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"There can be only One"

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AS A HUMAN MADE MONSTER ENGULFS THE PACIFIC OCEAN...

So where is the world’s biggest landfill? And we are talking really big here. In the US? China, maybe? Well it covers an area at least a quarter of a million square miles... nearly three times the size of the UK. Any ideas? OK, well it was a trick question really – it’s actually a slick of human debris in the sea, floating around in the Pacific starting from around 500 miles off the west coast of the US. It’s caused by rubbish that gets caught up by spiraling underwater ocean currents, called a gyre, which draw it in from all around and trap it into a floating layer of filth near the surface of the ocean. Named by a Star Trek fan no doubt, the phenomenon has not been named ‘Garbage Gyre’, but given the more frightening tag of ‘Trash Vortex’.
Just how big it is a matter of hot debate. While many organisations cite it as being around the size of Texas, Charles Moore, the American oceanographer credited with first discovering it, has recently been quoted as claiming that it’s now twice the size as continental United States, extending nearly all the way to Japan. Either way, its staggeringly big. (Sadly as it's largely translucent, it’s not visible by satellite so no good rushing to download Google earth).
Whilst some of the junk is stuff dumped by boats of one sort or another or off oil platforms, 80% of it originates from the land. It’s caused by wind and rain taking trash from the land (and indeed landfills) into rivers, people dumping along the coasts, poor sewage treatment and waste from industry.
Just how many millions of tons a year the Konsumer Kings of Krap discard into their vortex may be unknown, but with Californians alone using 19 billion plastic bags a year, there’s no shortage of waste to go round. In fact around 90% of human pollution in the sea is plastic and this is far from fantastic news for sea-dwelling organisms and the ocean ecosystems. Made from a process using that ol’ war-causing fossil fuel, oil, plastic is toxic to marine life and indestructible. While most plastics only officially take up to hundreds of years to ‘degrade’, the truth is they never actually chemically break down and return to the ecosystem at all - they just disintegrate into ever smaller pieces, making a deadly plastic dust.
And it doesn’t always have to wait so long to be dust; billions of tiny plastic pellets, called nurdles - the raw materials for the plastic industry - are lost or spilled every year, many ending up in the sea. These act like chemical sponges, soaking up other toxic man-made chemicals, all artificial pollutants (for toxicity think DDT pesticide etc), concentrating them up to a million times more than in normal sea water.
Trawls of the Pacific vortex have revealed that for every pound of proto-plankton, the foundation of the marine ecosystem, in a given volume of water, there are six pounds of plastic waste.
Plastic is therefore a catastrophic threat to the world’s seas as stuff chucked away anytime in the last fifty years is still out there degrading somewhere. Waste caught up in the trash vortex, the gyre currents keeping it suspended in a plastic ‘soup’ near to the surface, is only the thin end of the widget. Around 70% of marine plastic waste sinks straight to the sea floor where it can slowly choke plant life and the animals that feed on it, unseen.
According to the UN Environment Programme, plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds every year, with countless fish and more than 100,000 whales, seals and turtles. Greenpeace have identified at least 267 separate species known to have suffered from entanglement or ingestion of marine debris. And before we get too cocky about how green and caring Europe is compared to their uncouth American cousins... they may not have vortices, but the North Sea is one of the most polluted seas in the world and the Mediterranean is the most plastic-polluted sea by density on the planet.
Whether serious attempts to do anything about our constant adding to an already critical problem will really materialise before climate change or economic collapse give us a helping hand is anyone’s guess (you can guess what we’d guess) – and so much damage has already been done. With respected journal ‘Science’ projecting that Earth’s stocks of fish and seafood will collapse by 2048 if trends in overfishing and pollution continue, it looks like we’re all gonna be sea sick soon.
More Here

http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news6201.htm

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Jitters Over Virtualization


Margaret Lewis, director of com-
mercial solutions and software
strategy at AMD


The easy stuff is already done in enterprise virtualization. What comes next is much more complex.
Virtualization has been proved to boost utilization of individual servers, particularly those powered by multicore processors. It allows multiple operating systems and applications to run on each core, which in turn means fewer machines, lower power consumption in a data center and less real estate.
The next phase of virtualization is aimed at enterprise management, and it's one that has never been fully tested. Forbes.com caught up with Margaret Lewis, director of commercial solutions and software strategy at Advanced Micro Devices, to talk about the future of virtualization.
Forbes.com: Is virtualization the best solution for multicore machines?
Lewis: One of the reasons everyone is moving to multicore is that it's a way to provide better performance from a processor without always having to increase the heat envelope. With today's high energy costs and exploding computer infrastructures, having servers that run too hot is not acceptable.
More cores don't generate as much heat and they give better performance than just one core. But software needs to be able to use all those cores. With virtualization, you stack multiple operating systems on one computer. That creates a very thread-rich environment, so virtualization can be used to take advantage of those cores.
Forbes.com: But that threading doesn't scale, right? You can't go from 20 cores to 80 cores with most applications without totally rewriting them.
Lewis: That's correct, but if you were using virtualization you could go from running 20 virtual machines to 60 virtual machines, each with 60 different OSs [operating systems] and 60 different applications to running 100 virtual machines on a server. You could scale by putting more virtual machines on the server.
But not everyone wants to do that. What happens if that machine goes down and takes all those virtual machines down with it? That's not the right answer, but virtualization does help solve this multicore problem.
Another way to help solve it is to run multiple applications on a server, which doesn't have to be with virtualization. With a database, servers are now powerful enough to run three or four on a single server. You also can run your database engine and your analysis engine on the same server and they both use different resources. They're both multithreaded applications, which helps to use some of those threads.
The Holy Grail is how to make software multithreaded. The better-threaded the software, the better use it makes of a multicore environment. That is a tougher problem.
Forbes.com: Hasn't that been a recurring nightmare for decades?
Lewis: It's been a problem from the mainframe days. And it isn't an easy problem to solve because when you take a program and try to make it parallel, it depends on the task and how easy it is to parallelize. You can take tasks that are embarrassingly parallel, such as databases and rendering of film for animation. Here's where discrete different processes can be sent out, and they're not closely related to other processes. Those are easy.
But with applications that aren't easy, you have to decide which parts of those applications have a potential to be parallelized. There are some tasks where it is hard to do. It takes a woman nine months to have a baby, but you can't have nine women pregnant for one month and have a baby. That's a task that cannot be parallelized. You can get into some software routines where they cannot be broken down and parallelized.
Forbes.com: Isn't this a throwback to time-sharing--only instead of using a single machine or multiple machines, now you're doing it with multiple cores?
Lewis: Yes. So what do you do if you're a processor vendor and it's the norm to throw out more cores? You have to think of different ways to use those cores. We can put different metrics in the processors and work on run-times where those environments run many different applications or applets at one time. By nature, those environments are multithreaded. We can put better hardware hooks in place so the run-times that control those environments can do a better job of scheduling tasks simultaneously.
Forbes.com: How does that fit in with the stated goal of virtualization software providers to move everything up a notch, so if there is a hot spot in one server cabinet the load can be spread among multiple machines?
Lewis: If all of your servers are virtualized and all of your tasks are running in virtual machines, a virtual machine is, by nature, independent of the hardware. You could open it up and move it. If I have a server being hit really hard and it's not giving me the response time I want, if it's virtualized I could pick up those virtual machines and move them to other servers. This is the whole idea of multithreaded environments and how you manage them.
As a hardware vendor, we have to provide the necessary hardware information so that management can happen. There are things we do for virtualization hypervisors so they can understand what kind of hardware is under these virtual machines so when you move the virtual machines around the hardware can readily support it.
If you have an older server that is only 32-bit and a new one that is 64-bit, you can't necessarily pick up your virtual machine from a 64-bit server and run it on the 32-bit server. We provide information so hypervisors can understand how virtual machines can be moved around. We also provide metrics so you can decide which server has more resources available.
Forbes.com: What's the difference between the hypervisor and the virtual machine?
Lewis: The hypervisor creates a virtual machine. It's the host operating system that communicates directly with the hardware. It sets up these virtual machine environments. Then it schedules how each of these things run. The virtual machine manager can manage all the servers in your computer room, whether they're virtual servers or real servers. VMware has management software that allows you to take a holistic view of all the virtual machines you have running in your data center. You can run it as a console.
Forbes.com: Others are working on similar things, as well. Microsoft has a version, right?
Lewis: Yes. It's how you manage what is on your platform. The hypervisor lives on a particular server and helps you divide up and manage that server. These upper-level management tools look at all the machines you have and help you manage them more holistically. Today, when you run a server in a data center, there's a piece of system software in it that helps you keep track of that server. There's also data center management software. There's platform-level management and the bigger piece.
Forbes.com: What hooks have to be built into those machines?
Lewis: There are management standards that have been put in place by groups such as the DMTF [Distributed Management Task Force], which is creating standard ways for management software to talk to hardware. If everyone created their own, we wouldn't have a cooperative environment. Their standards affect the format used for how hot your processor is running. They also describe from a software level what it looks like so you can pick it up. We've got a set of standards for regular server management, called SMASH [Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware].
On the virtualization side, there has been some standardization for how these virtual machines look and report so that management software can understand it's a virtual machine and collect information about it. Some of this was proprietary at first, but a lot of the vendors have worked on that so it is fairly standardized. Big management platforms like HP's OpenView or CA's management have to be able to decide how they work with virtual machines.
Forbes.com: How long will it take before this becomes ubiquitous in data centers?
Lewis: VMware brought out its first software for x86 machines in 1999, and they were one of about 10 software vendors that demonstrated at the AMD Opteron launch in 2003. Even in 2003, when they were doing demonstrations, virtualization was still a niche, interesting technology but not something people considered mainstream.
The cut-over in interest started with multicore processors for x86 in 2005, so you could run multiple applications and [operating systems] without losing application response time. And in 2005 and 2006, we had more and more customers having trouble bringing extra power into their data centers. People were putting in racks and racks of servers and they were running 10% to 15% utilization. It was still drawing 100% power even though they were [only] 15% utilized.
Forbes.com: Let's fast forward to the end of this year and 2009. What happens next?
Lewis: We've seen that virtualization has become a technology well accepted in the enterprise. If enterprises aren't currently running it, they're seriously considering it. When you get Microsoft's Hyper-V in September, you'll have an everyman's virtualization technology that reaches out to a wider group of people.
Just because they release it doesn't mean you'll see a huge adoption, but a lot of people that were Windows-only shops can explore whether virtualization helps them consolidate resources, save energy or just be more flexible. Microsoft coming into the market provides another inflection point. Most analysts believe the pace of adoption is going to be rapid. By the end of 2010, 50% of enterprise data centers may be virtualized.
Forbes.com: Does that require new hardware?
Lewis: Usually it does, because the server you want to virtualize is more robust than the server you were using to run one app. We see a lot of people buying four-socket servers, or two-socket servers with a much bigger memory footprint. You'll see people going to virtualization as they do hardware refreshes. The economics are different, too. If I can buy one four-socket server and retire 15 or 20 two-socket servers from my data center because the new server can absorb their workload, that's a compelling return-on-investment message.
Forbes.com: Then does the point of failure move from hardware to software?
Lewis: Yes. The thing in our favor is that the hypervisor technology is well understood. A hypervisor's main job is to interface with the hardware and divide the hardware up into virtual machines that interface with the hardware. It doesn't have to think about applications running on top of it. It's complex, but its tasks are well defined. VMware pulled out all the code you don't need and the only thing left is the code you need to do the hypervisor.
The thinner it is, the more well-defined the task and the more secure you can make it. It doesn't mean having to run every legacy application. By breaking the environment into host and guest operating systems, the hypervisor can be more secure. If one of the virtual machines goes down, the other virtual machines stay up. Your point of failure is the hypervisor on that machine.
The people making the hypervisors have a huge responsibility, and a lot of attention will be on how secure and robust that code [is]. You have a lot riding on it.


http://www.forbes.com/technology/200...s_0825amd.html

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Justin Rattner, Intel’s CTO, showed off the company’s up-and-coming technology

Intel on Thursday showed off its technology for transmitting power wirelessly, a capability that could one day help eliminate the wire clutter behind desks and other areas of the home or office.
Wireless power was one of several technologies Justin Rattner, CTO for Intel, highlighted at the last keynote of the chipmaker’s Developer Forum in San Francisco. Rattner also rolled out Intel’s work in robotics and “programmable matter,” which is the ability to manipulate the shape, size, and even color of an object.
Alanson Sample, a University of Washington intern at Intel’s research facility in Seattle, demonstrated the ability to transmit 60 watts of power a distance of two or three feet, using two round metal coils, one as a transmitter, the other a receiver. The latter had a light bulb on the top that remained lit as Sample, a graduate student in electrical engineering, moved the coil around.
The technology builds on the work of Marin Soljacic, a physicist at MIT. Intel and MIT researchers are leveraging a phenomenon know as “resonant induction” in transmitting power.
Intel’s system, called a “wireless resonant energy link,” relies on strongly coupled resonators, which operate on a principle similar to how a singer can shatter glass with her voice. The receiving resonator absorbs power at its natural frequency much like a glass absorbs sound energy at its natural frequency.
If the technology finds its way into our daily lives, it could one day make it possible to recharge or operate a laptop or any other device simply by placing it on a desk or table with a wireless power device built in. If these devices proliferate, then we may no longer need a notebook battery, for example, a capacitor could be used instead to store power temporarily, Rattner said.
No timetable was given for when the technology could find its way to the market. Intel is working on miniaturizing the power-receiving antenna to a size where it could fit in the base of a notebook.
Rattner’s keynote took a look at the next 40 years of technology in honor of Intel’s 40th anniversary. Intel’s work on robotics was one area covered.
Joshua Smith, principal engineer at Intel’s research facility in Seattle and the leader of the wireless power project, showed a robotic arm that could sense an apple placed in front of its claw, grasp the object, and then drop it into someone’s outstretched hand. Among the key innovations is the sensor used in the robot. Rather than a camera, the sensor uses an electric field to identify objects, similar to how some fish identify their surroundings.
Smith, who also heads Intel’s wireless power project, said the advanced sensor could one day make it possible to introduce the robots used on the factory floor into “a human environment.”
As computers become smarter and robots more sophisticated, security becomes an issue. Rattner claimed that at the current pace in which computers are becoming more powerful, they could one day become smarter than people. If that was to happen, then how do you ensure control?
During a meeting with the media following the keynote, Rattner did not address the issue directly. However, he said Intel is working on developing computer systems that can dynamically lock code or information selectively, so the rest of the system can remain open to communication with other devices or computers. “The platform can close locally to contain certain information securely,” Rattner said. The idea is to enable an otherwise open system “to close when needed.” Such technology could be introduced over the next four to five years.
Rattner also highlighted during his keynote Intel’s work in programmable matter. Company researchers are investigating how million of tiny micro-robots, called catoms, can be used to build shape-shifting materials.
Although the work is listed as exploratory research, Jason Campbell, a senior staff research scientist brought on stage to discuss the project, said steady progress is being made.
To build functional catoms, Intel is using novel techniques that borrow from processes now used to make silicon chips. Intel eventually wants to bring all the necessary computational and mechanical components of a catom into one package less than a millimeter across.
If such research is successful, then people could one day have a computer that fits comfortably into a pocket, but can also be stretched and shaped into a full-size traditional notebook. The same manipulation, theoretically, could be done with a mobile phone or other gadget




http://www.informationweek.com/news/...yText=&isPrev=

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Microsoft is incubating a componentized non-Windows operating system known as Midori, which is being architected from the ground up to tackle challenges that Redmond has determined cannot be met by simply evolving its existing technology.
SD Times has viewed internal Microsoft documents that outline Midori’s proposed design, which is Internet-centric and predicated on the prevalence of connected systems.
Midori is an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity operating system, the tools and libraries of which are completely managed code. Midori is designed to run directly on native hardware (x86, x64 and ARM), be hosted on the Windows Hyper-V hypervisor, or even be hosted by a Windows process.
According to published reports, Eric Rudder, senior vice president for technical strategy at Microsoft and an alumnus of Bill Gates’ technical staff, is heading up the effort. Rudder served as senior vice president of Microsoft’s Servers and Tools group until 2005. A Microsoft spokesperson refused comment.
“That sounds possible—I’ve heard rumors to the effect that he [Rudder] had an OS project in place,” said Rob Helm, director of research at Directions on Microsoft. He noted that it is quite possible that the project is just exploratory, but conceivably a step above what Microsoft Research does.
One of Microsoft’s goals is to provide options for Midori applications to co-exist with and interoperate with existing Windows applications, as well as to provide a migration path.
Building Midori from the ground up to be connected underscores how much computing has changed since Microsoft’s engineers first designed Windows; there was no Internet as we understand it today, the PC was the user’s sole device and concurrency was a research topic.
Today, users move across multiple devices, consume and share resources remotely, and the applications that they use are a composite of local and remote components and services. To that end, Midori will focus on concurrency, both for distributed applications and local ones.
According to the documentation, Midori will be built with an asynchronous-only architecture that is built for task concurrency and parallel use of local and distributed resources, with a distributed component-based and data-driven application model, and dynamic management of power and other resources.
Midori’s design treats concurrency as a core principle, beyond what even the Microsoft Robotics Group is trying to accomplish, said Tandy Trower, general manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group.
The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places.
In order to efficiently distribute applications across nodes, Midori will introduce a higher-level application model that abstracts the details of physical machines and processors. The model will be consistent for both the distributed and local concurrency layers, and it is internally known as Asynchronous Promise Architecture.
Midori will have provisions for distributed concurrency—or cloud computing—where application components exist in data centers. Doing so will require work in three areas: execution techniques, a platform stack and a programming model that can tolerate cancellation, intermittent connectivity and latency.
In that scenario, operating system services, such as storage, would either be provided to the applications by the OS or be discovered across a trusted distributed environment.
Likewise for local concurrency, Midori will have a programming model, a platform stack and execution techniques that are intended to help developers write applications that can safely and efficiently use a greater number of hardware threads than is currently feasible. Elements in local parallelism interact through shared memory, which is the huge difference with distributed applications, said Microsoft distinguished engineer John Manferdelli, in a separate interview.
“Mere mortal developers need a programming model/application model that lets them distribute processing to massively parallel devices without having to become experts,” explained Forrester Research senior analyst Jeffrey Hammond in an e-mail. “Even with the quad-core Intel chips today, you have to have specialist teams to take full advantage of them,” he added.
These design goals affect aspects of the system that include its application model, scheduling and storage. Indeed, big changes are in store for Microsoft developers.
Programming with Midori
The Midori programming model will tackle state management, which Microsoft admits in its documentation is a challenge in Windows, by migrating APIs, applications and developers to a constrained model.
Other objectives are eliminating dynamic loading and in-process extensions; developing a failure model based on reliable transactions, so the system understands exactly which processes are impacted by a cascading failure and how to restart the computation; and having a standard way of dealing with latency, asynchronous behavior and cancellation, throughout the stack.
Forrester’s Hammond said that doing away with dynamic loading and in-process extensions was worrisome. “I’m going to assume that eliminating dynamic loading doesn’t prevent dynamic language execution,” in virtualized interpreters. Microsoft, he added, must “be clear that restricting dynamism at the OS level will not impact dynamism at the programming level.”
The Midori programming model will be particularly useful for service-oriented architectures, by allowing for the decomposition of applications into services that can be partitioned across tiers.
Hammond said that having SOA go into the runtime makes sense, as that would remove a certain amount of middleware complexity. “Why shouldn’t the average developer begin to think in terms of lightweight, asynchronous services?” he asked. “After all, that’s the migration path we’re seeing on the Web.”
In a possible link to Microsoft’s Oslo composite application initiative, the programming model will have a dependence on metadata, with the aim of allowing the system to more reliably manage applications.
“This allows existing development tools to be easily repurposed while a lot of the complexity is hidden from the developer that is using it. We essentially see declarative programming replacing imperative programming at the OS level,” said Hammond. He noted that by having Oslo in place first, Microsoft would have an easier time when it begins the migration from today’s Windows applications to Midori or hybrid applications.
“I wonder if [Microsoft] concluded this sort of 10-year sea change was needed before kicking Oslo into high gear?” asked Hammond.
The Midori documents indicate that the proposed OS would have a non-blocking object-oriented framework API. This would have strong notions of immutability—in the sense of objects that cannot be modified once created—and strive to foster application correctness through deep verifiability by using .NET programming languages.
At the presentation layer, Microsoft is making a clean break from the existing Windows GUI model, where applications must update their display on one and only one thread at a time, and the associated problems that affect OS stability and make it more difficult to write multithreaded applications.
The Midori documents indicate that the company has not decided what user interface abstractions are appropriate when applications cut across boundaries, or how to combine the best qualities of rich client applications and Web applications.
“A lot of these problems are being solved, at least partially, by the ideas of store-and-forward and message synchronization,” Hammond noted. “Google Gears, Adobe AIR, even the mobile OSes with things like SMS can handle occasional connectivity. Why shouldn’t this be built into core OS communication protocols, especially if they are asynchronous by default?” he asked.
Midori’s applications would be created using .NET languages that will be compiled to native code using the Bartok compiler and runtime system, which is presently a Microsoft Search project. The Bartok compiler can typecheck machine code programs for programming errors thanks to its use of an intermediate typed language, according to the company.
Microsoft’s objective is to force developers to create applications that are correct by construction, and it has repeatedly pledged to shore up the overall security of the operating system. The use of .NET languages in Midori will create a new, safer programming model with higher-level reasoning, predicted Larry O’Brien, an independent analyst and consultant who writes the Windows & .NET Watch column for SD Times.
Another advantage of using .NET languages is retargeting, O’Brien said. “A very smart compiler or runtime could move a calculation onto a GPU or distribute it across cores,” he explained.
However, O’Brien observed that some of the onus for making this work might end up on developers. The Midori documents note, somewhat ambiguously, that applications were expected to “contain sufficient latent parallelism.” Reacting to that, O’Brien asked, “In a world where Moore’s Law doesn’t imply the speeding of individual components, where does this expectation come from and who holds it?”
The Midori design will also incorporate a type-safe abstraction set based upon a .NET language, say the documents, in order to provide a system binary interface that will eliminate the current break between the operating system and virtual machine runtime.
The abstraction set will eliminate an entire class of programming errors that stem from bad pointer arithmetic, enable the changing of the boundaries between privileged and unprivileged code, and provide for universal application analysis and instrumentation, Microsoft reasons.
The use of an abstraction set, said Hammond, “reflects the reality of programming today: The vast majority of professional developers, especially those in IT and out on the Web, don’t deal with low level constructs. Unless you’re a game developer, ISV or systems programmer, there really isn’t the need to do pointer math.”
Hammond believes that it would be advantageous for Microsoft to create a programming model that “mere mortals” could actually understand, akin to the early days of Win32 when Visual Basic was born.
Even though memory safety and type safety are deeply integrated into Midori’s design, Microsoft has yet to determine just how low to permit the Bartok runtime to delve into the kernel, or alternatively, whether it will allow some unmanaged processes to rely on Midori’s hardware address spaces.
The company also acknowledges that thread safety remains elusive, and it is investigating transactional memory as a proposed solution. O’Brien noted that there is significant indecision in the program model. “On the one hand, the phrase ‘strong notions of immutability’ has serious implications if meant formally, but elsewhere we see ‘thread-safety remains elusive’ and a laundry list of things that might contribute to a solution,” he said.
Backwards compatibility with legacy applications and hardware has also been considered; several Midori components already run on Windows as well.
The fundamentals
Unlike Windows, Microsoft intends for Midori to be componentized from the beginning to achieve performance and security benefits. It will have strong isolation boundaries and enforced contracts between components, to ensure that servicing one component will not cause others to fail, while keeping overhead minimal.
At its lowest level, Midori has two separate kernel layers: a microkernel comprised of unmanaged code that controls hardware and environment abstracts, and higher-level managed kernel services that provide the full set of operating system functionality.
The OS will have a single scheduling framework for all device types, known internally as the Resource Management Infrastructure (RMI). RMI will have provisions for resource accounting, quotas and management; resources including IO bandwidth, memory, power and response time will be monitored.
Microsoft believes that power-based scheduling will be particularly useful for mobile devices. It is considering creating a layered, thin platform for such devices, but it remains unclear how far the company can go with a single code base.
The ecosystem of devices is a major consideration in how Microsoft may choose to implement storage, perhaps by teasing functionality out of the OS and moving it into distributed services, with parts of the service being executed on the device itself.
“In this scenario, you establish Midori not so much as a replacement for Windows,” Hammond noted, “but as the hub of a new type of distributed system which Windows machines connect into until they are no longer needed,” in a fashion similar to IBM’s multi-year transition path for moving its iSeries customers to pSeries and xSeries platforms.
Hammond went on to forecast that there will be a deluge of mobile devices introduced over the next several years built with similar hardware, but with a range of different power and form factors.
Microsoft also envisions higher-level opportunities for storage, including compliance, compression, consistent replication, computation close to data, encryption, indexing and search, as well as storage in the cloud. Midori provides a built-in multi-master replication for complex data.
Scheduling, a process that allows multiple processes to run on the processor at the same time, will be integrated in Midori at the user-mode application level, from both the desktop and across distributed applications in the cloud. Its distributing scheduling may include active task migration, an activity that today is performed by hypervisors.
Notably, Midori’s scheduling may provide hooks for third parties to integrate software that asynchronously updates scheduling tables.
The intention is to enable developers to create collaborative Web-like applications, such as active documents, that operate safely and securely at the OS level. Resource quotas will be used to prevent denial-of-service attacks.
“This is the second attempt at re-implementing OS scheduling that I’ve seen announced in as many months,” Hammond remarked. “[Steve] Jobs talked [at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference on June 9] about how Snow Leopard was going to have a new scheduling framework that would make take advantage of multicore easier for OS X developers. This seems to reach similar conclusions, and then take it to the next step in terms of scheduling flexibility,” he added.
No timeframe for development has been set for Midori, which Microsoft technical fellow Burton Smith says is a research project. A spokesperson added that Midori is one of many incubation projects across Microsoft Research.




http://www.natadd.com/microsofts-plans-for-post-windows-os-revealed-software-development-times-on-the-web

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SUMMARY OF THE ANALYSIS

On 19 September 2008, during powering tests of the main dipole circuit in Sector 3-4 of the LHC, a fault occurred in the electrical bus connection in the region between a dipole and a quadrupole, resulting in mechanical damage and release of helium from the magnet cold mass into the tunnel. Proper safety procedures were in force, the safety systems performed as expected, and no-one was put at risk.
After a period during which the temperature of the magnets in question was allowed to rise close to room temperature, inspections started and a number of clear findings have now been established. Investigations are continuing and the complete findings will be reported at a later date.
A - In the following summary, a brief description is given of the chain of events which occurred around mid-day on 19th September. A more detailed technical report is available (PDF).
1. During the ramping-up of current in the main dipole circuit at the nominal rate of 10 A/s, a resistive zone developed leading in less than one second to a resistive voltage of 1 V at 9 kA. The power supply, unable to maintain the current ramp, tripped off and the energy discharge switch opened, inserting dump resistors into the circuit to produce a fast current decrease. In this sequence of events, the quench detection, power converter and energy discharge systems behaved as expected. Prior to this fast discharge, it is certain that a magnet quench can be excluded as the cause of the initial event. During the discharge, many magnet quenches were triggered automatically in the arc and the helium from their cold masses was recovered through the self actuated relief valves.
2. Within one second, an electrical arc developed, puncturing the helium enclosure and leading to a release of helium into the insulation vacuum of the cryostat. After 3 and 4 seconds, the beam vacuum also degraded in beam pipes 2 and 1, respectively. Then the insulation vacuum started to degrade in the two neighbouring subsectors.
3. The spring-loaded relief discs on the vacuum enclosure opened when the pressure exceeded atmospheric, thus releasing helium into the tunnel, but they were unable to contain the pressure rise below the nominal 0.15 MPa in the vacuum enclosure of the central subsector, thus resulting in large pressure forces acting on the vacuum barriers separating the central subsector from the neighbouring subsectors.
B - After restoring power and services in the tunnel and ensuring mechanical stability of the magnets, the investigation teams proceeded to open up the cryostat sleeves in the interconnections between magnets, starting from the central subsector. This confirmed the lsocation of the electrical arc, showed absence of electrical and mechanical damage in neighbouring interconnections, but revealed contamination by soot-like dust which propagated over some distance in the beam pipes . It also showed damage to the multilayer insulation blankets of the cryostats.
The forces on the vacuum barriers attached to the quadrupoles at the subsector ends were such that the cryostats housing these quadrupoles broke their anchors in the concrete floor of the tunnel and were moved away from their original positions, with the electric and fluid connections pulling the dipole cold masses in the subsector from the cold internal supports inside their undisplaced cryostats. The displacement of the quadrupoles cryostats damaged “jumper” connections to the cryogenic distribution line, but without rupturing its insulation vacuum.
C - Pending further inspection of the inside of the dipole cryostats, it has been established that the number of magnets to be repaired is at most 5 quadrupoles and 24 dipoles from the three subsectors involved. But it is possible that more magnets will have to be removed from the tunnel for cleaning and exchange of multilayer insulation. Spare magnets and spare components appear to be available in adequate types and sufficient quantities to allow replacement of the damaged ones during the forthcoming shutdown. The extent of contamination to the beam vacuum pipes is not yet fully mapped, but is known to be limited; in situ cleaning is being considered to keep the number of magnets to be removed to a minimum. The plan for removal/reinstallation, transport and repair of magnets in Sector 3-4 is being established and integrated with the maintenance and consolidation work to be performed during the winter shutdown across the whole CERN facility. The corresponding manpower resources have been secured.
D - Once all possible inspections are completed, an analysis of the events will lead to recommendations for future actions to prevent the reoccurrence of this type of initial event, and to mitigate its consequences should it accidentally reoccur. Although the cause of the initial growth of connection resistance has not yet been established, and knowing that a similar event has not occurred in the test of all other sectors and of their thousands of connections, it has nonetheless been decided that additional measurements to generate early warnings and interlocks, improvements in pressure relief devices and in external anchoring of the quadrupole cryostats with vacuum barrier will be implemented before any further powering of the LHC circuits at high current.
Technical appendix: LHC design
The arcs of the LHC, extending over most of the length of each 3.3 km long sector, are composed of a periodic lattice, the elementary cell of which (107 m long) is composed of a horizontally focusing quadrupole, three dipoles, a vertically focusing quadrupole and another three dipoles. In each family, the magnets are electrically powered in series throughout the sector. The magnets, equipped with their helium vessel and end covers, constitute the “cold masses”, which, in normal operation, contain superfluid helium at 1.9 K and 0.13 MPa, and are thermally insulated from the vacuum enclosure. The neighbouring cold masses are electrically and hydraulically interconnected. The weight of the cold mass is transmitted to the vacuum enclosure via cold support posts and is further transmitted to the tunnel floor by adjustable support jacks, anchored in the concrete. The lattice cell corresponds to the extent of the local cooling loops of the cryogenic system, fed from the cryogenic distribution line through a “jumper” connection every 107 m at the location of a quadrupole. Two subsequent cells constitute a vacuum subsector sharing a common insulation vacuum; the insulation vacuum enclosures of neighbouring subsectors are separated by “vacuum barriers”. The two beam pipes constitute two other separate vacuum systems, extending over the whole length of the continuous cryostat, and segmented at the arc ends.


http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/brea...-lhc-incident/

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LHC@Home
Most of the scientific computing challenges that the LHC experiments are facing will require access to huge amounts of storage - the LHC will produce 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data per year. These data requirements means that most analysis programmes cannot be run on individual PCs. This is why CERN is leading the development of Grid computing, which aims to link hundreds of major computing centres around the world.
However, there are exceptions where public computing makes sense for the LHC. CERN's IT Department is interested in evaluating the sort of technology that is used by SETI@home for future use. A program called SixTrack, which simulates particles traveling around the LHC to study the stability of their orbits, can fit on a single PC and requires relatively little input or output.
SixTrack was developed by Frank Schmidt of the CERN Accelerators and Beams Department, based on an earlier program developed at DESY, the German Electron Synchrotron in Hamburg. SixTrack produces results that are essential for verifying the long term stability of the high energy particles in the LHC. Lyn Evans, head of the LHC project, says that "the results from SixTrack are really making a difference, providing us with new insights into how the LHC will perform".
Typically SixTrack simulates 60 particles at a time as they travel around the ring, and runs the simulation for 100000 loops (or sometimes 1 million loops) around the ring. That may sound like a lot, but it is less than 10s in the real world. Still, it is enough to test whether the beam is going to remain on a stable orbit for a much longer time, or risks losing control and flying off course into the walls of the vacuum tube. Such a beam instability would be a very serious problem that could result in the machine being stopped for repairs if it happened in real life.
By repeating such calculations thousands of times, it is possible to map out the conditions under which the beam should be stable.

click for participation details



The LHC beneath Genève Switzerland

What does it er...do?
Click video for the "LHC Revisited"

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http://athome.web.cern.ch/athome/LHCathome/whatis.html

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Astronomers for the first time have taken snapshots of a multi-planet solar system, much like ours, orbiting another star. The new solar system orbits a dusty young star named HR8799, which is 140 light years away and about 1.5 times the size of our sun. Three planets, roughly 10, 10 and 7 times the mass of Jupiter, orbit the star. The size of the planets decreases with distance from the parent star, much like the giant planets do in our system.
And there may be more planets out there, but scientists say they just haven’t seen them yet.
“Every extrasolar planet detected so far has been a wobble on a graph. These are the first pictures of an entire system,” said Bruce Macintosh, an astrophysicist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and one of the key authors of a paper appearing in the Nov. 13 issue of Science Express. “We’ve been trying to image planets for eight years with no luck and now we have pictures of three planets at once.”
Using high-contrast, near-infrared adaptive optics observations with the Keck and Gemini telescopes, the team of researchers from Livermore, the NRC Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Canada, Lowell Observatory, University of California Los Angeles, and several other institutions were able to see three orbiting planetary companions to HR8799.
Astronomers have known for a decade through indirect techniques that the sun was not the only star with orbiting planets.
“But we finally have an actual image of an entire system,” Macintosh said. “This is a milestone in the search and characterization of planetary systems around stars.”
During the past 10 years, various planet detection techniques have been used to find more than 200 exoplanets. But these methods all have limitations. Most infer the existence of a planet through its influence on the star that it orbits, but don’t actually tell scientists anything about the planet other than its mass and orbit. Second, the techniques are all limited to small to moderate planet-star separation, usually less than about 5 astronomical units (one AU is the average distance from the sun to Earth).
In the new findings, the planets are 24, 37 and 67 times the Earth-sun separation from the host star. The furthest planet in the new system orbits just inside a disk of dusty debris, similar to that produced by the comets of the Kuiper belt of our solar system (just beyond the orbit of Neptune at 30 times Earth-sun distance).
“HR8799’s dust disk stands out as one of the most massive in orbit around any star within 300 light years of Earth” said UCLA’S Ben Zuckerman.
In some ways, this planetary system seems to be a scaled-up version of our solar system orbiting a larger and brighter star, Macintosch said.
The host star is known as a bright, blue A-type star. These types of stars are usually ignored in ground and space-based direct imaging surveys since they offer a less favorable contrast between a bright star and a faint planet. But they do have an advantage over our sun: Early in their life, they can retain heavy disks of planet-making material and therefore form more massive planets at wider separations that are easier to detect. In the recent study, the star also is young - less than 100 million years old - which means its planets are still glowing with heat from their formation.
“Seeing these planets directly - separating their light from the star - lets us study them as individuals, and use spectroscopy to study their properties, like temperature or composition,” Macintosh said.
“Detailed comparison with theoretical model atmospheres confirms that all three planets possess complex atmospheres with dusty clouds partially trapping and re-radiating the escaping heat” said Lowell Observatory astronomer Travis Barman.
The planets have been extensively studied using adaptive optics on the giant Keck and Gemini telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Adaptive optics enables astronomers to minimize the blurring effects of the Earth’s atmosphere, producing images with unprecedented detail and resolution. LLNL helped build the original adaptive optics system for Keck, the world’s largest optical telescope. Christian Marois, a former LLNL postdoctoral researcher and the primary author of the paper who now works at NRC, developed an advanced computer processing technique that helps to extract the planets from the vastly brighter light of the star.
A team led by Macintosh is constructing a much more advanced adaptive optics system designed from the beginning to block the light of bright stars and reveal even fainter planets. Known as the Gemini Planet Imager, this new system will be up to 100 times more sensitive than current instruments and able to image planets similar to our own Jupiter around nearby stars.
“I think there’s a very high probability that there are more planets in the system that we can’t detect yet,” Macintosh said. “One of the things that distinguishes this system from most of the extrasolar planets that are already known is that HR8799 has its giant planets in the outer parts - like our solar system does - and so has ‘room’ for smaller terrestrial planets - far beyond our current ability to see - in the inner parts.”


http://esciencenews.com/articles/200...d.solar.system

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A new class of exceptionally effective chemical catalysts that promote the powerful olefin metathesis reaction has been discovered by a team of Boston College and MIT scientists, opening up a vast new scientific platform to researchers in medicine, biology and materials.
The new catalysts can be easily prepared and possess unique features never before utilized by chemists, according to findings from a team led by professors Amir Hoveyda of BC and Richard Schrock of MIT. The team's findings are reported in the current online edition of the journal Nature.
"In order for chemists to gain access to molecules that can enhance the quality of human life, we need reliable, highly efficient, selective and environmentally friendly chemical reactions," said Hoveyda, the Joseph T. and Patricia Vanderslice Millennium Professor and Chemistry Department chairman at BC. "Discovering catalysts that promote these transformations is one of the great challenges of modern chemistry."
Catalytic olefin metathesis transforms simple molecules into complex ones. But a chief challenge has been developing catalysts to this organic chemical reaction that are practical and offer exceptional selectivity for a significantly broader range of reactions.
Schrock, the Frederick G. Keyes Professor of Chemistry at MIT who won the 2005 Nobel Prize in chemistry, said the unprecedented level of control the new class of catalysts provides will advance research across multiple fields.
"We expect this highly flexible palette of catalysts to be useful for a wide variety of catalytic reactions that are catalyzed by a high oxidation state alkylidene species, and to be able to design catalytic metathesis reactions with a control that has rarely if ever been observed before," Schrock said.
Highly versatile molecules that contain carbon -- carbon double bonds, alkenes, or olefins, are ubiquitous in medicinally relevant and biologically active molecules. Tetrahedral in constitution, the new catalysts are the first to exploit a metal with four different ligands -- molecules that bond to the central metal -- which in turn dictate the catalysts' high level of reactivity and selectivity.
"For the first time these catalysts take advantage of the configuration of a metal with four different ligands attached to it, an untested situation that has long been predicted to be a strong director of asymmetric catalytic reactions that take place at the metal center," said Schrock.
A novel aspect at the center of the catalyst is that the metal molybdenum is a source of chirality, also known as "handedness." Like the mirror image of left hand and right, molecules can come in two variations, one a reflection of the other. But these two variations often function in entirely different ways -- sometimes one proves harmful, while the other is benign.
With molybdenum at its core, the new catalyst gives chemists a simple, unique and efficient way to produce one form of the molecule or the other in order to yield the desired reactions.
The new catalysts are also structurally flexible, a relatively unconventional attribute that lends them exceptional chemical activity. The discovery of catalysts with stable configurations and flexible structures is expected to allow chemists to design, prepare and develop new chemical transformations that furnish unprecedented levels of reactivity and selectivity, according to the co-authors, which include BC researchers Steven J. Malcolmson, Simon J. Meek, and Elizabeth S. Sattely.
The findings mark the latest discovery from the long-standing collaboration between the Hoveyda and Schrock labs, work that has been supported by more than $3.5 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health for nearly a decade.
"Unquestioned leaders in their own areas of science, Hoveyda and Schrock have pooled their complementary skills to come up with an elegant solution to an elusive goal -- the development of catalysts for enantioselective olefin metathesis," said John Schwab, who oversees organic synthesis grants at the NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences. "This is a beautiful illustration of the power of collaborative science."


http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/catalyst-1116.html

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Research carried out at MIT’s Alcator C-Mod fusion reactor may have brought the promise of fusion as a future power source a bit closer to reality, though scientists caution that a practical fusion powerplant is still decades away.
Fusion, the reaction that produces the sun’s energy, is thought to have enormous potential for future power generation because fusion plant operation produces no emissions, fuel sources are potentially abundant, and it produces relatively little (and short-lived) radioactive waste. But it still faces great hurdles.
“There’s been a lot of progress,” says physicist Earl Marmar, division head of the Alcator Project at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). “We’re learning a lot more about the details of how these things work.”
The Alcator C-Mod reactor, in operation since 1993, has the highest magnetic field and the highest plasma pressure of any fusion reactor in the world, and is the largest fusion reactor operated by any university.
One of the most vexing issues facing those trying to construct a fusion plant that produces more power than it consumes (something never achieved yet experimentally) is how to propel the hot plasma (an electrically charged gas) around inside the donut-shaped reactor chamber. This is necessary to keep it from losing its heat of millions of degrees to the cooler vessel walls. Now, the MIT scientists think they may have found a way.
Physicist Yijun Lin and principal research scientist John Rice have led experiments that demonstrate a very efficient method for using radio-frequency waves to push the plasma around inside the vessel, not only keeping it from losing heat to the walls but also preventing internal turbulence that can reduce the efficiency of fusion reactions.
“That’s very important,” Marmar says, because presently used techniques to push the plasma will not work in future, higher-power reactors such as the planned ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) now under construction in France, and so new methods must be found. “People have been trying to do this for decades,” he says.
Lin says that “some of these results are surprising to theorists,” and as yet there is no satisfying theoretical foundation for why it works as it does. But the experimental results so far show that the method works, which could be crucial to the success of ITER and future power-generating fusion reactors. Lack of a controllable mechanism for propelling the plasma around the reactor “is potentially a showstopper,” Rice says, and the ITER team is “very concerned about this.”
Rice adds that “we’ve been looking for this effect for many years,” trying different variations of fuel mixture, frequency of the radio waves, and other parameters. “Finally, the conditions were just right.” Given that the ITER project, which will take 10 years to build, is already underway, “our results are just in time for this,” Lin says. These results are being published in Physical Review Letters on Dec. 5.
A number of other recent findings from Alcator C-Mod research could also play a significant role in making fusion practical, and several papers on these new results were presented at the Plasma Physics Divisional meeting of the American Physical Society held in November.
One of these is a method developed by Dennis Whyte and Robert Granetz for preventing a kind of runaway effect that could cause severe damage to reactor components. When a fusion reactor is in operation, any disruption of the magnetic field that confines the super-hot plasma could cause a very powerful beam of “runaway electrons,” with enough energy to melt through solid steel. This would not be dangerous to personnel because everything is well-shielded, but it could cause hardware damage that would be expensive and time-consuming to repair.
But Whyte and Granetz have developed a kind of high-powered fire extinguisher for such runaway beams: A way of suddenly injecting a blast of argon or neon gas into the reactor vessel that turns the plasma energy into light, which is then harmlessly absorbed by the reactor walls, and suppresses the beam by apparently making the magnetic fields more disorganized.
For about a thousandth of a second, Whyte says, this brilliant flash of light is the world’s brightest light—the equivalent of a billion-watt bulb—though it’s in a place where nobody can directly see it.
Because the Alcator C-Mod’s design is very closely matched to that of ITER, “we are uniquely positioned to explore what happens when these disruptions occur,” Whyte says. ITER will be 10 times the diameter, with a thousand times the energy, so if this quenching system is used there it would produce a trillion-watt bulb -- for a fleeting instant, nearly equivalent to the total electricity output of the United States.



http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/f...ts-tt1203.html