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Following on my previous post, today I focus on automated meter infrastructure (AMI) and field area network (FAN). Local area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN) are well-known terms and do not need explanation. There are a few XANs to indicate the scope of the area covered. For example, a metro area network (MAN), usually citywide, is larger than a LAN but smaller than a WAN.
Smart grid introduced the term FAN. FAN is part of AMI, the infrastructure connecting the end consumer to the utility. A smart meter aggregates home power consumption data and passes them on to a FAN, which then transmits that data to a WAN, which delivers them to the utility.
For the average consumer, the smart meter is the gateway to the utility and the interface with the home area network (HAN). Although there are other gateways, such as broadband cable, DSL, and fiber modems and connectors, the smart meter is gaining a foothold as a gateway. Since the utility installs it, the smart meter is already compatible with the utility’s communications protocols. For that reason, it is becoming the de facto gateway.
The meter technology is unique, and I am not sure whether typical ICT vendors can enter the field easily. Some vendors, like GE, stand out among the who’s who in providing meters. In my PG&E territory, we had an analog (dumb) meter from GE before, and our new smart meter is also from GE. A big difference between dumb and smart meters, aside from analog vs. digital, is the communications capability of the smart meter. The smart meter has at least three functions: it aggregates/stores the power usage information (hourly or more frequently), transmits the aggregated data to the utility via the FAN, and receives the signal from the utility to control devices and appliances on the HAN.
A dumb meter stores the power usage information by advancing hands in the analog indicators, and it needs no specific internal memory. On the other hand, a smart meter requires some kind of internal memory to record the usage according to the frequency of measurement. In addition, a smart meter needs a mechanism to transmit and receive data and signals. A transmission chip or firmware is embedded into the meter logic for that. ZigBee (mesh wireless technology) is becoming the de facto standard for smart meters. (ZigBee is not a company but a consortium that dictates the ZigBee specification. A company that wants to implement ZigBee pays a license fee and implements its own version according to the specification. NIST is very cautious about declaring a technology a standard. For example, NIST has designated IP as a communications protocol but no others yet. ZigBee, Wi-Fi, and WiMax are under consideration to become part of the standard. ZigBee has started working on supporting IP but doesn’t do so completely yet.
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Schneider Electric Improves Product Quality While Saving Over 2,500 Engineering Hours with Coverity | ||
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Data collected from each household are aggregated to a network access point (NAP) in the neighborhood. I have been looking for this point but have not found it yet. Since ZigBee does not support IP 100%, the communication between each smart meter and the NAP is via ZigBee.
Some information about PG&E’s smart meter can be found here.
Each NAP is now connected via wireless WAN. PG&E uses ZigBee for FAN, but other technologies could be wired or wireless (WiMax) and BPL.
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More 3D movies than ever are in theaters now and manufacturers are selling 3D TVs. Yet surprisingly little is known about the effects of stereo vision on our brains. Researchers at Berkeley are applying cutting-edge technology to find out what happens when 3D is not produced correctly. UC Berkeley Visual Science Professor Martin Banks’ lab is breaking new ground in studying the way we perceive depth. Enabling test subjects to see two screens at once using mirrors, his team has established some of the things that lead to bad 3D.
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Map of world climates where proposed systems for thermal-energy management and grey water disinfection could potentially be used.
A University of California, Berkeley, team has been awarded a $2 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for research on biologically-inspired technologies for grey water reuse and thermal energy management that may propel sustainable building into a new era.
The grant comes from the NSF’s Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation’s 2010 Science in Energy and Environmental Design (EFRI-SEED) program for engineering sustainable buildings.
Leading UC Berkeley’s award-winning, interdisciplinary research team as principal investigator is Maria-Paz Gutierrez, assistant professor of architecture in UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, and the only architect serving as principal investigator for any of the NSF’s eight EFRI-SEED 2010 grants. Her work focuses on advancing sustainable building technologies, particularly for developing regions.
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About one year after the August 29 2005 Katrina hurricane hit the Gulf Coast of our north american continent, a report was issued by the Independent Levee Hurricane Katrina Investigation Team. This investigation targeted three main questions: (1) What happened?, (2) Why?, and (3) What types of changes are necessary to prevent recurrence of a disaster of this scale again in the future?
The three main causes, listed in the executive summary of the report, for the many failures involved, are:
“(1) a major natural disaster (the Hurricane itself), (2) the poor performance of the flood protection system, due to localized engineering failures, questionable judgments, errors, etc. involved in the detailed design, construction, operation and maintenance of the system, and (3) more global “organizational” and institutional problems associated with the governmental and local organizations responsible for the design, construction, operation, maintenance and funding of the overall flood protection system.”
For this article, keep your eye on #3 as it affects the present constructing and unveiling of the latest man-made public work to fix the problems. Check out the update in the NYTimes on the new adventure into man’s control of nature:
Nearly five years after Katrina and the devastating failures of the levee system, New Orleans is well on its way to getting the protection system Congress ordered: a ring of 350 miles of linked levees, flood walls, gates and pumps that surrounds the city and should defend it against the kind of flooding that in any given year has a 1 percent chance of occurring.
The scale of the nearly $15 billion project, which is not due to be completed until the beginning of next year’s hurricane season, brings to mind an earlier age when the nation built huge works like the Brooklyn Bridge, the Hoover Dam and the Interstate highway system.
The city’s reinforced defenses are already stronger than they were before Katrina. But even after 2011, experts argue, they will still provide less protection than New Orleans needs to avoid serious flooding in massive storms.
For a region devastated by a storm and by a loss of faith in the government’s ability to safeguard it, the new system is a test of more than the prowess of the Army Corps of Engineers. Some residents say they may never fully get over the failure of the Katrina response. “Do I trust them?” asked Beverly Crais, a Jefferson Parish resident. “No. How can I trust somebody who makes that big of an error?”
First off, wouldn’t it be grand if all we needed is for “Congress to order” the protection of anything these days. Secondly, the folks in New Orleans have reason to distrust the Army corps of Engineers, and their own local engineers and the folks foiling their expeditions into the unknown. Look deeper into this article and the characters that emerge and you wonder when sex and drugs show up in this saga. From recent NYTimes article:
“Victor Zillmer, the engineer in charge of the Lake Borgne barrier, stood on the roadway that runs along its top and looked at the cranes building its navigation gates. His challenge, he said, is to build “the world’s tallest surge barrier on the world’s worst soils — in the least amount of time.”
Many who watch the corps declare themselves impressed. “The system that they are building is going to keep us, I think, safe,” said Timothy P. Doody, the president of the consolidated levee board to correct the failures of fragmented local boards.”
And I’m pretty sure Mr. Doody hasn’t a clue how safe this Godzilla project is going to make anyone but I am real curious why you would say that. What on earth, or the water, makes anyone believe these guys have a clue, or is buying time the best we can expect? History, apparently, is no precedent.
On the other side of the moon, we read what Cal Berkeley professor Robert G. Bea, said that “he has seen ‘lots of positive changes’ in the corps but said 100-year protection “is not even close to what is needed.” The system needs a greater margin of safety, he said.” The bigger problem lies beyond the walls, said Ivor van Heerden, author of the State of Louisiana’s report on the levee failures. “The nation needs to rebuild fragile wetlands, which are disappearing at a rate of about 24,000 acres a year and reduce the force of storms. We’re never going to succeed if we rely on concrete alone,” Dr. van Heerden said. Van Heerden has stated in the past that, “failure of the New Orleans hurricane-protection system could have been prevented.” Ah concrete, if there was ever a clever word to include in any public works project looking for Federal aid, it is concrete.
Many years ago, I recall a little book written by John McPhee titled, “Control of Nature,” a trilogy of natural disasters looking for a day to happen. McPhee’s writing style draws you in with his descriptions of how the Mississippi works and how water flows through the continent and exits it’s southern border without any documents or privilege.
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Frequentis Standardizes on Coverity Static Analysis for Safety-Critical Software Integrity | ||
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His descriptions of the Army Corps of Engineers are over thirty years old, but may depict a problem that will take that long again to repair.
“In 1980, for example, a study published by the Water Resources Research Institute, at Louisiana State University, described Old River as “the scene of a direct confrontation between the United States Government and the Mississippi River,” and—all constructions of the Corps notwithstanding—awarded the victory to the Mississippi River. “Just when this will occur cannot be predicted,” the report concluded. “It could happen next year, during the next decade, or sometime in the next thirty or forty years. But the final outcome is simply a matter of time and it is only prudent to prepare for it.”
In McPhee’s account of how the Corp viewed the southern exposure, he describes an interview with a Cajun lockmaster back several decades:
“Rabalais works for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Some years ago, the Corps made a film that showed the navigation lock and a complex of associated structures built in an effort to prevent the capture of the Mississippi. The narrator said, “This nation has a large and powerful adversary. Our opponent could cause the United States to lose nearly all her seaborne commerce, to lose her standing as first among trading nations. . . .We are fighting Mother Nature. . . .It’s a battle we have to fight day by day, year by year; the health of our economy depends on victory.”
Well, at least they realized one thing. They knew that as we saw major cities left to disintegrate, under the failure of politicians with the common sense of a slab of concrete, confidence in this economy and our ability to sustain our way of life is threatened everywhere. Never before has the ‘every man for himself’ been evident in our government. It’s a pity the hubris and failures history elaborates on have not taught us that Mother Nature is not amused.
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Plants, dirt, birds and fish have all been enlisted to clean Discovery Bay’s wastewater as part of an experimental constructed wetland project. Facing $100,000 in fines for copper contamination, the town three years ago partnered with University of California Berkeley scientists to determine whether the latest advancements in artificial wetlands could help clean the town’s sewage. The one-of-a-kind project was a success - it reduced copper in the test pond by as much as 90 percent. "In Discovery Bay, they’re way ahead of everyone - they’re really trendsetters," said Alex Horne, professor of ecological engineering at UC Berkeley and an expert in the field.
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Although I have not abandoned the green IT/data center field, I have also started following smart grid. Smart grid includes the three areas of power, IT, and communications. In this post, I’ll briefly touch on how ICT is used in smart grid.
The power system consists of generation, transmission, and distribution. Let’s start with distribution, which also has three parts: the distribution network, field area network/automated meter infrastructure (FAN/AMI), and the home. Today I’ll talk about the home aspect.
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The Different Types of UPS systems | ||
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A smart meter installed at home provides power usage information as an aggregate. By observing my hourly power usage information, I can understand my usage. (By the way, I do not think we have any dynamic pricing yet, as the usage and the charge for it are proportional.) This is great progress, but I would like to see a more detailed breakdown. For example, there is a spike in the middle of the night when I shut down all but essential appliances like the refrigerator. I would like to know if this spike comes from the refrigerator’s defrosting cycle or something akin to it.
To support more-detailed information, each appliance and other electronic device must be able to report its power use to the smart meter or some other collection point in the house. To do this, we need a module to meter power usage as well as some kind of communication function. A new set of appliances and electronic gear may come with the metering chip or firmware installed, but we need a dongle for the existing ones. The dongle business would be only until our current appliances are all replaced by new ones that have the chip or firmware. As for communication, we need a mechanism to transmit the power usage information to the smart meter and/or some collection point. The communication should be two-way because, when demand and response (D/R) is implemented, each appliance and other electronic gear must receive a D/R signal and respond to it. Whirlpool, for example, has announced that it would include such a function in all its new appliances. The candidates for the communications technology include HomePlug, ZigBee, Wi-Fi, Z-Wave, and 6lowpan. None of them is designated as a standard by NIST, though.
Right now, the only way I can get my power usage information is to access PG&E’s website. The information is delayed more than 24 hours. Even though this is progress over the one-month-late information on the bill, I want to receive more minute and real-time information. Unless the data sent over to PG&E are available to me, I cannot do anything with them. However, if its own collection module is embedded in each appliance and electronic device, any power usage information, whether aggregate or individual, can be readily available. The metering frequency can be adjusted at our discretion. Once such data become available, they can be displayed on any of several dashboardlike software applications now available. Google and Microsoft provide free software, while companies like Opower sell their own versions. Opower works with utilities to provide its product. PG&E has not worked with either Google or Microsoft, stating that it wants to wait for the standard.
The home market may be large, but the technical barrier to entering it does not seem to be too daunting. The chip or firmware for metering power usage is a commodity. The communications protocols are well known and do not appear to be hard to implement. Once the power usage data are available, collection, aggregation, analysis, and display are very straightforward, and I do not see much differentiation in the technology itself. So probably the key to this market is how well each vendor and service provider can work with utilities. After all most consumers are not engineers and would like to have an easy solution. On top of that, power consumers deal with their utility, and adopting the solutions provided by their utility may feel easier.
By the way, as one of the speakers at SVLG’s energy summit, I find my interest in checking the hourly use of power waning. After all, I cannot see the breakdown or real-time usage. I will talk about the FAN/AMI area later.
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From
and Science Times
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: August 16, 2010
MYSTIC, Conn. — The shipbuilders are long dead, their knowledge gone. The shipyard no longer exists. No blueprints survive, nor ship’s models.
But the Charles W. Morgan is still here — the world’s last surviving wooden whaling vessel, built in 1841. And restorers are spending $10 million to turn the museum piece into a working ship able to ply the unruly sea. They plan to sail the ship on its first voyage in nearly a century, opening a new chapter in its long career.
Built in New Bedford, Mass., a bustling port known as the whaling capital of the world, the Morgan sailed the globe for eight decades in pursuit of leviathans, escaping fire and cannibals, Confederate raiders and Arctic ice. She brought home thousands of barrels of whale oil that lighted homes and cities. She also delivered tons of baleen, the horny material from the mouths of certain whales that was made into buggy whips and corset stays. In 1941, its centenary, the Morgan was towed to Mystic Seaport for museum display and in 1966 was named a national historic landmark.
To learn as much as possible about the old ship and ensure its successful restoration, the specialists here are turning to the art and science of imaging.
They are deploying lasers and portable X-ray machines, laptops and forensic specialists, cameras and recorders, historians and graphic artists to tease out hidden details of the ship’s construction and condition. The project, begun in 2008, is producing a revealing portrait. It shows the exact placement and status of many thousands of planks, ribs, beams, nails, reinforcing pins, wooden pegs and other vital parts of the Morgan, giving shipwrights a high-tech guide for the rebuilding of the historic vessel.
“When we’re done, she’ll be as strong or stronger as the last time she went to sea,” Quentin Snediker, director of the shipyard here, said during a restoration tour. “So why not sail her?”
Minutes later, a specialist was firing X-rays through the ship’s keel — a massive oak spine composed of several timbers, its length more than 90 feet. He was hunting for the large bronze pins that hold the keel together. The restorers want to assess the so-called drift pins 169 years after their installation and plan to replace or reinforce those that show deterioration. The pins are between one and two feet long.
In a more sweeping assessment, specialists have sent laser beams racing across the Morgan, inside and out, seeking to record inconspicuous details and form a digital archive of exact measurements. The laser scans can track details as small as an eighth of an inch and have swept the entire ship across its 114-foot length and 28-foot width — once a cramped home to a crew of 35.
The scans have produced “millions of points of information” and a wealth of three-dimensional images, said Kane Borden, research coordinator of the restoration. “The results are pretty spectacular to look at.”
Historians here say the restoration, for all its high-tech sophistication, is fundamentally about remembering and honoring the past. The Morgan is the last representative of a fleet of 2,700 American whaling vessels that put the young country on the map and nourished its growing economy. The industry was so important that the whaling life became a distinctive part of the American experience.
“The scope and scale of it is something that people have no idea of today,” said Matthew Stackpole, a Mystic Seaport official. “It was the first time the U.S. presence was felt around the world.”
The Morgan was built in the shipyard of Jethro and Zachariah Hillman and named after Charles Waln Morgan, a Philadelphia Quaker who was its first main owner. The year of its inaugural voyage, 1841, also marked the departure from New Bedford of another ship, carrying an aspiring author by the name of Herman Melville. His whaling experience resulted in “Moby Dick,” and his realistic portrayals of the industry gave it new visibility and status.
The Morgan completed 37 voyages from her home ports of New Bedford and San Francisco and sailed farther than any other American whaler, according to historians. Near a remote Pacific isle, the crew took up firearms to fend off canoes full of cannibals.
Captains could bring along their wives, and two of them served as expert navigators. The logs of Charlotte Church, the wife of Capt. Charles S. Church, who sailed on the Morgan from 1909 to 1913, recorded not only latitude, longitude, heading, distance and barometric pressure but the death of a pet cat.
Dry humor marked her entries. “We have two live pigs, one rooster, four cats and almost twenty canary bird — no fear of starving for a while.”
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Like other people, I’ve been wondering how Oracle has integrated many of Sun’s technologies and hardware after buying that company. Oracle has just started a nationwide tour to inform us of just that. The first stop was in their neck of the woods, Palo Alto, California. The free seminar information, titled "Share the Vision: Build aMore Efficient and Powerful Datacenter with Oracle,” is found here, along with the agenda and locations.
Now that Oracle has Sun’s hardware, Solaris operating system, virtualization engine, and other components, they can provide well-integrated solutions for data centers, as this slide shows:
The plan is to increase server and storage performance by several times and even tens of times more in a few years.
Server Performance Increase
Storage Performance Increase
In addition to Solaris, they have Red Hat–compatible Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) and support. Their virtualization is implemented through Oracle’s version of Xen software, Oracle VM. On top of Xen, Oracle added management and other software to make it a comprehensive offering for virtualization. The features of Virtual Iron, which Oracle acquired some time ago, are being integrated into Oracle VM. Both Oracle VM and Virtual Iron are based on Xen, so the integration should not be too hard.
A presentation on cloud computing was a good tutorial. Many of Oracle’s customers are enterprises, which tend to use VMware’s virtualization solution. Oracle provides a feature to translate VMware VM file formats to theirs. Currently, private or on-premise clouds are implemented mostly with VMware, and public clouds (AWS and Rackspace) are implemented with Xen. Eucalyptus’s enterprise version has a feature that is the reverse of what Oracle VM does. It can translate VMs by VMware on-premise to AWS file formats to allow them to be transported to AWS public cloud (known as CloudBurst).
Oracle view on Enterprise Evolution to Cloud
Since Oracle now owns microprocessors, server and storage hardware, operating systems, virtualization engines, databases, and applications, they can fine-tune the entire system to make it very efficient and execute very fast. Although Oracle is still small compared with IBM in terms of revenue (Oracle $27B vs. IBM $96B), Oracle is now in a position to compete with IBM.
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Energy Efficient Cooling for Data Centers: A Close-Coupled Row Solution | ||
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The seminar was well run and presented very useful information. If there was one thing I did not like about it, it was the lack of discussion of energy efficiency. Energy efficiency and green IT initiatives were mentioned several times during the day, but they were not discussed in detail. I asked one of the speakers to share some energy efficiency data with me. If and when I get it, I will publish it here.
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When I started this blog about two years ago, there was a lot of discussion of direct current (DC) power distribution at data centers. It is very easy to see why DC is better than alternative current (AC) power distribution. AC power enters your data center from your utility. It then goes to a set of UPS that take in AC but convert the power to DC. This is because the power goes through a set of batteries (which only takes DC). Then, at the other side of the UPS, it is converted back to AC. Then the power is distributed to IT equipment via PDUs. This AC power is then converted again by the IT equipment for its internal use. Each conversion loses some percentage of power.
If the AC power entering the data center is converted only once to DC power and distributed to IT equipment that takes DC as input, there would be no conversion loss. Unfortunately, a few years ago, Green Grid put out a white paper comparing the power distribution of DC and AC and concluding that there were very few differences between the two configurations. After reading it, I moved my focus away from power distribution. Now I am back on this subject because some friends who started a company in that area and Keizo Hoshijima of NTT Facilities pitched me the merits of DC distribution recently.
I cannot forget another DC power distribution advocate, Dennis Symanski of EPRI. I met Dennis when he was a panelist in my Nordic Green panel session.
Dennis Symanski
At the conference, he gave a presentation on DC power distribution. Cooling is known to consume about 30–60% of power in a data center, but we seem to be getting a handle on that. Once cooling and other culprits are under control, then we can pay attention to power distribution to further cut power consumption.
Recently, I had a chance to visit Dennis at EPRI to chat about the current status of DC power distribution at data centers. The following is an edited summary of our conversation.
Q: What do you do at EPRI, and what is your background?
A: My focus is to make any computer equipment energy efficient (EE). Prior to coming to EPRI, I spent 18 years at Sun working on international standards and regulations. EPRI is funded by utilities but is an independent nonprofit research organization. It strives to "do good for society,” and it is quite refreshing for me when I do not have to pay attention to revenues and stock prices.
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Energy Impact of Increased Server Inlet Temperature | ||
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Q: So what’s new in the DC power distribution area?
A: In 2006, we conducted a set of experiments on the use of DC power distribution at Sun (currently Oracle), along with LBNL, Ecos Consulting, and other vendors. Our conclusion was that DC power distribution increases data center EE and reliability. Since the experimentation, we formed an organization called DC Power Partners to further our efforts. The members include LBNL, EPRI, EMC, IBM, HP, Oracle (former Sun side), Intel, and even APC. (ZK; APC had a different opinion of DC power distribution before.) We have a once-a-month teleconference to discuss new technologies and installations to share information. In addition to the U.S. companies, some European and Japanese companies call in.
Q: You only cover technology aspects at your DC Power Partners?
A: EMerge Alliance works on DC lighting, led by Armstrong Ceiling for 24 VDC. DC Power Partners is joining the alliance. They can take care of sales and marketing, trade shows, and web promotion.
Q: Are there any major changes in the DC power distribution area?
A: There are no drastic changes. We are currently working to make sure the components that comprise DC power distribution comply with UL and/or FCC regulations. For example, connectors that are used for DC power distribution.
Q: I have no issue with the technology. What about the market? Which region of the world is more receptive to this technology?
A: In general, the telecom industry is keen on picking this up. Companies like AT&T, Verizon, and NTT. In Europe, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) has prepared a specification for 380 VDC. There is at least one CO in each city and dozens in large cities, so there are 10’s of thousands of COs in the U.S.
Q: But IT-centric data centers and COs are different, and the IT data centers may not be so enthusiastic about DC power distribution.
A: They used to be quite different, but, these days, they are becoming increasingly similar as they share the same kind of IT equipment. Look at AT&T, which needs to process IP traffic coming from iPhones and iPads.
Q: A couple of years ago, I read a white paper from Green Grid (GG) that said there were few differences between AC and DC power distribution. What is your take on that?
A: GG members do not include any direct current facilities equipment suppliers. Several of the GG IT equipment suppliers are researching direct current power supplies for their equipment.
Q: What do server vendors need to do to support DC power distribution?
A: All they have to do is to swap the AC power supply with the DC one. The direct current power supplies have a smaller component count, are more efficient and as a result, research demos may show them to be more reliable. It is not hard to create a data center solely with DC power distribution. IBM created such a data center at Syracuse University.
Q: Is there any data center with a solely DC power distribution system in the San Francisco Bay area?
A: Several are going in parallel. But one in the Bay Area will be announced in November.
Q: Right now, generated power is carried via the AC transmission system. If DC power enters a data center, we do not need to convert power at all. Can you transmit power via DC?
A: In the days of Edison vs. Westinghouse, we could not transmit DC power at 5,000 V or higher. These days the high DC voltage is transmitted over a long distance. A hydropower plant in northern Quebec transmits generated DC power to New England over several hundred miles, in addition to much-closer Toronto and Montreal. (ZK: High-voltage direct current is a technology for transmitting high voltage DC over thousands of miles)
Q: Is there anything else I should know about what EPRI is doing in the DC area?
A: We talked about the power supply for IT equipment. Those power supplies were very inefficient. The conversion rate was only 65% on the average. 80 Plus is an organization that promotes increasing the conversion rate to at least 80%. EPA adopted their specification, and EPRI is running a test lab for 80 Plus.
I got very useful information talking with Dennis. EPRI covers a large area of energy and its efficiency. I have not heard much about DC power distribution recently, but that does not mean efforts on its behalf were terminated. On the contrary, they are going very strong, including DC for home and power transmission. I will report on this subject from time to time in this blog.
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Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a laser backpack that scans its surroundings and creates an instant 3D model.
It can make video games more realistic and buildings more energy efficient. They are driving to discover a model of the whole world.
"Here’s a model of two floors of Corey Hall," says Professor Zakhor. "This is the fourth floor and this is the third floor."
It is the first model of an existing building, generated automatically, without human intervention. It is the work of a Cal Berkeley team led by Professor Avideh Zakhor.
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Thirty years ago most psychologists, philosophers and psychiatrists thought that babies and young children were irrational, egocentric and amoral. They believed children were locked in the concrete here and now—unable to understand cause and effect, imagine the experiences of other people, or appreciate the difference between reality and fantasy. People still often think of children as defective adults.
But in the past three decades scientists have discovered that even the youngest children know more than we would ever have thought possible. Moreover, studies suggest that children learn about the world in much the same way that scientists do—by conducting experiments, analyzing statistics, and forming intuitive theories of the physical, biological and psychological realms. Since about 2000, researchers have started to understand the underlying computational, evolutionary and neurological mechanisms that underpin these remarkable early abilities. These revolutionary findings not only change our ideas about babies, they give us a fresh perspective on human nature itself.
Physics for Babies
Why were we so wrong about babies for so long? If you look cursorily at children who are four years old and younger (the age range I will discuss in this article), you might indeed conclude that not much is going on. Babies, after all, cannot talk. And even preschoolers are not good at reporting what they think. Ask your average three-year-old an open-ended question, and you are likely to get a beautiful but incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness monologue. Earlier researchers, such as the pioneering Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, concluded that children’s thought itself was irrational and illogical, egocentric and “precausal”—with no concept of cause and effect.
The new science that began in the late 1970s depends on techniques that look at what babies and young children do instead of just what they say. Babies look longer at novel or unexpected events than at more predictable ones, and experimenters can use this behavior to figure out what babies expect to happen. The strongest results, however, come from studies that observe actions as well: Which objects do babies reach for or crawl to? How do babies and young children imitate the actions of people around them?
Although very young children have a hard time telling us what they think, we can use language in more subtle ways to tease out what they know. For example, Henry Wellman of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has analyzed recordings of children’s spontaneous conversations for clues to their thinking. We can give chilsome that were on the table. The children showed
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dren very focused questions—for instance, asking them to choose between just two alternatives, rather than asking an open-ended question.
In the mid-1980s and through the 1990s, scientists using these techniques discovered that babies already know a great deal about the world around them. That knowledge goes well beyond concrete, here-and-now sensations. Researchers such as Renée Baillargeon of the University of Illinois and Elizabeth S. Spelke of Harvard University found that infants understand fundamental physical relations such as movement trajectories, gravity and containment. They look longer at a toy car appearing to pass through a solid wall than at events that fit basic principles of everyday physics.
By the time they are three or four, children have elementary ideas about biology and a first understanding of growth, inheritance and illness. This early biological understanding reveals that children go beyond superficial perceptual appearances when they reason about objects. Susan A. Gelman, also at Michigan, found that young children believe that animals and plants have an “essence”—an invisible core that stays the same even if outside appearances change.
For babies and young children, the most important knowledge of all is knowledge of other people. Andrew N. Meltzoff of the University of Washington showed that newborns already understand that people are special and will imitate their facial expressions.
In 1996 Betty Repacholi (now at Washington) and I found that 18-month-olds can understand that I might want one thing, whereas you want another. An experimenter showed 14- and 18-month-olds a bowl of raw broccoli and a bowl of goldfish crackers and then tasted some of each, making either a disgusted face or a happy face. Then she put her hand out and asked, “Could you give me some?” The 18-month-olds gave her broccoli when she acted as if she liked it, even though they would not choose it for themselves. (The 14-month-olds always gave her crackers.) So even at this very young age, children are not completely egocentric—they can take the perspective of another person, at least in a simple way. By age four, their understanding of everyday psychology is even more refined. They can explain, for instance, if a person is acting oddly because he believes something that is not true.
By the end of the 20th century experiments had thus charted impressively abstract and sophisticated knowledge in babies and the equally impressive growth of that knowledge as children Kingget older. Some scientists have argued that babies must be born knowing much of what adults know about how objects and people behave. Undoubtedly, newborns are far from being blank slates, but the changes in children’s knowledge also suggest that they are learning about the world from their experiences.
One of the greatest mysteries of psychology and philosophy is how human beings learn about the world from a confusing mess of sensory data. Over the past decade researchers have begun to understand much more about how babies and young children can learn so much so quickly and accurately. In particular, we have discovered that babies and young children have an extraordinary ability to learn from statistical patterns.
The Statistics of Blickets
in 1996 Jenny R. Saffran, Richard N. Aslin and Elissa L. Newport, all then at the University of Rochester, first demonstrated this ability in studies of the sound patterns of language. They played sequences of syllables with statistical regularities to some eight-month-old babies. For example, “bi” might follow “ro” only one third of the time, whereas “da” might always follow “bi.” Then they played the babies new strings of sounds that either followed these patterns or broke them. Babies listened longer to the statistically unusual strings. More recent studies show that babies can detect statistical patterns of musical tones and visual scenes and also more abstract grammatical patterns.
Babies can even understand the relation between a statistical sample and a population. In a 2008 study my University of California, Berkeley, colleague Fei Xu showed eight-month-old babies a box full of mixed-up Ping-Pong balls: for instance, 80 percent white and 20 percent red. The experimenter would then take out five balls, seemingly at random. The babies were more surprised (that is, they looked longer and more intently at the scene) when the experimenter pulled four red balls and one white one out of the box—an improbable outcome—than when she pulled out four white balls and one red one.
Detecting statistical patterns is just the first step in scientific discovery. Even more impressively, children (like scientists) use those statistics to draw conclusions about the world. In a version of the Ping-Pong ball study with 20-month-old babies using toy green frogs and yellow ducks, the experimenter would take five toys from the box and then ask the child to give her a toy from some that were on the table. The children showedno preference between the colors if the experimenter had taken mostly green frogs from the box of mostly green toys. Yet they specifically gave her a duck if she had taken mostly ducks from the box—apparently the children thought her statistically unlikely selection meant that she was not acting randomly and that she must prefer ducks.
In my laboratory we have been investigating how young children use statistical evidence and experimentation to figure out cause and effect, and we find their thinking is far from being “precausal.” We introduce them to a device we call “the blicket detector,” a machine that lights up and plays music when you put some things on it but not others. Then we can give children patterns of evidence about the detector and see what causal conclusions they draw. Which objects are the blickets?
In 2007 Tamar Kushnir, now at Cornell University, and I discovered that preschoolers can use probabilities to learn how the machine works. We repeatedly put one of two blocks on the machine. The machine lit up two out of three times with the yellow block but only two out of six times for the blue one. Then we gave the children the blocks and asked them to light up the machine. These children, who could not yet add or subtract, were more likely to put the high-probability yellow block on the machine.
They still chose correctly when we waved the high-probability block over the machine, activating it without touching it. Although they thought this kind of “action at a distance” was unlikely at the start of the experiment (we asked them), these children could use probability to discover brand-new and surprising facts about the world.
In another experiment Laura Schulz, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and I showed four-year-olds a toy with a switch and two gears, one blue and one yellow, on top. The gears turn when you flip the switch. This simple toy can work in many ways. Perhaps the switch makes both gears turn at once, or perhaps the switch turns the blue gear, which turns the yellow one, and so on. We showed the children pictures illustrating each of these possibilities—the yellow gear would be depicted pushing the blue one, for instance. Then we showed them toys that worked in one or the other of these ways and gave them rather complex evidence about how each toy worked. For example, the children who got the “causal chain toy” saw that if you removed the blue gear and turned the switch, the yellow gear would still turn but that if you removed the yellow gear and turned the switch, nothing happened. We asked the children to pick the picture that matched how the toy worked. Four-year-olds were amazingly good at ascertaining how the toy worked based on the pattern of evidence that we presented to them. Moreover, when other children were just left alone with the machine, they played with the gears in ways that helped them learn how it worked—as if they were experimenting.
Another study by Schulz used a toy that had two levers and a duck and a puppet that popped up. One group of preschoolers was shown that the duck appeared when you pressed one lever and that the puppet popped up when you pressed the other one. The second group saw that when you pressed both levers at once, both toys popped up, but they never got a chance to see what the levers did separately. Then the experimenter had the children play with the toy. Children from the first group played with the toy much less than those from the second group. They already knew how it worked and were less interested in exploring it. The second group faced a mystery, and they spontaneously played with the toy, soon uncovering which lever did what.
These studies suggested that when children play spontaneously (“getting into everything”)they are also exploring cause and effect and doing experiments—the most effective way to discover how the world works.
The Baby Computer
obviously children are not doing experiments or analyzing statistics in the self-conscious way that adult scientists do. The children’s brains, however, must be unconsciously processing information in a way that parallels the methods of scientific discovery. The central idea of cognitive science is that the brain is a kind of computer designed by evolution and programmed by experience.
Computer scientists and philosophers have begun to use mathematical ideas about probability to understand the powerful learning abilities of scientists—and children. A whole new approach to developing computer programs for machine learning uses what are called probabilistic models, also known as Bayesian models or Bayes nets. The programs can unravel complex gene expression problems or help understand climate change. The approach has also led to new ideas about how the computers in children’s heads might work.
Probabilistic models combine two basic ideas. First, they use mathematics to describe the hypotheses that children might have about things, people or words. For example, we can represent a child’s causal knowledge as a map of the causal relations between events. An arrow could point from “press blue lever” to “duck pops up” to represent that hypothesis.
Second, the programs systematically relate the hypotheses to the probability of different patterns of events—the kind of patterns that emerge from experimentation and statistical analysis in science. Hypotheses that fit the data better become more likely. I have argued that children’s brains may relate hypotheses about the world to patterns of probability in a similar way. Children reason in complex and subtle ways that cannot be explained by simple associations or rules.
Furthermore, when children unconsciously use this Bayesian statistical analysis, they may actually be better than adults at considering unusual possibilities. In a study to be presented at a conference later this year, my colleagues and I showed four-year-olds and adults a blicket detector that worked in an odd way, requiring two blocks on it together to make it go. The four-year-olds were better than the adults at grasping this unusual causal structure. The adults seemed to rely more on their prior knowledge that things usually do not work that way, even though the evidence implied otherwise for the machine in front of them.
In other recent research my group found that young children who think they are being instructed modify their statistical analysis and may become less creative as a result. The experimenter showed four-year-olds a toy that would play music if you performed the right sequence of actions on it, such as pulling a handle and then squeezing a bulb. For some children, the experimenter said, “I don’t know how this toy works—let’s figure it out.” She proceeded to try out various longer action sequences for the children, some that ended with the short sequence and made music and some that did not. When she asked the children to make the toy work, many of them tried the correct short sequence, astutely omitting actions that were probably superfluous based on the statistics of what they had seen.
With other children, the experimenter said that she would teach them how the toy worked by showing them sequences that did and did not produce music, and then she acted on the toy in exactly the same way. When asked to make the toy work, these children never tried a shortcut. Instead they mimicked the entire sequence of actions. Were these children ignoring the statistics of what they saw? Perhaps not—their behavior is accurately described by a Bayesian model in which the “teacher” is expected to choose the most instructive sequences. In simple terms: if she knew shorter sequences worked, she would not have shown them the unnecessary actions.
Evolution and Neurology
if the brain is a computer designed by evolution, we can also ask about the evolutionary justification and neurological basis for the extraordinary learning abilities we see in very young children. Recent biological thinking is in close accord with what we see in the psychology lab.
From an evolutionary perspective, one of the most striking things about human beings is our long period of immaturity. We have a much longer childhood than any other species. Why make babies so helpless for so long and thus require adults to put so much work and care into keeping their babies alive?
Across the animal kingdom, the intelligence and flexibility of adults are correlated with the immaturity of babies. “Precocial” species such as chickens rely on highly specific innate capacities adapted to one particular environmental niche, and so they mature quickly. “Altricial” species (those whose offspring need care and feeding by parents) rely on learning instead. Crows, for instance, can take a new object, such as a piece of wire, and work out how to turn it into a tool, but young crows depend on their parents for much longer than chickens.
A learning strategy has many advantages, but until learning takes place, you are helpless. Evolution solves this problem with a division of labor between babies and adults. Babies get a protected time to learn about their environment, without having to actually do anything. When they grow up, they can use what they have learned to be better at surviving and reproducing—and taking care of the next generation. Fundamentally, babies are designed to learn.
Neuroscientists have started to understand some of the brain mechanisms that allow all this learning to occur. Baby brains are more flexible than adult brains. They have far more connections between neurons, none of them particularly efficient, but over time they prune out unused connections and strengthen useful ones. Baby brains also have a high level of the chemicals that make brains change connections easily.
The brain region called the prefrontal cortex is distinctive to humans and takes an especially long time to mature. The adult capacities for focus, planning and efficient action that are governed by this brain area depend on the long learning that occurs in childhood. This area’s wiring may not be complete until the mid-20s.
The lack of prefrontal control in young children naturally seems like a huge handicap, but it may actually be tremendously helpful for learning. The prefrontal area inhibits irrelevant thoughts or actions. But being uninhibited may help babies and young children to explore freely. There is a trade-off between the ability to explore creatively and learn flexibly, like a child, and the ability to plan and act effectively, like an adult. The very qualities needed to act efficiently—such as swift automatic processing and a highly pruned brain network—may be intrinsically antithetical to the qualities that are useful for learning, such as flexibility.
A new picture of childhood and human nature emerges from the research of the past decade. Far from being mere unfinished adults, babies and young children are exquisitely designed by evolution to change and create, to learn and explore. Those capacities, so intrinsic to what it means to be human, appear in their purest forms in the earliest years of our lives. Our most valuable human accomplishments are possible because we were once helpless dependent children and not in spite of it. Childhood, and caregiving, is fundamental to our humanity. â–
Alison Gopnik is professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She has done groundbreaking research into how children develop a “theory of mind,” the ability to understand that other people have minds and may believe or want different things than they do. She helped to formulate the “theory theory,” the idea that children learn in the same way that scientists do. Investigations of children’s minds, she argues, could help us resolve deep philosophical questions such as the mystery of consciousness. 
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I have done consulting work for MySQL as it enters the Japanese market for more than three years. I have not seen Marten Mickos for a few years. I wondered what his next move would be after he left MySQL. I heard he became CEO of Eucalyptus, which is gaining visibility in the crowded cloud computing market. I asked him to talk to me about his new venture. In spite of his busy schedule, he was nice enough to sit down with me at breakfast and share his views on Eucalyptus and cloud computing. I usually take my own pictures for this blog, but I forgot to do so in the excitement of talking with him. So the official picture from Eucalyptus is a little too formal for my blog. But, oh, what the heck!
Marten Mickos
The following is a summary of our talk.
Q: Correct me if I’m wrong: Eucalyptus provides a set of open source tools and utilities to create on-premise clouds. All the components are either from Eucalyptus or some other open source. In addition, it has a hook to pick different types of hypervisors and to run on major Linux distributions like Ubuntu and CentOS. It is largely compatible with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. You can move your virtual machines (VMs) between Eucalyptus and AWS clouds.
A: Basically, you are right. We provide a platform for building on-premise cloud.
Our enterprise version supports multiple hypervisors, such as Xen, KVM, and VMware.
Q: Can you name your customers for the enterprise product? Is the pricing based on number of CPUs?
A: We have several customers that are large enterprises and government agencies. I cannot reveal their identities yet, because I need their consent. Licensing is based on cores and we charge about $300 per core.
Q: What is an on-premise cloud, and what is the difference between on-premise and private clouds? In the past, you were looking for a better term than on-premise cloud. Did you find one?
A: An on-premise cloud runs on your hardware infrastructure at your site. A private cloud is a cloud reserved for the use of one single organization. In many cases, if not all, you can use the two terms interchangeably.
Q: What is your license for the open source side?
A: It is GPL version 3.
Q: Who develops code and commits it to the main trunk? Who has the copyright of the code? Do you take others’ contributions as well?
A: We develop our code and have the copyright of the code but take in others’ contributions as well.
Q: So this is somewhat similar to what you did at MySQL?
A: Yes. But the difference is that MySQL was disruptive in the old database market, but Eucalyptus is innovative in the new market of cloud computing.
Q: You are a big proponent of open source, and you like what Rackspace recently did? I mean that it created OpenStack for clouds. NASA’s Nebula project uses Eucalyptus, and they contributed their code to the OpenStack project. Did they include Eucalyptus in OpenStack as well?
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A: Yes, I like what Rackspace did. I do not think they included Eucalyptus, because our license is GPL and OpenStack is by Apache 2.0. With open source, users can naturally take your code, use it, modify it and redistribute it. In the cloud market there are new projects and companies being launched all the time.
Q: If everyone can do it, what you are doing? What are your differentiation and/or advantage points?
A: We see it as a benefit, not a problem, that open source gives users many freedoms. Already today we have tens of thousands of users who do not need our commercial support. But the most mission-critical installations are dependent on our support, bug fixes and further development of the product. Uniquely in this market at this time, we have a scalable, mature and functional product.
Q: Amazon uses Xen open source, yet has its own APIs and file format for VM. So open source is closed by a proprietary container and is no longer open source. What do you think of it?
A: Again I think it demonstrates the power of open source. Open source is needed in all major infrastructure deployments today. What Amazon is doing is perfectly within the licensing terms and principles of open source.
Q: What is Dr. Rich Wolski (the founder of Eucalyptus) like? Is he a typical researcher?
A: Not at all. The typical researcher does not produce very useful things like Eucalyptus. Also the typical researcher does not start a new business.
Q: Is cloud computing more energy efficient?
A: Yes it is more energy efficient. But we must remember that certain computation always requires a certain amount of energy. It is the fact that you have higher utilization rates in cloud computing and you can turn off servers that are idle for some time to save energy.
Q: What about the opposite of that? What if more demands come to you beyond your capacity? Do you load-balance among several different clouds? If so, what are the problems in doing that?
A: Yes, the vision of cloud computing includes cloud bursting, which allows you to move load dynamically from one cloud to another. Technically it is an advanced proposition and we are not there yet for the general public. There are intricate challenges around security, authentication and latency that the industry is working on.
Q: What geographical markets are you addressing now?
A: Four regions are very important: the U.S., the E.U., China, and Japan.
Q: Are you doing anything in those areas, other than the U.S.?
A: Eventually, we will be in all of the areas, but right now we have our hands full with the U.S.
Q: We are sitting and talking here in Silicon Valley. Do you plan to move Eucalyptus to this area?
A: In the days of cloud computing, the physical location of headquarters does not make a difference. The headquarters is where the CEO is.
Q: So it is like Air Force One. When the president gets on the plane, that plane becomes Air Force One.
A: Exactly. Now this cafe is Eucalyptus One, and I can make all the executive decisions from here! In reality, of course, a company makes decisions in many locations and by many executives. At Eucalyptus we work as a team and for this analogy to be perfect, we need to consider the locations of every employee of the company.
Q: One thing I remember about you, during your days at MySQL, is that you came up with good analogies. You said that regardless of which seating area (first class, business class, or economy class) in an airplane you are sitting in, everyone gets to the destination at the same time. This was in reference to MySQL vs. Oracle databases. Do you have a good one for cloud computing and/or Eucalyptus yet? That kind of description grabs people’s attention quickly and easily.
A: I am thinking about it but have not come up with anything yet.
I had not seen him for a while, but Marten remains as he was before, very nice and friendly. As I researched into Eucalyptus, I found many similarities with MySQL. They are both based on open source, but the business model has a commercial version as well. MySQL was run as a virtual company, which, come to think of it, is a cloud in a sense.
Cloud people tend to ignore the underlying infrastructure; data centers. Marten has a good sense of what is below the cloud. When he talked about turning off servers in the case of low loads, I thought about Power Assure, which has a feature to turn servers on and off as needed. If you can synchronize the operation of IT and facility (cooling and power delivery) equipment according to the loads you receive, you could save more energy at your data center.
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There are a few technologies to make networking more energy efficient. But a more energy efficient Ethernet would have by far the biggest impact because of its ubiquity.
I visited Broadcom to meet with David Berry, senior marketing manager, and Wael William Diab, technical director, office of the CTO. David and I have talked about the general energy efficiency of networking equipment before. Wael is vice chair of the IEEE 802.3 Working Group
So I focused on finding out what 802.3az is all about. My core technology area started with software engineering and expanded to cover networking and embedded systems. I am by no means an expert in networking technologies but am dangerous enough to know some of the basics. I here confess that while I was summarizing my conversations with these two gentlemen, I studied and researched this subject extensively so I could keep up. If the whole thing is completely over my head, it is easy to let it go, but with some effort, I can understand the subject matter to some extent. Sigh.　　
Wael Diab and David Berry
The following is an edited version of my questions and their answers.
Q: My understanding is that energy efficient Ethernet (EEE) allocates networking resources when needed and turns them off when not needed. Can you give me a little bit more on EEE?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Power and Cooling for VoIP and IP Telephony Applications - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A: Traditionally, the most important things about networking were speed and cost. But energy consumption is becoming more important than either of those because opex is beginning to surpass capex. The Ethernet has typically been operated as always-on, even though traffic is not always on. A typical utilization is less than 10% and sometimes even less than 1%. But when traffic is back on, it tends to hit the peak, and the Ethernet has to quickly come back on at 100% capacity. When the PHYsical layer (layer 1 on the OSI model) is on, the layers above (layer 2, data link, and up) are on as well. When there is no traffic, the PHYsical layer (PHY) can be turned off, along with the layers on top of it, creating further energy efficiency. Additionally, we have implemented a way to negotiate when to turn on layer 2. In this way, layer 2 can sleep until absolutely necessary.
Q: Is the ratification of 802.3az done? Is the product based on the standard shipping?
A: The standard is at the final stage, and ratification is expected in September. However, prestandard versions are shipping by vendors, as has happened for other networking products before.
Q: Can this technology be implemented with firmware refresh?
A: Unfortunately, to support firmware refresh, a new PHY is required and, therefore, new equipment. We have a technology called AutoGrEEEn. AutoGrEEEn technology enables a device with a non-EEE MAC to seamlessly transition to EEE capability by implementing control policy assist engines and circuitry inside the PHY device.
EEE requires control for the PHY to be done via in-band signaling over the MAC/PHY interface. This requires a change to both the PHY and MAC silicon. A number of systems have the MAC and PHY as two different pieces of silicon with the MAC often embedded in a switching or controller-type device. These MAC-containing devices have associated drivers and software, and are often multiport devices. So, a transition to EEE may be hampered by additional development that involves replacement of the MAC-containing devices. AutoGrEEEn technology eliminates the need to change the MAC/PHY interface on the MAC silicon, and allows for rapid transition today with legacy non-EEE MAC silicon attached to AutoGrEEEn-enabled PHYs.
Q: Servers are refreshed every three to five years at data centers. How about networking equipment?
A: In general, the networking equipment refresh cycle is probably longer than that of servers. However, it is important to consider networking in conjunction with servers and other IT equipment. Servers get more powerful, with new chips every 18 to 24 months. For example, a newer server with more computing power may require 48 ports rather than 24 ports in the networking equipment to process more loads. Thus, the refresh cycle may not be that much longer than that of servers. In addition, new builds are happening all the time and they can take advantage of any new innovations in energy savings.
Q: I think 802.3az is for 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, and 10 Gbps. Does it apply to 40G and 100G as well?
A: For 40G and 100G, there is another standard called 802.3ba, which was recently ratified.
Both 802.3az (EEE) and 802.3ba (HSE) started about the same time. EEE looked at copper
interfaces that already existed ton be enhanced for energy efficiency. By the way, the
energy efficiency technology we use is called
low power idle . When it is idle, it sends little energy and is very energy efficient.To achieve this both sides go into a suspended state, effectively turning the PHYs off. To keep both sides synced at the PHYsical layer a refresh signal is occasionally sent. Because the refresh signal has a low duty cycle, it is very energy efficient. To leave the LPI state, either side can send a wake-up signal and the other side reacts to that.
In addition to PHYsical layer savings additional subsystems above the PHY can be turned off. Broadcom championed the development of a technology called layer 2 data link LLDP stateful negotiation for enhanced saving modes in the standard.
Q: Some people insist that saving on the networking side does not make a huge impact on data center power consumption. Some studies indicate that power consumed by networking equipment at a data center is only several percents compared with those of servers and storage equipment. What do you say to that?
A: It is true that the networking equipment by itself does not consume a lot of power from the perspective of a few single ports. However, this energy efficient technology (EEE) for networking enables energy efficiency across the entire data center which typically has 1000’s or more ports. Enabling EEE is like turning off a bunch of leaky faucets. One might not notice the savings at a single point in time but it will certainly show up in the monthly bill. Ethernet has also been proven to be an extremely scalable technology enabling port consolidation during bandwidth migrations cutting total power consumption (1G to 10G for example) while at that same time increasing performance typically by a factor of 10. In a sense, Ethernet networking is playing a much larger role in turning a data center into the next-generation energy efficient one.
Think of this analogy. When you try to establish a high quality of service (QOS), you may want to have the fastest server with the fastest CPUs in it. However, if you study this carefully, you would find out that the fastest CPUs alone are not the answer. It may be established with fast CPUs, memory, disk, and other components combined. Energy consumption at a data center can be considered in the same way. Networking connects IT equipment together and, by activating and deactivating according to needs, networking controls other IT resources (IT equipment). This energy efficient technology in networking should not be considered just for networking equipment but for all the IT resources and, consequently, the entire data center.
After talking with Wael and David, I pondered the following. My discussion with them reminds me of the argument about whether servers or networking are more important in computing. It is true that servers are the center of computing, and we tend to pay attention only to servers. However, networking ties together servers and other equipment, like storage, to create an IT system. Without fast, low-cost, and energy efficient networking equipment, even the fastest and most energy efficient servers could not deliver, alone, the most energy efficient computing for a data center. This means networking equipment needs to be energy efficient. On top of that, networking equipment should be able to allocate resources dynamically, as needed, and without delay, to ensure the energy efficiency of other IT resources.
When the IT energy efficiency discussion was in its infancy a few years ago, it was O.K. to discuss each category of IT equipment in a data center separately to see how much it consumed in order to control its consumption. As IT equipment is being integrated and coming to function as one system, it is time to consider the energy efficiency of the IT system as a whole.
There are a few more technologies for making networking equipment more energy efficient, but I will cover them sometime in the future.
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Stuart Bale is a professor of physics and director of UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory. Image credit: courtesy Stuart Bale
The sun is an orb of shimmering energy. It pours out life-giving light and withering heat, but also an invisible torrent of charged particles called the solar wind. Made of plasma—gases heated until their atoms disintegrate into electrons and ions—the solar wind blasts past every planet in the solar system at supersonic speeds.
“From just outside earth’s atmosphere all the way to the part of the sun you see during the day, is all plasma,” says Stuart Bale. A Berkeley professor of physics and director of the university’s Space Sciences Laboratory, Bale studies the plasmas that stream from stars and suffuse entire galaxies.
Of the countless sources of plasma in the universe, the sun is the nearest and easiest to observe. That makes the solar atmosphere “a great laboratory for studying plasma physics,” Bale says.
Bale hopes to get his best view of solar plasma to date on NASA’s Solar Probe Plus mission. Scheduled to launch in 2018, the unmanned spacecraft will hurtle into the hellish environment of the sun more than 20 times over six years, flying closer to the star’s surface with every pass.
Bale has submitted a proposal for an experiment that will study the acceleration and heating of the solar wind. The wind originates as plasma evaporating from the sun’s relatively cool 5,000 to 6,000 degree Celsius surface. As it expands and rises into the corona, the radiant solar “atmosphere” only visible during a total solar eclipse, this plasma grows hotter and faster until it is roaring through the solar system at more than a million kilometers per hour.
Solar Probe Plus will be the first space mission to visit the sun. Bale hopes to have an experiment on board the spacecraft that will study the acceleration of the solar wind. Image credit: NASA
The process can be likened to the physics of a rocket engine. The fuel within a rocket gets ignited within one chamber of an hourglass-shaped nozzle. The heated gas expands with constant force. But as it passes through the constriction of the hourglass, the change in volume increases its pressure enough to accelerate the gas to supersonic speeds. On the sun, Bale explains, “the rocket nozzle is not spatial. It’s the gravity of the sun that’s holding back the atmosphere at the same time as the gas pressure is trying to push outward. This forms a kind of rocket engine that the solar wind expands through.”
Yet how the plasma of the corona achieves such a blistering velocity, and continues to increase in temperature and acceleration millions of kilometers after leaving the sun, has scientists scratching their heads. “We’re looking for a way to keep the solar wind hot as it expands,” Bale says.
On earth, that kind of heat transfer can be observed in water waves in a bathtub. The larger waves decay into smaller and smaller eddies until the friction of one molecule rubbing against another becomes an important factor. The energy of the waves is then transferred into heat. On the sun, magnetic fields are shaken into waves by the rotation of the sun and larger scale magnetic features. But one plasma particle cannot rub against another to dissipate the extra wave energy. Solar plasma is collisionless—one particle isn’t likely to encounter another within the 150 million kilometer distance between the sun and the earth.
“There has to be some collisionless process that’s heating the plasma. There has to be some place for that energy cascading into smaller and smaller scales to go,” Bale says. To observe that transfer of heat, Bale has proposed to measure the electromagnetic fields in the corona and the temperature at the same time. In this way, he can link the behavior of the fields to the transfer of heat.
Though the theory seems to fit, details of the process aren’t known. The information gleaned from the experiment will then help characterize the physics of black hole accretion disks, galaxy clusters, and other stars. “Heating coronas is a universal astrophysical problem,” Bale says.
The rigors of space travel will impose strict limits on the experiment’s design. “The power available for all of the experiments is about the same as for a lightbulb,” Bale says. “Once you put it into space, you can’t get it back, so it must be autonomous. You have to think through all possible failures, and use parts and materials that are well characterized and resistant to radiation, that will work after being shaken up on a rocket, heating up, and cooling down again.”
The Space Sciences Laboratory has a long history of developing just such independent instruments, having launched more than 75 into space over its fifty-one year history. In fact, more than a dozen are still operating in space. Bale’s experiment may be sailing among them in the near future, en route to a rendezvous with the sun.
by Kathleen M. Wong
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I reported that container-based data centers are gaining some attention these days. At the recent DatacenterDynamics in San Francisco, Andreas Zoll of i/o Data Centers gave a talk on the modularization of data centers. What is the relationship between modularization and containers? Modularization is a broader category than containers; a container is one example of modularization. Actually, data centers have been constructed with customized components because each data center is different. As I tour more data centers, I find that is true for somewhat old ones. But at the same time, newer constructions attempt to use standardized components. Standardized components could allow the whole data center to be constructed cheaper because they could become a commodity, and the entire data center structure could be standardized, regardless of location and requirements.
Andreas Zoll
Zoll started his talk by giving the current status of data centers, which was not surprising to those of us who keep track of their trends and challenges. These are some of his key points:
- Continuing growth of densities (for computing, power, and cooling)
- Cooling requirements and focus
- High capex and opex
- Right-sizing hard
Container data centers could address most of those trends and challenges. He made these points:
- Rapid scalability
- Capex in line with actual demand
- Geographically agnostic
- Higher efficiency
- Repeatable
- Flexible
One of his slides shows the history of container-based data centers:
Container-based data center progression
He defined three generations of container data centers.
Generation 1:
- Box containing servers
- Vendor lock-in
- Niche audience only
Generation 2:
- Variety of cooling options
- Vendor-neutral configurations
- Customizable
- Not self-contained but requiring several vendors
Generation 3 (next generation that is not yet on the market):
- Purpose-built
- Open architecture
- Fully integrated
- Tailored for redundancy
- Maintainable
- Location agnostic
- Automated
- Internationally plug-and-play
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Some people asked him to elaborate on his last point about the second generation and full integration in the third generation. The current generation of container comes either with IT equipment that has some power and cooling inlets or with power and cooling equipment. HP (IT equipment) teamed up with Active Power (power) to provide a whole solution. Dell’s version comes as a double-decker: the bottom is IT equipment storage and the top is a power and cooling box.
Regardless of configuration, power and cooling should be available as a modularized unit to hook the container up to the building. This reminds me of the fourth generation data center proposed by Microsoft.
What you can do with each container is limited. You still have to hook your container up to power and cooling before you put it into operation. So the entire data center should be designed to provide modularized power and cooling. How soon can you do that? It is a good idea, but I wonder how doable it is now.
While people were buzzing with this question, a VP came on stage and said i/o Data Centers would announce their latest container-based solution in two to three weeks. I suppose it will be the third generation. They planned the session well. They well knew that people would ask what "fully integrated” meant and that they would announce their new solution. That was very clever. We will see if their new solution is as good as their session planning.
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