Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Twitter Is Three

Yesterday (March 21, 2009), Twitter, the microblogging service, turned three years old. I've been twittering for two years now, watching the evolution of social networking and the nature of the participants. (Yeah, I had a Blackberry back in 2000-2001, long mobile email became an international addiction, but then I'm a gadget geek.) Twitter is now growing exponentially according to Nielsen Wire, with unique visitors up over 1000 percent since one year ago.

Twitter would not have been possible in the U.S. a decade ago, as we lacked the ubiquitous smartphones and broadband coverage needed for mobile access. However, if one recalls the popularity of the short message service (SMS) in Europe and Asia, Twitter could easily have appeared as a value-added service long ago. After all, GSM has been around since the 1980s. It remains an open question, however, if Twitter can be a profitable business.

Extended Friends

Like its big brother, Facebook, Twitter has gone mainstream, with attributions and social discussions in the popular press. Indeed, some have argued that Twitter is the new Facebook, favored by the digerati. All of this reminds me of Yogi Berra's famous remark about a restaurant, "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."

In both the Facebook and Twitter worlds, it does seem crowded. I am now being "friended" by some people I barely know, and by others I do not know at all. (I am sure many of you have had the same experience.) I am not complaining; rather I have realized that friend in this context is a very elastic thing, ranging from long-time personal friend to an extended network of business acquaintances. Who would have thought one would need information visualization tools like Friend Wheel to track one's "friends"?

Interacting Networks

Like web search engines and the social insights one can glean from tracking queries (e.g., Google's tracking of flu trends), analyzing and visualizing tweets can illuminate social dynamics and behavior. Watching Twittervision, Twitter StreamGraphs or TwittEarth can at times be fascinating but can also overwhelm one with the minutia of daily life. (A trip to the gas station is not an event of historic proportions.) Such is the nature of a global social dynamic.

I also find it interesting that these extended social networking sites are themselves increasingly interconnected. For example, my Twitter updates appear on my blog and my Facebook page. Conversely, excerpts and links from my blog posts appear on Twitter via TwitterFeed and are also replicated on Facebook, LinkedIn and FriendFeed. In between, there's microblogging (a tumblelog) with Tumblr – hpcdan.tumblr.com).

Perhaps in the limiting case, all of my social networks can simply chat about me among themselves. They are probably more interesting than I am.

Electronic CACM Is Now Live

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the Communications of the ACM (CACM) was about to "go live," together with a series of blogs, including one written by yours truly. CACM is now live, and the blog (Blog@CACM) is live as well. My first two blog entries are entitled Pipelining, Computing Innovation and Economic Growth and Connecting the Two Ends: Mobile Clouds.

I will be writing for CACM roughly every two weeks.

Seeding The Clouds

Since I joined Microsoft in late 2007, I have written about science policy, Federal government interactions, and national competitiveness studies, in my role as a member of PCAST and chair of the Computing Research Association (CRA). Throughout, I have emphasized the need for strategic investment in long-term, basic research, especially as part of the economic stimulus package..

I have also discussed the rise of multicore computing, the consequent software crisis and the need for innovation in both architecture and software, including Microsoft's support for the Microsoft/Intel-funded Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRCs) at Illinois and UC-Berkeley. I have also mused on the future of high-performance computing and its role as an enabler of scientific discovery. I have even written about my family, my rural childhood and my life experiences.

What I have not done is write about why I came to Microsoft and what I am doing – until now. Yes, my team manages the UPCRCs in partnership with Intel. Yes, I devote time and energy to research policy, both for the community and on behalf of Microsoft. Yes, I am involved in the future of high-performance computing, both politically and technically. However, that's not the entire story.

It's time to talk infrastructure so large it makes petascale systems seem small. It's time to talk about why I can't remember the last time I had this much fun. It's time to pull back the curtain and talk about the future of clouds. No, I'm not talking about weather forecasting, though I really enjoyed my past collaboration with the LEAD partnership.

I came to Microsoft to lead a new research initiative in cloud computing, one that complements our production data center infrastructure and our nascent Azure cloud software platform. You can read the press release and the web site for the official story. What follows is my personal perspective.

The Infrastructure of Our Lives

We all know the cloud premise – Internet delivery of software and services to distributed clients, from mobile devices to desktops. We tend not to think about how dependent we now are on those delivered services, though we are, just as we depend on the telephone and our water and electrical utilities.

Imagine a day without the web, without search engines, without social networks, without online games, without electronic commerce, without streaming audio and video. Our world has changed, and government, business, education, recreation and social interaction are now critically dependent on reliable Internet services and the hardware and software infrastructure behind them. However, more research and technology evaluation are needed to make them as trustworthy as the telephone network.

Building Internet services infrastructure using standard, off-the-shelf technology made sense during the 1990s Internet boom. (And yes, I remember how cool Mosaic was, when I first saw it at Illinois.) The facilities were small by today's standards, and the infrastructure could be deployed quickly. Today, however, the scale is vastly larger, our social and economic dependence is much greater and the consequences of failure are profound. Web service outages are now international news, and a cyberattack is considered an act of war.

For background on some of the challenges and problems in scaling, you might want to follow the Data Center Knowledge and High Scalability web sites. If you are new to this space, they and other reading will redefine your notions of large and reliable. You might not think 100 megawatts could be a data center design constraint, but it is. More importantly, you should fear – yea, verily, be absolutely terrified by –the wrath of 100 million unhappy customers should your Internet service fail. Every nightmare that has ever awakened a CIO in a cold sweat at 2am is real, but magnified a thousand fold. If it were easy, though, it would neither be exciting nor fun.

Cloud Infrastructure Challenges

Microsoft's business, like that of other cloud service providers -- Amazon, Google, Yahoo and others – depends on an ever-expanding network of massive data centers: hundreds of thousands of servers, many, many petabytes of data, hundreds of megawatts of power, and billions of dollars in capital and operational expenses. This enormous scale – far larger than even the largest high-performance computing facilities – brings new design, deployment and management challenges, including energy efficiency, rapid deployment, resilience, geo-distribution, composability, and graceful recovery.

I have been a "big iron" guy for a long time, and Internet and cloud services infrastructures do have analogs with petascale and exascale computing, but the workloads and optimization axes are different. Like today's HPC systems, cloud computing facilities are being built with hardware and software technologies not originally designed for deployment at such massive scale. Consequently, they are less efficient and less flexible than they either can or should be. If we built utility power plants the same way we build cloud infrastructure, we would start by visiting The Home Depot and buying millions of gasoline-powered generators. This must change.

Imagine a world where heterogeneous multicore processors are design and optimized for diverse workloads, where solid state storage changes our historical notions of latency and bandwidth, where on-chip optics, system interconnects and LAN/WAN networking simplify data movement, where scalable systems are resilient to component failures, where programming abstractions facilitate functional dispersion across devices and facilities, where new applications are developed more quickly and efficiently. This can be.

Cloud Computing Futures

Over the past fourteen months, I have been quietly building the Cloud Computing Futures (CCF) team, starting with a key concept. We must treat cloud service infrastructure as an integrated system—a holistic entity—and optimize all aspects of hardware and software. I have recruited hardware and software researchers, software developers and industry partners to pursue this vision. It's been a blast.

The CCF agenda spans next-generation storage devices and memories, new processors and processor architectures, networks, system packaging, programming models and software tools. We are a research and technology transfer team, whose roles are to explore radical new alternatives – "blank sheet of paper" approaches to cloud hardware and software infrastructure – and to drive those ideas into implementation and practice.

Effective research in this space requires changes to both hardware and software, and the resulting prototypes must be constructed and tested at a scale difficult for small teams. This type of research and technology transfer is in academia, because the efforts often cross many research disciplines.

For this reason, the CCF team is taking an integrated approach, drawing insights and lessons from Microsoft's production services and data center operations, and partnering with researchers, vendors and product teams worldwide. Our work builds on technical partnerships and collaborations across Microsoft, including Microsoft Research, Debra Chrapaty's Global Foundation Services (GFS) data center construction, operations and delivery team, and Ray Ozzie's Azure cloud services group. We are also partnering with an array of hardware-technology providers and companies as we build prototypes.

Now You Know

For me, CCF has been an opportunity to apply research experiences and ideas gleaned over the past twenty-five years of my academic career. Equally importantly, it is a chance to build prototypes at scale to test those ideas, and then help drive the promising technologies into practice. The past year has been great fun, and I have been privileged to attract and partner with some wonderful people to this adventure, including Jim Larus and Dennis Gannon.

Now you know why I came to Microsoft. It was a chance to practice what I've been preaching. It was a chance to help design the biggest of big iron. It was a chance to help invent the future. It's a pretty cool gig for a balding old geezer like me!

Beyond The Azure Blue

From the first day I arrived at Microsoft, my academic colleagues have been asking me about Microsoft's strategy for cloud computing and when (or if) there would be public announcements. Those questions rose to a crescendo as academic groups prepared responses to the NSF eXtreme Digital (XD) TeraGrid solicitation. All I could say was that we were working on a plan, and it would become clear soon.

I don't normally pitch Microsoft products in the blog, preferring to discuss science policy, technology research and development and global competitiveness. However, something big just happened at Microsoft, something I think will affect all of us. Moreover, as I write this, the Pacific Northwest sky is clear and azure blue, and that doesn't happen often this time of year. An omen, perhaps?

Microsoft Azure Cloud Services

At our Professional Developers Conference (PDC), Microsoft announced Azure, our cloud computing platform, with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale and manage Internet or cloud applications. The press release has additional business perspective and a link to the presentation. Azure is one element of the vision Ray Ozzie (See "Mind to Mind: Building Innovation") described in his 2005 Internet Services Disruption memorandum.

The simplest description of Azure is that the initial release allows you to develop hosted Windows applications using .NET Services, though future releases will support unmanaged code and open source tools as well (Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python). Within Azure, a fabric controller manages application instances and access to storage via SQL Data Services (SDS), and it hosts applications atop virtualized multicore hardware. Finally, Microsoft's Live Services offerings will be layered atop the Azure framework.

You can read the white paper for details on the Azure design and usage approach. In addition, the software development kit (SDK) is available for download. In addition to the Azure SDK itself, there are SDKs for Visual Studio, .NET and SDS Services. Finally, there are Java and Ruby SDKs for .NET Services as well. This is a Community Technology Preview (CTP), meaning Microsoft welcomes feedback on these early capabilities and will continue to expand the capabilities of Azure over the coming months.

Science and Technology Implications

Earlier in the year, I wrote on both my blog and in HPCWire ("Dan's Cloudy Crystal Ball") about the possibility of outsourcing research computing services and infrastructure to the cloud. I noted then that the explosive growth of computing as an enabler of scientific discovery had strained university capabilities and Federal research budgets. Given our current economic crisis, university operating budgets and Federal research expenditures will be under even greater strain and there will be increased scrutiny on the need for each investment.

In a world of (at best) modest research budget increases, we must ask hard questions about the best use of limited funds. Cloud computing offers a potential mechanism to increase the efficiency of current research, ensure continuity of critical data and enable new kinds of research not now feasible.

In this model, researchers focus on the higher levels of the software stack -- applications and innovation, not low-level infrastructure. University and Federal research agency administrators, in turn, procure services from the providers based on capabilities and pricing. Finally, the cloud service providers deliver economies of scale and capabilities driven by a large market base and energy efficient infrastructure. Remember, computing infrastructure exists to enable discovery, not as monuments to technological prowess.

In addition to efficiency, the scalability of cloud services and infrastructure opens new research possibilities. Not only is it possible federate multidisciplinary research data at far larger scales than possible in a university environment (think tens to hundreds of petabytes of low latency storage), we can escape the pernicious cycle of transitory research infrastructure.

How often have we created data repositories as part of research projects, only to find few mechanisms to ensure their long-term sustainability and access by the broader research community? How often have we faced a miasma of distributed data sources with unknown provenance and non-compatible metadata, each supported pro bono on a best effort basis? (See my recent comments on digital document preservation.) Instead, imagine multidisciplinary data fusion and mining, where students can pose queries against integrated but diverse data sources using robust tools?

Finally, by leveraging "pay as you go" models, we can trade time and scale on a continuous basis. Imagine applying 50,000 processors for one hour at the same cost as 50 processors for one thousand hours. In the cloud, the integral under the curve is the same and the costs are comparable, but the research effects are qualitatively different.

The Standard Questions

The standard questions always arise about new approaches to computing. Cloud services and data storage inevitably raise the standard ones.

• Is it reliable and will my data persist?
• Is it safe, private and secure?
• Will I be captured and become captive?
• What does it cost and what if I can't continue paying?

We tend to forget that there are complementary issues about local infrastructure because we have already internalized and accepted the implications and risks. Moreover, local failures are rarely publicized.

• What happens if my disks crash?
• What if I can't pay for backups or maintenance or physical plant or …?
• What if my network is penetrated?

These are the standard cost/benefit/risk tradeoffs. One must make them based on statistics, economics and practical constraints. Remember that we debated the same issues when we shifted research computing from vendor-backed HPC designs to predominantly commodity components.

Let's Reason Together

I welcome discussion of how we can exploit cloud services and infrastructure effectively – all cloud infrastructure, not just Microsoft's Azure. To do this, the cloud service providers, hardware vendors, universities and Federal government must work together to outline an agenda, conduct experiments at scale and speak with a united voice on the opportunities.

It's a sunny day, but my head is in the clouds.

Preserving the Past: Educating the Future

A recent front page article in the New York Times, entitled In the Digital Age, Federal Files Slip into Oblivion, really caught my attention. The article described a problem with which I am painfully and intimately familiar, namely the struggle to preserve the electronic record of government processes and deliberations. Quoting from the article,

Many federal officials admit to a haphazard approach to preserving e-mail and other electronic records of their work. Indeed, many say they are unsure what materials they are supposed to preserve.

This confusion is causing alarm among historians, archivists, librarians, Congressional investigators and watchdog groups that want to trace the decision-making process and hold federal officials accountable. With the imminent change in administrations, the concern about lost records has become more acute.

Even with an army of government clerks, there is a limit to how many pieces of paper the federal government could produce. However, the explosive growth of digital communications and document preparation has far outstripped the processes and technology available to the Library of Congress and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). However, it is not just the volume of digital data, it is the diversity of electronic formats and the myriad of physical devices on which the data is stored.

Imagine receiving a truck filled with PC disk drives and being expected to identify, curate and manage the data contained on them. Sound daunting and farfetched? It isn't. This is precisely what the Clinton White House delivered to the National Archives for preservation; though it included a mere 32 million e-mail messages. (Remember that the White House did not have Internet access until DARPA and Randy Katz wired it in the 1990s.)

Given the growth of electronic communication since the early 1990s, the Bush administration will undoubtedly have generated hundreds of millions of e-mail messages that must be preserved, along with a plethora of electronic documents in a dizzying array of file formats. In addition to the standard challenges of document identification, extraction and preservation, the Archives of course must deal with national security and classification issues, further exacerbating the challenge.

I have seen this struggle first hand, as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Electronic Records Archive (ACERA), the digital document preservation project of the National Archives. The National Archives are building a web accessible, indexed repository that will eventually host at least a portion of the torrent of digital data pouring from the federal government. It is an arduous and difficult journey, with more work ahead.