Virtual Machines for Harvard Commencement

Dear Reader: each year at the Harvard Commencement, three graduating students speak to approximately 32,000 students, faculty, parents, alumni/ae, and guests. As the first anthem concludes, a senior strides to the microphone and announces, "Salvete omnes!" What follows is one of the oldest of Harvard traditions - an oration in Latin. Although we had no similar tradition at MIT, I thought I would contribute this modest effort to the cause of improving communication between layabouts studying long-dead topics and superheroes developing exciting new technology.

Salavete omnes! VM est omnis divisa in partes tres, placitum et inventor Bob Creasy. Primary component eram hypervisor. Alter CMS , sermo monitor ratio. tertius eram RSCS , Longinquus Spooling Defero Subsystem. Horum omnium fortissimi sunt Hypervisor. Dissimilis alius IBM operating ratio VM /370, quod suus decessor CP -40 quod CP /67, postulo proprius intentio repono tutela quod relocation hardware. Creasy had seen mane in et relocation hardware could soleo suggero rectum apparatus pariter et rectum memoria. Is insight venit et him dum inrideo MBTA LXXVII bus ex Arlington ut Cambridge.

EGO propono a toast ut IBM Cambridge Scientific Center quod et suus farsighted procurator , Norm Rasmussen.

The chip wars are about to become even more bloody...

In this next phase, the chip manufacturers fight a "Battle Royal" to supply the silicon for one of the fastest-growing segments of computing: smartphones, tiny laptops and tablet-style devices.


The NY Times analyzes the match. “The fight pits several big chip companies — each trying to put its own stamp on the same basic design for mobile chips — against Intel, the dominant maker of PC chips, which is using an entirely different design to enter a market segment in which it has a minuscule presence.”


Intel remains the last mainstream chip maker to both design and build its own products, which go into the vast majority of the PCs and servers sold each year. Most other chips are built by a group of contract manufacturers, based primarily in Asia, to meet the specifications of other companies that design and market them.


Intel’s Atom line of chips, used in most netbooks and now coming to smartphones, can cost two to three times as much as competitive chips. In addition, the Atom chips consume too much power for many smaller gadgets.


Intel executives argue that consumers will demand more robust mobile computing experiences, requiring chips with more power and PC-friendly software, both traditional Intel strengths.


“As these things look more like computers, they will value some of the capabilities we have and want increasing levels of performance,” said Robert B. Crooke, the Intel vice president in charge of the Atom chip.


I tend to be with Intel here, but I fear they may be making a dangerous mistake. The original Atom chips could support Intel’s Virtualization Technology. Those features seem to be missing from the newest Atom chips, making it unlikely that you can use virtual machine technology on a smartphone to make that phone a full participant in Cloud Computing.


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Interestingly, articles from the NY Times are not available online unless you are a subscriber. But the same information is sometimes posted on the NY Times blogs, which are at present outside the “paywall.”

Find Ashlee Vance's article about the forthcoming battle here. You might also take a look at a blog post by Nick Bilton with a wish list of features for future cell phones A second advantage of reading the blogs is that you can also read the comments; the wish list attracted quite a few.

IT's Perfect Storm: Where Smart Phones, The Cloud, and Virtualization Meet

Last month I cited a Morgan Stanley Report on the prospects for "the mobile internet."  Upon reflection, I believe  the Morgan Stanley view misses some of the key forces remaking the IT industry today.   I am now preparing a lecture series on this topic and would appreciate your thoughts.

Proposed Lecture Series: Information Technology’s “Perfect Storm”

Accelerating information technology is having a disruptive influence on our economy, but the underlying forces causing this disruption are yet to be identified and understood by the vast majority of business leaders, government officials, and technologists themselves.

Like the Perfect Storm, three fundamental technologies: smart phones, cloud computing, and virtualization; are changing the face of our society and changing business as we understand it. The greatest effects are most visible at the points where the three intersect and merge. This combination threatens massive restructuring not only in computing and information technology, but in financial markets, entertainment, news, politics, education, societal values, and in the very ways we come to learn and understand things (epistemology).

In a March, 2009 blog post, the iPhone as a Murder Suspect, this author attributed many of the following deaths to the ever evolving smart phone: phone booths, pay phones, the phone on the kitchen wall, landline phones, the home phone number, paper address books, the “ month at a glance” calendar, wristwatches, PDAs. Also threatened are airline boarding passes, paper coupons, TV remote controls, garage door openers, point and shoot cameras, Walkman and MP3 players, and handheld gaming devices

A very recent and extremely visible disruptive effect of this Perfect Storm was its impact on the market for handheld and dashboard mounted GPS devices. Smart phones with location detecting chipsets and large color screens can do everything that dedicated GPS units from Garmin, Magellan, and Tom Tom can do. Smart phones are leading this attack, with the Cloud providing reserve troops. By using the smart phone for directions and display, while accessing continually updated maps and directions from the Cloud, supplemented by traffic reports, weather updates, parking advice, and shopping information, the phone becomes a far superior functional device and its multi-purpose nature provides an insurmountable cost advantage over dedicated GPS devices.

Moreover, the low cost and ease of writing and distributing applications for the smart phone and Cloud encourages vast numbers of entrepreneurs to extend the capabilities of these technologies in yet-undiscovered ways. Google’s Q4 2009 introduction of a free navigation application wiped 16 per cent off the valuation of Garmin and 23 per cent off Tom Tom.

And the story will grow more dramatic. Our three technologies have a long history, but recent advances have brought them to the fore. These pivotal events over the past couple of years have wrought fundamental changes:

Smart Phones: The July, 2008 introduction of the iPhone 3G with its application library made the smart phone a true general purpose computing device. Within 16 months, developers had created over 100,000 apps for the revolutionary App Store, making it the world’s largest applications store. App Store users have downloaded well over three billion apps, clearly making it the world’s most popular applications store. Google just introduced its own smart phone, the Nexus One, in Jan., 2010. A variety of smart-phone like devices of varying sizes and capabilities, sometimes called netbooks or tablets, are being delivered this year.

Cloud Computing: The 2008 publication of “The Big Switch” by Nicholas Carr brought Cloud computing to public attention, Amazon had launched its pioneering service, the Amazon Elastic Cloud, or EC2, in August 2006, primarily to monetize the extra capacity Amazon had purchased to handle peak loads for holidays. Microsoft will introduce a competing service in 1st Quarter 2010. Other major cloud providers include Google and IBM, as well as several smaller companies.

Virtualization: First a bit of history - IBM’s mainframe based VM (Virtual Machine) operating system was the most versatile, responsive, and secure system of its day. First prototyped in 1966, the VM System required both special hardware features and its own software. VM systems developed for microprocessors were far less robust until 2006, when both Intel and AMD delivered chips that support a full virtual machine implementation. Now processors can run unmodified guest operating systems with minimal performance degradation. VMware’s IPO in August, 2007, brought these developments to the attention of the investment and user communities. Virtualization, in the form of Virtual Machines and Virtual Operating Environments, provides the technological foundation for Cloud Computing. It has been successfully demonstrated on smart phones, and provides the likely basis on which future business, government, and social applications will be designed and developed.

Clouds, Smart Phones, and Virtual Machines

Having recently participated in forums on both Mobile and on Cloud Computing, both well run, intellectually stimulating, and attended by hundreds, you might infer that I have been discussing which technology will be more significant. The forums, in Cambridge MA, were held only eight days and 12 minutes walking distance apart, yet appeared to attract disparate audiences. Outside of myself, the only person I saw attending both forums was Mike Werner, Platform Strategy Advisor- Cloud Computing, Microsoft.

Ask me to declare a winner, I say virtual machine concepts. The combination of Smart Phones and Clouds, connected through a revived belief in virtual machines, will be the new paradigm. It needs a new name, maybe McCloud (the Mobile Computing Cloud).

Meanwhile, some parties are battling over ownership of the old paradigms. From CIO.com:

VMware CEO Paul Maritz took another jab at IBM, sometimes called a pioneer of virtualization because of its use of the technology in its mainframes.

"Even IBM, which likes to claim to be the inventor of virtualization, didn't fully realize and anticipate what could have been done with this technology," Maritz said. "It's not about individual machines but about how groups of servers relate to each other."

First and foremost, Virtual Machine operating systems were invented at IBM’s Cambridge Scientific Center by a team led by Bob Creasy. I would give much of the credit for extending the virtual machine outside the bounds of its host to my friend Edson Hendricks, who developed the RSCS networking subsystem, which he described in a seminal paper in the IBM Systems Journal. Ed’s subsystem became the basis for VNET, IBM’s internal network which in the 1970s became one of the largest computer networks in the world.

This is not to disparage the fine work done by VMware and others extending the virtual machine concept, but putting the virtual devices on the network opened up many of these possibilities. You can do more today with a multi-gigabit packet switching network than you could with a 2400 bit dial-up line.

I referred to Ed’s paper recently while I was preparing an SBIR proposal for a virtual machine security subsystem; his approach holds up very well, thirty years later.

The scramble for credit reminds me of my old friend, Eddie Bernays, who organized a festival commemorating the 50th anniversary of Edison’s invention of the light bulb. Attendees included President Hoover, Henry Ford, Orville Wright, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Madame Curie.

I fondly anticipate that most of you will participate in the 50th anniversary of Cloud Computing, honoring me as the inventor of the concept. What’s that you say: I didn’t invent Cloud Computing? Well, Edison didn’t invent the light bulb either; you can look it up in your Wikipedia. Then again, Thomas Edison and I both knew Eddie Bernays, the Father of Modern Public Relations; Long life to all.