Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

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.

Interesting Times Indeed: Science Debate 2008

I write a quarterly column for the Computing Research Association (CRA)'s newsletter, Computing Research News (CRN). The following is a preview of my upcoming column, which will appear in the November 2008 issue.

That awful gurgling noise you hear in the background is the global economy draining through the hole that is the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis. We do not yet how bad the economic downturn will be. However, if history is a guide, we can expect the weakened economy to depress rates of return on university endowments, tighten state budgets due to decreased tax revenues, constrain corporate R&D spending and increase the already large pressure on federal government discretionary spending. In short, we are likely to experience constraints on faculty and researcher hiring and on overall education and research funding

On the latter front, CRA continues to advocate that the America COMPETES Act be fully funded. You will recall that the Act authorizes greater funding for physical science research in the U.S., but no additional funding has been appropriated. (In Washington-speak, computing is a physical science.) As I am sure at least some of you have noticed, this is a U.S. Presidential election year, with its own set of implications for the future of science policy and research funding.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Council on Competitiveness, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine, along with the leaders of many organizations, crafted fourteen questions for the Presidential candidates. (I signed in support on behalf of CRA.) This "Science Debate 2008" includes questions on approaches to research and innovation, education, climate change, energy security, health care, biomedicine and pandemics, space and other topics. The first, and perhaps most important question, concerns innovation:

Science and technology have been responsible for half of the growth of the American economy since WWII. But several recent reports question America's continued leadership in these vital areas. What policies will you support to ensure that America remains the world leader in innovation?

I encourage you to review the responses to all of the questions from both candidates at www.sciencedebate2008.com. (You might also want to read a recent New York Times assessment.) As I write this in early October, the election campaigns are in full flight, but by the time you read this, the election will have been decided, barring the unexpected, and we will know which of these sets of responses is more likely to become reality.

I can also report that the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), of which I am a member, also recommended that the new President appoint the Presidential Science Advisor as quickly as possible, enabling the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to begin operating expeditiously. My personal hope is that the new President will name the Science Advisor during the transition period after the election and before taking office.

Let us remember that the laurel in the race to the future sometimes goes to the sprinter, but more often the reward accrues to those who have the vision, foresight and persistence to run the long and sometimes enervating marathon that is education, intellectual innovation via research and transfer of good ideas into practice. To hark back to our current financial crisis, the smart money bet (quite literally) is always on innovation.

 

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.

Three Views on Multicore

 

Andrew Chien, Dave Patterson and I have each written articles on the challenges and opportunities inherent in multicore hardware and software for the Community Computing Consortium (CCC) blog. My recent article, on the challenge of software, is now posted. In the article, I argued that we must re-envision parallel computing and a new generation of applications that explicitly exploit the scale and heterogeneity of multicore. You can read the article on the CCC blog or below.

Multicore: It's The Software

For over thirty years, we have watched the great cycle of innovation defined by the commodity hardware/software ecosystem – faster processors enable software with new features and capabilities that in turn require faster processors, which beget new software. The great wheel has turned, but it no more, as power constraints and device physics now limit the performance achievable with single microprocessors.

Multicore chips – those with multiple, lower power processors per chip – are now the norm. Moreover, current multicore chips (those with 4-8 cores/chip) are but the beginning. We can expect hundreds of cores per chip in the future, with diverse functionality (graphics, packet protocol processing, DSP, cryptography and other features).

The software research challenge is clear – developing effective programming abstractions and tools that hide the diversity of multicore chips and features while exploiting their performance for important applications. Hence, we need a vibrant community of researchers exploring diverse approaches to parallel programming – languages, libraries, compilers, tools – and their applicability to multiple application domains.

Microsoft researchers are investigating all of these approaches, from coordination languages for robots and distributed systems to mobile phones to desktops and data center clouds. To engage the academic community, Microsoft funds multicore research projects and many sites, and we have partnered with Intel to fund the Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRCs) at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

As Richard Hamming famously noted, "The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers." In that spirit, I believe our research challenge is to break free from the limitations of the desktop metaphor and exploit the ever greater performance of multicore chips to create new human-computer interaction metaphors that are more natural and intuitive. This will require new approaches to parallel computing education and increased collaboration with researchers in application domains.

As an example, consider one possible future – "spatial computing" – where real-time vision and speech processing, coupled with knowledge bases, distributed sensors and responsive objects, enhance human activities in contextually relevant ways while remaining otherwise unobtrusive. Such an infosphere would adapt to its user's needs and behavior and move seamlessly across home, work and play.

Multicore brings enormously interesting intellectual challenges and the opportunity to rethink much of how we approach computing. Let's embrace the opportunity!

The Long Race for Innovation

Recently, the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) met at the National Academy of Sciences to discuss and approve our most recent draft report on research and innovation, entitled, University-Private Sector Research Partnerships in the Innovation Ecosystem. Quoting from the executive summary (note that the final wording may change slightly), the goal of the study was to

… examine approaches to stimulate interactions between the private sector and universities, including new R&D business models that are scalable to a national level. As part of its study, PCAST also considered policies to incentivize interactions and to address potential barriers, such as intellectual property, tax policies, and organizational challenges. The study is aimed at improving the effectiveness of public and private sector research through cooperative investments, expanding interactions among personnel, and increasing opportunities for technology transfer in its broadest sense.

Perhaps coincidently, but more likely because the meme is both pervasive and compelling, this coupling of ecosystem and competitiveness mirrors that in the earlier study (Leadership Under Challenge: Information Technology R&D in a Competitive World) of the U.S. Networking, Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program, which I had the privilege to co-chair.

Although the findings and recommendations of the study are manifold, I took two major ideas away from the presentations and the report. The first is based on a funny but pointed remark from Norm Augustine. The second relates to prizes and their ability to inspire our imaginations.

Norm Said the Stock Dived …

I've always enjoyed the fact that the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) staff members rearrange our seating at each PCAST meeting. It gives me a chance to have sidebar conversations with different people during each meeting. At our most recent meeting, I happened to be sitting next to Norm Augustine, the former head of Lockheed-Martin.

Norm is a fascinating guy, with wonderful stories and a piercing belief in the importance of research as the critical enabler of the long-term, global competitiveness of the United States. You may remember that Norm led the group which produced the seminal report, Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Future, which in turn led to the America COMPETES Act. (Despite bipartisan support, the COMPETES Act, which would double federal funding for physical science research, remains unfunded.) But I digress from my story …

During the comment period after the public presentation of the draft PCAST report on the innovation ecosystem, Norm told a wonderful but sad story that could be a parable for our economic times. (Any inaccuracies or errors in the story are mine.) During his time as Lockheed-Martin CEO, Norm said they had identified a set of promising applied research directions that could yield long-term competitive advantage to company, after the requisite time and investment. Pleased and excited by this possibility, he dispatched one of his senior people (a group president, as I remember) to brief the Wall Street financial analysts.

Norm went on to say that the analysts nearly ran from the room at the end of the briefing to sell their Lockheed-Martin stock, which then dropped precipitously on the markets. He noted ruefully that it was nearly two years before the stock recovered to its price before the briefing. Chagrined by this experience, Norm said he asked the analysts at the next briefing why the company had been so punished for its planned R&D investment and for seeking to assure its long-term competitive position. The answer came back clearly and pointedly. Most investors held the stock less than eighteen months, and corporate investment beyond this horizon was viewed as a drain on the corporate coffers.

A Parable for Our Time

Norm told his story to highlight the dangers of short-term thinking and the risk to our competitive future, a point he also made recently in a Science editorial (Vol. 321, No. 5896, p. 1605
September 19, 2008), from which I cannot help but quote an excerpt:

Much has been accomplished since The Gathering Storm was published. A new research university was established, with an opening endowment equal to what the Massachusetts Institute of Technology amassed after 142 years. Next year, over 200,000 students will study abroad, mostly pursing science or engineering degrees, often under government scholarships. Government investment in R&D is set to increase by 25%. An initiative is under way to create a global nanotechnology hub. An additional $10 billion dollars is being devoted to K-12 education, with emphasis on math and science. And a $3 billion dollar add-on to the nation's research budget is in process. Of course, these actions are taking place in Saudi Arabia, China, the United Kingdom, India, Brazil, and Russia, respectively. What about in the United States?

The laurel in the race to the future sometimes goes to the sprinter, but more often the reward goes to those who have the vision, foresight and persistence to run the long and sometimes enervating marathon that is education, intellectual innovation and technology commercialization.

Perhaps more pointedly, Norm was quite literally telling his story as the U.S. government was desperately seeking to develop a rescue plan during the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Call it coincidence if you like; I view it as a warning.

Prizes: Powering the Imagination

During the PCAST meetings we heard from a variety of academic, government, industry and non-profit groups. One of the clear messages concerned the power of prizes to catalyze competition and innovation, with the sub-orbital space flight X Prize being the most visible and recent example. PCAST member Fred Kavli's foundation has also offered prizes for scientific innovation.

The incentive for such prizes is rarely the direct financial reward to the winner, but rather the collateral opportunities that accrue to the winner. For example, Paul Allen undoubtedly spent far more on Burt Rutan's Spaceship One than the $10M X Prize, but the international publicity was enormous, and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic has booked revenue-paying passengers for future flights.

Even more important than the economic incentives is the power of prizes to focus the imagination and intellectual talent of a community on accomplishing something both difficult and audacious. In that spirit, in 2006 the U.S. Congress directed the National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish a prize program. Also, the National Academy of Sciences recently released a report outlining a series of detailed recommendations for how to conduct a prize program.