Holding a portal to the Cloud

Lester Miller

I've just received my shiny, new, brushed steel and polished glass smartphone. I'll admit now: I'm in love with it. Before this day came, I'd talked frequently about how amazing life would be after it arrived and, now that it's here, I spend a lot of my spare time bathing in its visual modern beauty and trying to fully realise what I'm convinced are life-enriching possibilities.

One of the important features of this smartphone is the loudly-touted easy access to a cloud on which data can be stored and complex calculations can be made.

In 1950, Herb Grosch, a Canadian-born astrophysicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, envisioned a future where the whole world would run using a cloud system of computing, operated by individual local terminals but served by only 15 data centres.

Today, there are about 50,000 data centres just in Australia – certainly more than 15 worldwide – but they are getting larger in size and smaller in number.

Arguably the largest data centre in the world, the Lakeside Technology Center, is 10 hectares (24 acres) in size. It's the nerve centre for Chicago's commodity markets and requires about 100MW of power to operate.

The architecture of computers means they can't presently solve certain kinds of equations, but what they can do is break a model down into millions of tiny parts and approximate the solution to governing algorithms by iterative methods. The smaller the parts the problem is broken into, the greater the precision and accuracy of the solution, but the more calculations required.

My final year project for my Engineering degree, an aeon (or ten years) ago, was to design an efficient shape for a solar-powered car, hypothetically to be built and raced in the World Solar Challenge. It involved modelling the movement of air across the surface of the car, a problem governed by partial differential equations, unsolvable directly but susceptible to a good approximation. My team would go into the computer rooms on campus, enter the surface geometry of a car we thought would slip through the air cleanly, and then leave the post-processor to think about the problem, which would take about a day. The graphic visualisation part of the problem would also take hours. We would return, review the results, think about how shape could be improved and do it again.

How much quicker would the process have been an aeon later? With the accessibility of clouds now, computational fluid dynamics packages and so many other data analysis packages for professionals from structure designers and advertisers to baseball scouts can be operated remotely, by our smartphones or tablets, which need only have the power to display the interface between the calculator and the user: a "dumb" terminal.

Computing is rapidly becoming a service business. Want to store your precious data? Don't keep it where moth and rust destroy.  Leave it all with us for a monthly fee, or for free if you promise to notice our constant but subtly-placed advertising banners.

Need a complex problem solved? It was not unusual, until recently, for a seat with a data consultant to be up to tens of thousands of dollars. The barriers to entry are now lower for modelling and data manipulation consultants, such that all it takes is a short lease contract for software and the computer power on which to run it (and soon, your sexy smartphone).

The challenge for data centres is business continuity delivered in an efficient way. The global ICT industry was estimated in 2007 to be producing 2% of the world's carbon emissions and data centres 14% of that, the latter of which appears to be growing. Google keeps the server hallways in its centre at 27 degrees celsius to reduce airconditioning loads. Other centres are being built near proposed tidal power generation sites, such as one near the Pentland Firth in Scotland.

The technology can be used across the entire spectrum from trivial to world-changing problems. There are, for example, teams of people involved in the search for intelligent life beyond Earth. The SETI@home project used hundreds of thousands of idle home computers to review reams of data from a radio telescope array for faraway signals that couldn't be dismissed as noise. Last year, Amazon donated a part of their cloud so that SETI could continue their efforts with even greater power for the next six years.

It's frustrating but also amazing that the problems we want to solve seem to become more complex the more we learn. The cloud will no doubt become the way that we will relate to and get closer to solutions to the most tricky and long-standing unknowns.

Image by Karin Dalziel, made available by Creative Commons licence via Flickr.

Technology a double-edged sword in a rapidly developing Asia

Greg Adamson

Patent filings in China this year may surpass both the US and Japan. For India, IT and business process outsourcing is now a $50b industry. Asia is racing ahead in the technology stakes. But it isn’t all smooth sailing.

The Australian Financial Review on 10 January this year carried an article by Yu Yongding, former director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which stated that “China has become one of the most polluted countries in the world. Dust and smog choke its cities. All major rivers are contaminated. Although progress has been made, deforestation and desertification are serious.”

There are many reports of quality problems with Chinese goods: criminal adulteration of milk with melamine, an industrial material used to increase the apparent protein content; use of lead paint in exported children’s toys; and the collapse of a newly constructed 13-storey apartment building in Shanghai in 2009, to name a few.

When I read these reports I feel as though history is repeating itself. I remember reading of the adulteration of bread with alum and of milk with water and chalk in 19th century England; of the thousands of deaths caused by London's “Great Smog” of 1952; and of the fact that in the early 20th century the River Thames was devoid of aquatic life due to manufacturing and other pollution.

Those historical cases had various causes: uncontrolled industrialisation; unanticipated consequences of technology; profiteering; criminal behaviour. The impact is still felt today. In some US cities, for example, modern traffic chaos can be viewed as the outcome of car companies buying up and closing down public transport (a serious subject humorously described in Who Framed Roger Rabbit).

The same causes are evident across modern-day Asia. Many of the problems have local causes – economic, technical, business, regulatory or otherwise. For other problems, responsibility seems to lie outside the country. The 1984 Union Carbide disaster in India’s Bhopal, which left thousands dead, created the impression that global corporations may apply lower safety standards in developing countries.

Some of my friends roll their eyes when I talk about addressing technology quality or environmental issues in Asia. But the 19th and 20th century problems in Europe and North America didn’t just fix themselves. In the 1870s, physician and scientist Dr AH Hassall led a campaign to overcome food adulteration in Victorian England. Scientists and engineers were among environmentalists who changed the way we think about water quality and cleaned up London and the Thames. Consumer legislation has allowed us to expect that the food we eat won’t poison us. Social awareness around these problems was informed by science and addressed by technical activities and legal and industry standards.

In Asia today we see progress at the infrastructure level. We may argue about the timing and extent of the progress, but it at least demonstrates awareness. China is a major investor in renewable energy technology. India has developed a sophisticated IT industry, including its prestigious Indian Institute of Technology. Notable is the early approach of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who invited the advice of Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics and a pioneer in industrial automation, regarding options for industrial development in India. Asia’s most economically developed country, Japan, led the world in the adoption of what became known as “quality systems” in manufacturing, building quality into a product rather than rejecting defects at the end. This approach was based on the work of statistician W.E. Deming, who was invited to contribute his ideas by the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers.

I also see this commitment to awareness of the impact of technology at the individual level: a December 2011 IEEE conference in Hyderabad, India, focussing on sustainable technologies, has received more than a thousand papers. An Indian engineer recently explained that all the world’s IT waste ends up in India and other underdeveloped countries, causing significant problems. If controls to manage the handling of poisonous old car batteries can be set up, why not poisonous old mobile batteries? I spoke to a Chinese engineer in the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics who expressed his concerns about materials substitution in building construction, and the growing importance of quality control in China.

These are just individual examples which illustrate a larger picture: many engineers across Asia understand the societal challenges created by technology.

For me, this is a source of hope for the future.


These and other issues will be discussed at the IEEE conference on Technology and Society in Asia, to be held in Singapore 28-29 October 2012.  Further information on the conference can be found here.

Photograph by Sandruz, made available by Creative Commons licence via Flickr.