December 2007

With its new Android Operating System, Google plans to deliver for mobile phones what the iPhone failed to - at a cheaper price and with greater innovation (Ryan Kim, "Android could transform any cell phone into a computer or game device," San Francisco Chronicle, 6 November 2007). More than this, Google plans to use this new OS to create an open mobile environment where innovation was formerly quashed.

On the high-performance computing front, AMD introduced its FireStream 9170 chip package for Stream Computing:

"The FireStream is being manufactured on a advanced, 55 nanometer manufacturing process and will use a 'double precision' floating point technology for scientific and engineering calculations. The processor board includes 2G bytes of GDDR3 RAM..., a type of memory designed by ATI, and consumes under 150 watts of power" (James Niccolai, "AMD Brings GPU Technology to High-Performance Computing," IDG, 8 November 2007).

Not to be outdone, Intel introduced its high peformance microprocessor designed with hafnium-laced silicon chips that will be more energy efficient and promises to pack more power into less space with pathways just 45 nanometers wide (Tom Abate, "Intel expected to surpass AMD with fast new microprocessors," San Francisco Chronicle, 12 November 2007).

In the virtualization technology sector, Sun unveiled its xVM Suite, composed of an xVM Server as a hypervisor with support for Linux, Solaris, and Windows guest operating systems and an xVM Ops Server as a management console released under the open-source GPLv3 license (Chris Kanaracus, "Sun Joins Virtualization Fray With xVM," IDG, 14 November 2007). The xVM Server will also provide access to ZFS and Predictive Self-Healing, much like IBM's Tivoli Suite (to be discussed shortly).

This comes on the heels of Oracle's own unveiling of its virtualization product, Oracle VM, based on the open-source Xen hypervisor project (ibid).

Despite these great innovations, no one can outshine IBM, apparently:

1) In a move to reduce costs and manpower involved in running data centers, IBM introduced its Tivoli Suite - Change and Configuration Management Database; Usage and Accounting Manager; and Security Operations Manager (Agam Shah, "I.B.M. Gives Autonomic Computing a Brain," IDG, 8 November 2007). In effect, with Tivoli, a company's data center can run with little-to-no manpower because it will be enabled with its own virtual brain and self-regulation/detection systems.

2) In what seems to be the next evolutionary step in IT, IBM introduced Blue Cloud using Hadoop software running on Linux and based on the Nutch open-source project and a version of Google's Map Reduce software (Steve Lohr, "I.B.M. to Push 'Cloud Computing,' Using Data From Afar," The New York Times, 15 November 2007). As an internet-based supercomputing system, Blue Cloud will enable vast stores of information and processing resources to be remotely accessible through laptops, cell phones, and other mobile devices (ibid).

3) In a final show of the ultimate in supercomputing recognition, IBM made the top two spots in the Top 500 Supercomputer List of 2007 (Tom Abate, "Blue Gene's supercomputer dominance isn't fading at Livermore lab," San Francisco Chronicle, 13 November 2007). The first five spots of this list include:

a) IBM's Blue Gene, running at 478.2 teraflops and located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory;

b) IBM's supercomputer running at 167.3 teraflops in Germany;

c) Silicon Graphic's supercomputer commissioned in New Mexico to work on water conservation problems, among others;

d) HP's supercomputer in India; and

e) HP's supercomputer in Sweden.

While we are fast approaching the potentiality of our electronic-imagination, a need for a language to support the new reality of autonomic computing and virtualization is fast becoming critical. Technology is effectively forcing us to re-write and re-account our lived reality. No longer will the antiquated language of our erstwhile doxa be acceptable as accurate and relevant.

Moreover, with the above-mentioned amazing innovations and technological breakthroughs, it is poignant and perhaps more astonishing how we can simultaneously advance forward while firmly gripping onto our own decadence and petty self-annihilation. As I will discuss in the next four entries, the disparity is all too telling, casting a dark shadow of problemmatic issues threatening to cause our downfall.

Perhaps juxtaposed against our potentiality and against our amazing e-advancements, we will be shocked back into 'sense' towards our empowerment, rather than what seems to be a surrender to our macabre shackling of 'kool-aiding' decay and flamboyant 'cultural' degradation...

If not as a language, then perhaps as a reflecting prism, hyphenation, please...