing (HPC) and virtualisation. For companies like IBM and HP, the resurgence of the mainframe and the development of blade servers, both of which were attributable to the adoption of Linux, has made cloud computing a reality - and data centres that are efficient in power, data and processor utilisation.

The magic carpet

It's a beguiling idea. Computing in the cloud or across the network brings many theoretical and practical advantages. Data centres cost money that can be channeled into other parts of the business. Money is spent not just on the hardware but on up-keep and maintenance, idle time, unused processing and storage capacity, security concerns, energy bills, upgrades and personnel.

Even the PCs that sit on every desktop of every worker in the organisation make a disproportionate hit on the organisation's cash flow, not just in the initial investment in the hardware, but in licensing the sometimes less than adequate software, hardware upgrades to satisfy upgrades to the software. It's also hard keeping track of company data that may sit on random PCs anywhere in the organisation, and may be lost forever from the company pool of knowledge. Each of these desktops is consuming disproportionate energy.

Cloud computing is the logical conclusion of many other comfortable and fluffy concepts of the last few years, all of which were designed to bring some organisation to the organisation of the organisation's data, such as "Information on Demand", Software as a Service (SaaS), virtualisation, web services, thin clients, SAO and web 2.0. All these concepts can, to some degree, be taken care of by cloud computing. To its advocates, cloud computing has the potential to be a magic carpet ride into a never never land where all the problems of client side computing can be solved through the browser.

Your data, your applications, and your processing are kept elsewhere, and are accessed on a need to know basis. This can happen on a personal or a business level. Google Mail, Google Docs and Facebook are all manifestations of how this can happen, but all the usual enterprise applications can also be accessed in exactly the same way. The network has moved from the data centre to the cloud. Every user has a potential supercomputer at his or her fingertips.

You don't need the big hardware as long as you have access to the network, and a device to speak to it. You can access the data you need from any place at any time. Your costs are slashed, and you only pay for what you need. Your data is kept in one place, tight and secure, and is no longer your responsibility or problem, and your carbon footprint and general impact on the community are much reduced. Your data, your applications, your server, are available when you need them, without infrastructure or capital constraints. Cloud computing can give access to compute power that wouldn't otherwise be available.

The village in the clouds

Google and the Internet have shown the way. All the world's data can be accessed more or less instantaneously across the Net, and the Net has become the virtual realisation of Marshall McLuhan's Global Village. "Post-literate man's electronic media contract the world to a village or tribe where everything happens to everyone at the same time," he wrote in 1960. "Everyone knows about, and therefore participates in, everything that is happening the minute it happens. Television gives this simultaneity to events in the global village."

McLuhan was a prisoner of his own time and his observation predated, rather than predicted, the rise of the digital computer and the Internet. But his perception of the world in the electronic age as a global village remains a remarkably prescient vision of what the internet has become, an unparalleled repository for information, accurate and inaccurate, about everything and anything, which can be accessed instantly and at will, an encyclopaedia at our fingertips. And if the information we access can't always be trusted, hasn't it ever been so?

The electronic global village is the wider context for Google's wider ambition to serve our data, and the potential of the cloud has barely been tapped. When a user accesses data in the cloud, he or she wants a synthesised form of data that has been processed to answer specific requirements or preferences, just as information on the Net is processed by Google to satisfy our search requests. And this can offer any number of opportunities for merging, sharing and distributing the information that is stored in the cloud.

Needless to say the realities are some way behind the bigger vision. But there are practical examples in the real world. Banks have built worldwide networks for authentication of credit cards where data must be shared across the network, and security is a premium. Airline booking systems operate in a similar way with network access to central storage systems - and most organisations of any size have wide area networks that can be accessed on the move. Cloud computing takes this to another level.

As a proof of concept, HP Labs in Bristol instigated the SE3D project back in 2004 which offered 12 groups of UK animators free access to HP Labs' Maya Rendering Service to produce a 3D short. Participants received Maya licenses and a programme of workshops, public events and industry mentoring. The Maya rendering service offered utility computing across the Net, a prototype for offering rendering as a service for commercial film production companies at vastly reduced cost.

The most famous example of cloud computing at work is given by Amazon's EC2 grid, which was recently rented by The New York Times to create searchable PDFs of four terabytes of data that contained 11 million articles spanning the period from 1851 to 1920. According to Derek Gottfrid of the New York Times, he used 100 Amazon EC2 instances and a Hadoop application to churn "through all 11 million articles in just under 24 hours" and "generated another 1.5TB of data", at a cumulative cost of $US240. Even where cloud computing is not employed for mainstream services it offers otherwise unattainable processing power as a viable option.

The silver lining

Like many innovations in computing, the adoption of cloud computing stumbles over legacy systems and assumptions, and despite the cost savings it offers, is more likely to be taken up in "emerging economies" than in Europe or America.

There are many reasons for this. In so-called developed economies most businesses already have infrastructures in place, dependent upon legacy hardware, software and conventional ways of working. In Southeast Asia, India, China or sub-Saharan Africa, SMEs are less likely to have complex client-server infrastructures in place, and government and research establishments are keen to encourage adoption of technologies that wouldn't otherwise be affordable.

IBM has opened cloud computing centres in places such as China, South Africa and Vietnam, where individuals, communities and businesses can get immediate access to applications that were previously out of reach.

Like other instances of cloud computing, grid computing and/or utility computing, these centres are based on virtualised instances of Linux running on mainframe or blade computers, and can be seen to provide a huge boost to the local economies where they are based.

Get off of my cloud

As beguiling to IT managers the notion of cloud computing may be, but like many ideas that disrupt the current way of doing things, there is some resistance.

You don't necessarily want your data out there, for personal or business reasons. Your personal information, privacy and security may be taken out of your hands. Your personal desktop gives you control, and no-one who has been brought up on Microsoft Windows, virus holes, spam-filled inboxes and "security through obscurity", has much faith in network security. For all kinds of reasons companies are possessive of their data, and often with good reason.

There are issues of licensing and the current availability of applications, and there are also questions of privacy and control. We live in a world where data is being collected in greater and greater volumes, and is increasingly being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Google might not want to share your data, but government agencies can go beyond the law to access what they will. Governments and corporations are increasingly obsessed with gathering information about us. In such circumstances who is going to jump onto the cloud? It just won't happen, or so the logic goes - big brother is watching over us from inside the cloud. But this dystopian view probably assumes a much greater degree of centralisation and control than will actually be the case.

The most compelling reason for the adoption of cloud computing in the current climate is that it has the potential to vastly reduce the scale of energy consumption and waste that is a characteristic of the current data centre.

The irony and the value of cloud computing is that it returns us to the world of the mainframe. The difference is that the mobile computer or hand held device we use to put the supercomputer at our fingertips will have more power than a mainframe the size of a warehouse thirty or forty years ago.

Red Bull Racing, the Formula 1 race team, has revealed it is using new grid management software to improve the management and use of its high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure.

The team has been has been using a 1,024-core HPC cluster running AMD processors on an IBM server platform for some months now and needed to find a more automated way of running its computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models on the platform.

Steve Nevey, business development director of Red Bull Technology, which manages the technology partnerships of both Red Bull Racing and sister team, Scuderia Toro Rosso F1, told IT PRO that having already used two similar 250-core clusters installed two years go, its latest HPC platform allowed the team to run larger CFD models, faster.

"The problem emerged when the guys would set a big job to run overnight," he said. "Being able to run bigger jobs faster meant they would have to hang around to kick off another job. We needed to automate this with software to handle the scheduling of CFD jobs."

The team took on load sharing facility (LSF) software from specialist provider Platform Computing to manage job scheduling more effectively. As a result, Nevey said it has managed to improve the throughput of CFD jobs on it HPC platform. "We've been able to optimise the AMD/IBM cluster implemented last year to run CFD jobs by 20 per cent," he said.

He explained how maximising CFD analysis throughput is key to successful car design because it allows Red Bull Racing's designers and engineers to streamline their development of key characteristics that simultaneously maximise downforce and reduce drag the cars create on the track, as well as shorten production time.

Nevey said another benefit of the Platform LSF software is that Red Bull Technology is now able to use hardware more efficiently by selecting the best hardware to run simulation processes at each development stage. Maximizing throughput also reduces downtime in support of the development, from building the CFD mesh to post processing.

"We've been able to demonstrate better return on investment," he said. "By optimising the cluster, we are also building fewer 60-per-cent models and optimising the time it allows us to spend in wind tunnel."

Nevey added that the team is now looking to run more structural and vehicle dynamics modelling on the new cluster because of the LSF software's added management capabilities. And it will also look to use it to add the spare processing power of its computer aided design (CAD) PC workstations when not in use to grow its virtual pool of compute power in future.

Oracle has started shipping the latest version of its database management software, 11g is now available on the Linux platform.

As the successor to 10g, this latest version was announced a month ago, but has not been on actual sale until now.

At the launch, Oracle touted various new features including upgraded testing, compression and security functionality. But the vendor has yet to set a date for its availability on Windows.

"Oracle Database 11g continues the focus on grid computing by enabling grids of low-cost servers and storage," stated Andy Mendelsohn, Oracle senior vice president of database server technologies.

The company said pricing for the upgrade would remain the same as for 10g and has made an evaluation version available. But it has also added four new features it said will cost extra.

The Real Application Testing option allows users to test upgrades and system changes more quickly at a cost of $10,000 (5,001) per processor and $200 (100) per named user.

The Advanced Compression option is available at the same price as the testing option and offers the ability to compress data twice or three times over. Oracle said this option can be used with new partitioning capabilities to deploy database Information Lifecycle Management strategies without application changes, reducing overall storage requirements.

The Total Recall option offers a new query tool designed to make it easier to maintain historical data archives and track data changes for business intelligence, auditing and compliance. This and the last new option both cost $5,000 per processor (2,500) or $100 (50) per user, with the last optional feature being called Active Data Guard.

Active Data Guard allows customers to offload resource intensive operations like queries and backups to standby databases to facilitate disaster recovery and upgrade work more cost effectively.

IT PRO

The ubiquitous nature of new technologies could hurt human rights, according to a study by the United Nation's Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

In the report, "Ethical Implications of Emerging Technologies", UNESCO argues that the effects of the pace and breadth of future technologies must be considered.

"The quickening speed of technological evolution leaves little time to decision-makers, legislators and other major stakeholders to anticipate and absorb changes before being challenged to adapt to the next wave of transformation," wrote Abdul Waheed Khan assistant director-general for communication and information at UNESCO. "Lacking the time for lengthy reflection, the international community is often faced with immediate policy choices that carry serious moral and ethical consequences."

The study looked at the ethical implications of leading new technologies, including semantic web, digital ID management, radio-frequency identification (RFID) and sensors, location-based services, grid computing and other new computing methods.

For example, while biometrics, RFID and sensors can improve efficiency, access to public services and security, they could also be abused to allow extensive surveillance. A code of ethics must be developed to ensure technology works for people, not against them, study authors Mary Rundle and Chris Conley wrote.

"The first infoethics goal, derived from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, establishes the fundamental priority of putting technology in the service of human rights," they wrote in the report.

One Laptop Per Child

Making one of its most public shows of faith in Unix to date, HP has launched a major new release of its HP-UX operating system while reiterating its future commitment to the HP-UX platform despite growing sales of Linux-based servers.

HP-UX 11i v3, which begins shipping today, includes several operational and technology changes, despite having a name that suggests it is merely a point release. The new OS features several operational improvements for use in the data centre, including optimisation and deployment support for virtualisation platforms, improved hot-swap support for hardware components including memory, processors and I/O cards - allowing for direct replacement of faulty components without minimal or often no downtime.

The new version of HP-UX also allows administrators to dynamically move memory among virtual partitions on the fly, simplifying the process of managing and supporting systems running multiple virtual mission-critical instances. Grid computing processes allow virtualised instances to be distributed across disparate servers and data centres, and in the event of a complete or partial data centre failure, instances can be transferred on the fly to another data centre or box with available capacity without interruption to users and running applications.

However, the key change in the OS is the optimisation of the kernel, which can now deliver significant performance boosts to existing applications without having to recompile or make any code changes. Performance gains are claimed to be as high as 30 per cent, depending on the application, using your existing hardware when compared to HP UX 11i v2.

"There really is no need to recompile your applications to experience an improvement in operational performance, the new version is completely code-compatible with anything that currently runs properly on v2" said Nick van der Zweep, HP's director of virtualisation and utility computing.

"Applications will run 30 per cent faster on average, on existing hardware. We have also rewritten the mass storage stack to support 100 million zettabytes of storage on a single system" he added. With one zettabyte equal to one billion terabytes, this larger limit is unlikely to be pushed by a single user any time soon, but nonetheless illustrates the focus HP is placing on the need to manage and be able to address large volumes of both storage and processing power as companies continue to look at distributing data centre resources and improve use of spare capacity, on-demand processing resources and minimise wasted energy.

Other operational changes introduced in v3 include an overhauled patch management system. Servers running v3 can now take and run a snapshot of the system while patches are installed, reducing the number of reboots needed and ensuring servers can keep running in peak periods even while critical patches and updates are applied to the system.

"We think we can get even more performance gains from the current code base through further optimisation and smart thinking about how we use the platform and applications on it" said van der Zweep.

HP is also shipping a revised version of HPjmeter Java monitoring and profiling tool for developers. HPjmeter 3.0 provides live views of application behaviour, root cause analysis and application behaviour modelling to help developers building Java based applications and processes for both HP-UX 11i v3 and older versions.

Network processing vendor Azul Systems has launched the latest generation of its Java appliances. Built using the company's new 48 core Vega 2 processor, the first systems offer up to 192 cores in a relatively small 5U system. A 768 core system with up to 788GB of RAM will be released next year.

Best thought of as a hardware replacement for a Java virtual machine, the first generation of Azul's appliances had an impressive performance, and the Vega 2 processor should offer a better than three times improvement.

Despite introducing a new processor architecture and microcode, Vega 2 systems will not require any new application development. Its performance looks good, and Azul is claiming a record score for the SPECjbb2005 benchmark. Other figures suggest that a large-scale data mining application could have more than a 300 per cent power saving over the equivalent x86 server farm - and in less than half the rack space.

British customers include BT, which is using Azul hardware to improve performance of their existing B2B portal. As Azul's appliances replace software JVMs with a networked pool of processing resources, applications didn't have to be rewritten. Additional Azul systems can be added to the pool as required, to deal with spikes in demand.

"We urgently needed to ensure service levels on a massive scale that we simply could not achieve with traditional servers," said Clive Selley, chief information officer at BT Wholesale. He also expects to see significant cost savings over traditional infrastructure implementations, especially in cooling and power requirements.

Azul has also renewed its partnership with BEA, and will certify the WebLogic platform for use with its appliances. Other supported Java frameworks include Gigaspaces' grid-computing platform. An ISV programme will help developers certify applications and technologies.