IBM Messing With Molecules

This might excite you: IBM has carved a circuit onto a single molecule.

Yes, a single molecule. It's not an H₂O molecule by the way, it's a Cn molecule, where n stands for a very large number and C stands for Carbon. Carbon, as I'm sure you remember from your school years, has an atom that has four electrons missing in its outer orbit. The effect of this is that Carbon is really good at bonding, or as my chemistry teacher used to say “Carbon is a promiscuous little atom”.

We also knew it was versatile at bonding with itself (a nasty little habit if you ask me)—diamond and graphite are the examples we were given. But we never knew in those days that it could do tubes (nanotubes, in fact). It can, and the nanotubes are very strong (like diamond) and, even though very thin, they can be quite long—like thousands of times as long as they are thick.

Well, IBM has disturbed the peace of one of these carbon tubes by carving a circuit on it and this is significant, because it is the first time anyone has carved a circuit on a single molecule. The circuit IBM carved is ten times smaller than the circuits that currently get carved on silicon, and IBM not only carved the circuit but turned it on and ran it at switching speeds of over 50 megahertz.

I'm sure you've worked out the relevance of this, but just in case you haven't, here's the point. Moore's Law had been repealed. It depended primarily on making circuits smaller and smaller every few years and, well, they ran out of smallness. It is no longer possible to make the semiconductor materials much thinner, and worse than that, with circuits that small there's a cooling problem. So right now the semiconductor companies (Intel, IBM, AMD et al) are resorting to other tactics to increase chip speeds. Such as having multiple cores and switching off the power to the parts of a chip that is idle. We have managed to claw our way up to Gigahertz chip speeds by printing circuits on silicon, but within 10 years or so we'll hit a hard stop with silicon. It's doubtful if we'll get to 100 Gigahertz.

But, according to IBM, nanotube circuitry will take us into Terahertz territory—just as soon as it becomes commercial, which is estimated to take, conveniently, 10 years. And...., there is no heating problem—at least IBM has not detected one.

So in theory, Moore's Law is back in force, God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.

Collective and the Moore-Is-Not-Enough Law

All is not right with the world. Here's a fact that will surprise you (if you've never had to build a Data Center). Data Centers are the most costly office space that a company has. Of course, it's not really office space, the power supply and environmental requirements are much more severe. The costs (in the US) for building a new Data Center vary between $670–$2000 per square foot. Ouch.

My source for this is Ed Taylor, CEO of Collective, an Austin-based but US-wide infrastructure consultancy. I've known Ed for quite a while, but never talked to him about the business he's in. He briefed me recently about a service Collective provides. It has a consultancy specialization in helping to build, maintain and relocate Data Centers. Ed opened my eyes to a strange fact:

The world is running out of data center space.

You wouldn't think that was happening would you? After all in the last ten years:

• Bandwidth costs have fallen by a factor of 10 (and bandwidth availability has mushroomed, making distributed processing arrangements far more viable).
• Disk storage costs have fallen by a factor of 400 and form factor (per Terabyte) has fallen by a factor of 8.
• Server costs have fallen by a factor of 10 (for a 4-way server) while server power has increased by a factor of 30, and the form factor has shrunk to the size of a blade.

So how can we be running out of data center space? Shouldn't there be an embarrassing surplus?

Clearly we are consuming computer power faster than Moore's Law is providing it. There's a Moore-Is-Not-Enough Law in operation, which reads as follows: “The demand for computer power more than doubles every 18 months. Moore is not enough”.

By the way, the reduction in form factor disguises the fact that the heat output of the technology isn't falling. Having the physical space doesn't mean you can use it—you might not be able to keep it cool. Today's computers, blade servers in particular, are seriously uncool.

Projections suggest that most data centers that run out of space will do so because of the cooling problem. One estimate suggests that 50 percent of data centers are going to run into trouble in the next few years.

Ed thinks that Collective is going to do well helping large companies address this problem—and he's probably right. An interesting fact he gave me: In a recent assignment, the average utilization of the servers Collective consolidated was 6%.

Jeeze Louise.

Homage to Babel Fish

Someone asked me how come I was able to read the German Posting to last week's blog. Had I studied German in my youth? No, but I had studied The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy and surfed the Internet extensively. I was therefore familiar with Babel Fish—both the fictional and the factual one. So for those of you that have never used Babel Fish, here is the automatic translation that it gave me for the blog feedback posting:

“One of the largest changes, which will happen resulting from the movement at service of oriented architecture, is the drastic change in the definition of a packed application. Think of this, Robin. What is a packed application? It is, in its simplest form, the coding of a set of business processes. With the movement toward of SOA we could begin to see the more loosely connected services which were combined with who those the process the new definition of packed applications. In this kind you would not have really a traditional application—rather you would have an accumulation services together at the running time were combined, the business context understood. Of course this not necessarily simply would obtain... would be, but I think that we witness the at the beginning of a very interesting revolution. What do you, Robin think?"

OK, I know this isn't perfect, but IMHO it reveals the meaning—and to me, that's impressive.

And so, remembering that I'd seen a translation service on Google, I tried the same text on that—only to discover that the output was identical. The Google translation service is Babel Fish.

More On AntiVirus (AV)

Given the response I've received to the comments I made last week about Anti-Virus software, I may decide to cover this issue regularly. Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised to attract flack from the Anti-Virus vendors. However, I've yet to see one good argument in favour of signature-based AV (either in the comments posted to this blog or in emails I've received). The simple fact is that signature-based AV software is inadequate protection and its day is passing.

There is technology that does a far better job. I've mentioned 3 vendors (AppSense, Bit9, Securewave) who provide such technology and more will probably emerge soon. (Any vendors out there with similar technology please let me know). It's early days, but I have little doubt that a new trend is in progress here. I can tell from some of knee-jerk reactions to the last blog and I can feel it in the air.

We're not done here.