the future of computing

The Future of Computing

Jamie Shiers, CERN

The Future of Computing is Already HereThe Future of Computing is Already Here

Its just not very concentrated yetIts just not very concentrated yet

Based on a mis-quote from William Gibson(*), the inventor of the term "cyberspace", this talk makes some bold forecasts concerning the future of computing. Given that the history of computing is littered with predictions that with hindsight look at best amusing, this is clearly either a daring or foolhardy thing to do. Nevertheless, in preparing for LHC computing - which arguably started over 10 years ago - we are required to look many years into the future. After setting the scene by revisiting some of the past's most famous blunders, we will briefly review how we arrived where we are now, before beginning wild and wonderful speculation about the future. Some of it may even come true. Sorry - be true.

* The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet. Author: William Gibson

Overview

Some famously bad predictions from history

Some explanations

Some infamously good predictions for posterity

Summary

Not Covered…

Quantum Computing

Utility Computing

Futility Computing

Autonomic Computing

Genetic Computing

These will be covered atCHEP 2004:http://www.chep2004.org/

Some famously bad predictions

Part A

• “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”, 1943

• Did he really say this?• N.B. IBM was not a

computing companyin 1943…

Thomas J. Watson, Sr. IBMRelay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: Notesfiles $Revision: 1.7.0.10 $; site convex From: [email protected] Newsgroups: net.columbia Subject: Shuttle cameras Message-ID: <34000003@convex>Date: Wed, 19-Feb-86 17:33:00 EST Article-I.D.: convex.34000003 Posted: Wed Feb 19 17:33:00 1986 Date-Received: Fri, 21-Feb-86 05:52:16 EST

On the mercury,gemini and apollo flights the command modules were equiped with cameras to monitor the astronauts as they launched. I know they have on board cameras on the shuttle but are they active during launch? And if not why?I don't recall seeing any inside shuttle shots during any news coverage but I hav'nt seen every launch. I understand that there is a lot of shaking going on but some reasonable image would still be possible. Does anyone have any info on this subject?

Thanks, Rick Poole

**"I think there is a world market for about five computers" ** ** --Remark attributed to Thomas J. Watson ** ** (Chairman of the Board of International Business Machines),1943 **

Computing Timeline

• January 1943: Harvard Mark I– Used by US Navy to calculate ballistics

• December 1943: Colossus (10 machines built)– Used to crack Enigma machines

• 1946: ENIAC completed– Weighed 30 tonnes, contained 18,000 Electronic

Valves, consumed around 25kW• 1947: Invention of the transistor• 1949: “Computers in the future may weigh

no more than 1.5 tons”, Popular Mechanics • 1953: Estimate of 100 computers in the world

• There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home. – Ken Olsen, President, Digital Equipment, 1977

• I'm quoted all the time as saying (early during the PC revolution) that there was no reason to have a computer in the home

• I said, 'I don't think we want our personal lives run by computer.'

• If you steal something from the refrigerator at midnight, you don't want it entered into the computer

Ken Olsen, DEC

Seymour Cray

• “If you were ploughing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?”– Seymour Cray (1925-1996), father of

supercomputing

Larry Ellison, Oracle, 2001/2

We’ve had 3 major generations of computing: mainframes, client-server and Internet Computing

There will be no new architecture for computing for the next 1,000 years

OracleWorld, Sep. 2003, JDS, from CERN, birthplace of Web, said that Grid Computing is “the next big thing”

Ellison said “Grid Computing is the biggest thing in about 40 years”

Thanks, Larry…

Other Failed Predictions…

• Object Databases – predicted to replace Relational Technology– With same growth curve as RDBMS

before…

• IA64 – even Intel doesn’t sound convincing when talking about this anymore…

RD45 Risk Analysis: Issues

• Choice of Technology– ODBMS, ORDBMS, RDBMS, “light-weight”

Persistency, files + meta-data, ... • Choice of Vendor (historically)

– #1 Objectivity, #2 Versant• Size of market

– Did not take off as anticipated; – unlikely to grow significantly in short-medium

term




* The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.Author: William Gibson

Computing for the LHC

• Started seriously at CHEP’92, Annecy– “OO” had a dedicated track– Numerous talks looking forward to needs of

LHC and SSC– “Databases for High Energy Physics” panel

Should we buy or build systems for our calibration and book-keeping needs?

Will database technology advance sufficiently in the next 8 – 10 years to provide byte-level access to petabytes of SSC/LHC data?

– Web emerged as key conference theme• Convergence of technologies…

• The term “Disruptive technology” coined by Clayton M. Christensen – A new, lower performance, but less expensive

product – Gains foothold in low-end part of market, gradually

moves up– Examples: music downloads vs CDs; open source

vs proprietary; e-commerce vs shops …• Also (mis)used to mean “technology that

changes way you think / work”• Classic examples: The Web; Linux• Future example: The Grid?

From the Web to the Grid16 July 2004 -- Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web … was dubbed Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire (KBE) by Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II The rank of Knight Commander is the second most senior rank of the Order of the British Empire...

"I am humbled by this great honour," stated Sir Timothy

World Wide Web Inventor Receives One Million Euros Prize from Finnish Technology Award Foundation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_M._Christensen

• In 1969, Ken Thompson wrote a small time-sharing system on a cast-off PDP-7– (reaction against “Multics” project)

• From 1972 Unix Programmers’ Manual: “The number of Unix installations has

grown to 10, with more expected.”• In 1973, Dennis Ritchie and Thompson

rewrote the Unix kernel in C

Before Multics there was chaos…and afterwards too…

The Birth of Unix

From: [email protected] (Linus Benedict Torvalds) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Gcc-1.40 and a posix-question Date: 3 Jul 91 10:00:50 GMT Hello netlanders, Due to a project I'm working on (in minix), I'm interested in the posix standard definition. Could somebody please point me to a (preferably) machine-readable format of the latest posix rules? Ftp-sites would be nice.

The IBM PC

• On August 12, 1981, IBM released their new computer, the IBM PC

• In July of 1980, IBM representatives met with Microsoft's Bill Gates to talk about an operating system for the PC

• In January 1983, Time Magazine named the PC “Man of the Year”– i.e. just over 1 year from the launch

OK – enough of the past…

(Very) Conservative Predictions

Part 2

Predictions from 2000

• In 2010, everything worth more than a few $ will know that its yours…

• A speck of dust on each fingernail will communicate with your computer

• Your house, office and car will be continuously aware of your presence

• Tyres will communicate with the on-board computer if pressure is low, your milk carton will signal if the contents are off… (sorry Ken…)

• In 2020, sensors will monitor all major bodily systems, providing early warning of diseases…

Summer Student Lectures 2002: http://cern.ch/ssl-computing/default.htm

http://cern.ch/ssl-computing/default.htm

Smart Dust / RFID tags / Motes

• OK, RFID tags are more like “smart corn-flakes”

• But they are already close to ubiquitous– Warehouse tracking, luggage tracking

(IATA project)• Cost negligible compared to anything

worth buying• The drive to smaller / cheaper inevitable

Database Predictions

• IBM “Global Technology Outlook”– zettabytes by 2010– 1,000,000 PB

• VLDB: yottabytes by 2020– 1,000,000,000 PB

Etymology1 – PC Hariharan

• Kilo Greek khilioi = 1000 • Mega megas = great, e.g., Alexandros Megas• Giga gigas = giant • Tera teras = monster, e.g. “Monster byte” • Peta pente = five, fifth prefix, peNta - N = peta• Exa hex = six, sixth prefix, Hexa - H = exa

Remember, in standard French,the initial H is silent, so they would pronounce Hexa as Exa. It is far easier to call it Exa for everyone's sake, right?

• Zetta almost homonymic with Greek Zeta, but the last letter of the Latin alphabet

• Yotta almost homonymic with Greek iota, but the penultimate letter of the Latin alphabet

1 Corrected by Ioannis Papadopoulos (Greek)

How much data is there?

• LHC Data Volumes: 10PB in 2008?

• Estimates of new data / year: 5EB in 2002

• All words ever spoken by humans: 5EB

The Personal Petabyte / The Enterprise Exabyte

The Challenge:• Can we store everything and keep it for ever?

LHC data (simplified)

Per experiment:• 40 million collisions per second

• After filtering, 100 collisions of interest / sec

• A Megabyte of digitised information for each collision = recording rate of 0.1 Gigabytes/sec

• 1 billion collisions recorded = 1 Petabyte/year

CMS LHCb ATLAS ALICE

1 Megabyte (1MB)A digital photo

1 Gigabyte (1GB) = 1000MB

A DVD movie

1 Terabyte (1TB)= 1000GB

World annual book production

1 Petabyte (1PB)= 1000TB

10% of the annual production by LHC

experiments

1 Exabyte (1EB)= 1000 PB

World annual information production Total: ~10.000.000.000.000.000 bytes/year= 1% of

Concorde(15 Km)

Balloon(30 Km)

CD stack with1 year LHC data!(~ 20 Km – 20M CDs)

Monte Bianco(4.8 km)

How Much Information?

• Study at Berkeley based on:– 4 storage media (+5EB)

• Print, film, magnetic, optical– 4 information flows (+18EB)

• Telephone, radio and TV, and the Internet• Phone calls contained 17.3EB of new data(!)

• Most recent study (2003) based on 2002– 92% data on magnetic media, 7% film

• Growth +30% / year 1999 – 2002

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/

Predictions for storage capacity

• 1992 – 1TB = Mass Storage Threshold• 2004 – 1TB = “smallest unit of disk”• 2020 – 1PB will cost $1K

The Personal Petabyte will be reality

• But how do you fill it?– 1 book / day for 80 years: 30GB– 100 pix / day for 80 years: 30TB– Mp3 24 x 365 x 80: 42TB– Video (DVD quality): 1PB = ~50 years

Predictions from 1945

• Vannevar Bush described a device called a ‘memex’ in “As we may think”– A memex is a device in which an individual

stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

• He influenced both Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson – & in turn (Sir) TimBLht

tp://

ww

w.c

si.u

otta

wa.

ca/~

dduc

hier

/mis

c/vb

ush/

awm

t.htm

l

Ted Nelson Proposal

• “Some 6 year old is going to grow up to be President. Why not record absolutely everything of her / his life?”

• Is this the Vannevar Bush vision?

– Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, “memex” will do...

– In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.

"The Hypertext," an article by Nelson, appeared as part of the Proceedings of the World Documentation Federation, 1965. However, it is not until Dream Machines that discussion of theconcept is published on a wider scale.

Here Nelson thoroughly divulges the work of his cybernetic predecessors (as well as pugnacious views regarding governmental bureaucracy and the computer industry). He expands the work of earlier visionaries by introducing Xanadu, his dream, “to give you a screen in your home from which you can see into the world's hypertext libraries.”

MyLifeBits: The guinea pig• Gordon Bell is digitizing his life!• Has now scanned virtually all:

– Books written (and read when possible)– Personal documents (correspondence, memos, bills, legal…) – Photos– Posters, paintings, photo of things (artifacts, …medals, plaques)– Home movies and videos– CD collection– And, of course, all PC files

• Now recording: phone, radio, TV (movies), web pages… conversations

• Paperless throughout 2002. 12” scanned, 12’ discarded.• Only 30 GB!!! Excluding digital videos• Video is 2+ TB and growing fastS

lide

from

Jim

Gra

y - h

ttp://

rese

arch

.mic

roso

ft.co

m/~

Gra

y/

http://research.microsoft.com/~Gray/

MyLifeBitsJim Gemmell & Gordon Bell

SDForum Distinguished Speaker SeriesFebruary 19, 2004

gbell wag: 67 yr, 25Kday lifea Personal Petabyte

0.001

0.01

0.1

1.

10.

100.

1000.

TB

Msgs webpages

Tifs Books jpegs 1KBpssound

music Videos

Lifetime Storage1PB

Slid

e fro

m J

im G

ray

- http

://re

sear

ch.m

icro

soft.

com

/~G

ray/


Evolution of Computing

• From the earliest days, the growth of computing has been from new applications

If we were still doing Early Warning Systems, there would not be (multiple) computers in every home

Instead of 5 computers on the planet, we (will) have 5 per person on the planet (6 x 109)

Or probably many many more…

The Future & Grid Computing

Part D

Outline

• Enterprise Computing

• Personal Computing

The Grid vs the Web

• Although its trendy to compare Grid to Web, there are many similarities– Many of us were doing much of this before– But in non-standard / incompatible ways

• “Nobody” was on the Internet before the Web explosion

• “Nobody” is using Grid now– (see next slide)

• If you’re not on the Web now you’re Nobody• Get the picture?Get the picture?

What Will Make the Grid Successful == Ubiquitous

What Is Ubiquity?

• used a billion times per day– Browse: Mosaic, Navigator, Explorer– Portal: AOL, MSN,…– Email: …– Chat: IRC…– Instant message: ICQ– Search: AltaVista, Yahoo!, Google,…– Share: Napster, Gnutella,….– Compute: SETI,…

Slid

e fro

m J

im G

ray

– O

pen

Issu

es in

Grid

Com

putin

g

Will the Grid work?

• The question is irrelevant

• But your going to ask it anyway…

• The answer is:

• What works will be called the Grid

Enterprise Grids

The Oracle vision:• Many companies have dedicated systems per

department• Typically sized for peak load• Typically underused <20% • Move away from ‘big iron’

– In this case large SMPs• Move towards blades

– Typically dual processor Intel boxes• And Oracle software…

– “Oracle (10g) resonates with the Grid”• Oracle9i offers scalability, information sharing, and VLDB

features for CERN LHC Computing Gridhttp://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oracle9i/grid_computing/index.html

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/oracle9i/grid_computing/index.html

What is the ‘killer’ app for Grid?

• If there’s all this ‘free’ CPU out there…• Obvious application is Games• e.g. “Weapons of Mass Destruction”• A Game for Two Players…• But more seriously, why not use the Grid

to address some of the most serious problems that faces the human race…

• “Diseases of Mass Destruction”

Grid.org

• Used in projects such as cancer, anthrax and smallpox research

Public Utility Computing• Class example – SETI@HOME

– Based on “Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing” – BOINC

– “The majority of the world's computing power is no longer in supercomputer centers and institutional machine rooms. Instead, it is now distributed in the hundreds of millions of personal computers all over the world. In a few more years, other consumer devices like game consoles and television set-top boxes may comprise a large fraction of total computing power.”

Scientific Grids

• Will be covered in great detail at this school…

• Also CERN summer student lectures:– http://agenda.cern.ch/tools/SSLPdisplay.ph

p?stdate=2004-07-05&nbweeks=7– Grid:

• Francois Grey (CERN openlab)• Markus Schulz (LCG / EGEE)

http://agenda.cern.ch/tools/SSLPdisplay.php?stdate=2004-07-05&nbweeks=7

http://agenda.cern.ch/tools/SSLPdisplay.php?stdate=2004-07-05&nbweeks=7

Personal Computing in 2020

When LHC stops running(Data will still be being analyzed)

Computing in 2020

Trends, such as increases in processor power, storage capacity, wireless coverage – any technology – will make today’s environment look neolithic– 100 x evolution per decade; 10,000 x by 2020!

Convergence (PDAs, phones, music & video players, cameras, e-books, …) will seem about as “cool” as Digital watches– Pretty much every device is already a (video)

camera… Human / machine interface will be radically

different– Computer vision, speech, …

“By 2015, wearables will have virtually eliminated desktop, laptop, and handheld solutions altogether, leaving only installed computers – i.e. computers and monitors built into the walls of your home – and wearables.”

Convergence Devices

• Introducing the petfrog, the “Integrated Fusion Device” of the future. The petfrog is the first wireless communication and computing concept with a totally integrated hardware, software, and content user-interface. It is a personal computer, PDA, Digital Media player, camera, karaoke machine, and more.

“Augmented” Reality

• Plato suggested that writing would“create forgetfulness” and the“… show of wisdom without the reality”

• Similar arguments were made more recently about calculators…

• Will we be shy of using computers to “aid our memory” (Bush) and benefit from the “intellect of … the world” (Wells) ?

• No more so than we are shy of using a household appliance today..

Overview/Augmented Reality•Augmented-reality (AR) systems add computer-generated information to a user's sensory perceptions. Whereas virtual reality aims to replace the real world, augmented reality supplements it. •Most research focuses on "see-through" devices, usually worn on the head, that overlay graphics and text on the user's view of the world. •Recent technological improvements may soon lead to the introduction of AR systems for surgeons, repair people, soldiers, tourists and computer gamers. Eventually the systems may become commonplace.

Surviving the Information Avalanche

Historical trends imply that in 20 years:1. we can store everything in cyberspace.

The personal petabyte.2. computers will have natural interfaces

speech recognition/synthesis, vision, object recognition beyond OCR

Implications1. The information avalanche will only

get worse. 2. The user interface will change:

less typing, more writing, talking, gesturing,more seeing and hearing

3. Organizing, summarizing, prioritizinginformation is a key technology.

We are here

Yotta

Zetta

Exa

Peta

Tera

Giga

Mega

Kilo

Slid

e fro

m J

im G

ray

- http

://re

sear

ch.m

icro

soft.

com

/~G

ray/


Computers• Computers are useless – they can only

give you answers– Pablo Picasso

• Computers should be treated with the contempt that they deserve

What has changed in 20 years?

• In 1984, I worked on the VAXes– On which Oracle ran…

• In 2004, worked on CMS DC04– And preparing for DC05…




* The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.Author: William Gibson

If you want to know more… http://cern.ch/jamie/

Post Script

• “Predicting is always very difficult. Especially predicting the future.”– Niels Bohr

• All predictions (so far) regarding LHC computing have been pessimistic– The so-called “PASTA” reports

• Advances in processors, storage, networks etc.

• Software engineering is an oxymoron• We can record everything – and keep it

for ever• Sky Net is not an impossibility…

the future of computing

Documents

cernthe future of computing

computing timelinejanuary

computing company

history of computing

lhc computing

board cameras

good predictions

version b