hsyq8xg******.com wrote:
> www.gcn.com/print/27_8/46117-1.html
>
> Interesting quotes --
>
> “We have achieved the promises of Moore’s Law,”
>
> “Much more pervasive now is the problem with software.”
>
> “Software is getting bigger and more complex,"
>
> "The Windows Vista operating system is so much bigger than its
> predecessors, that it is not any faster even though processing speeds
> have increased.”
>
>
> = = = ==================================
>
> DOD wants apps up to speed
>
> Despite hardware advances, complex code and heavy traffic put a drag
> on systems Bloated operating systems and applications are preventing
> military organizations from getting sufficient speed from their
> information technology systems, according to several speakers at a
> recent Navy IT Day in Washington.
>
> “We have achieved the promises of Moore’s Law,” the decades-old axiom
> that processing power would roughly double every 18 to 24 months, said
> Chris Miller, the Navy’s domain lead for command, control,
> communications, computers and intelligence (C4I).
>
> “Much more pervasive now is the problem with software.”
>
> “Software is getting bigger and more complex,” Miller said. “The
> Windows Vista operating system is so much bigger than its
> predecessors, [but] it is not any faster, even though processing
> speeds have increased.”
>
> Elizabeth Sedlacek, director of information systems and infrastructure
> at the Marine Corps Systems Command, echoed Miller’s complaint.
> “Windows 95 required 50M of hard drive space,” she said. “Vista
> requires 15G.”
>
> Part of the problem is that Moore’s Law isn’t the only one in the IT
> universe.
>
> Sedlacek said increased resource requirements from the multiplication
> of software code illustrate an adaptation of Parkinson’s Law: software
> will expand to fill the resources available to it. The original
> Parkinson’s Law states that work would expand to fill the time
> available. A corollary to Parkinson’s Law states that software
> eventually reaches a coefficient of inefficiency, meaning that it gets
> so large that it no longer processes data effectively.
>
> Sedlacek summarized her conundrum by citing yet another law. “Wirth’s
> Law states that software gets faster slower than hardware gets
> faster,” she said. According to Wirth’s law, then, software will
> always lag behind processing capacity.
>
> But it wasn’t always so. “In the 1970s and 1980s, hardware processing
> power was wanting, and programmers had to code effectively and
> efficiently in order to get done what we needed to get done,” Sedlacek
> said. “Now that capacity has increased and the software industry is
> much larger, developers want to put lots of features on software and
> to do it quickly in order to gain a competitive advantage. Efficiency
> of coding is no longer a priority.”
>
> A problem the Marines face, for example, is that they rarely operate
> in a resource-rich environment.
>
> Marines are on expedition-like missions when they deploy, Sedlacek
> said, and they typically operate with a minimal footprint in areas of
> limited bandwidth. They rely on small handheld devices for information
> and communications.
>
> She challenged industry to help solve the problem.
>
> Aside from software coding, agencies could address the problem through
> more efficient data management.
>
> Miller suggested that the Navy needs a data strategy for how it
> expands applications. Richard Hull, chief scientist at Modus Operandi,
> agreed in an interview with GCN that getting smarter about collecting
> and processing data will help software work more efficiently.
>
> “Software gets slower because the data operating over a network is
> increasing faster than computer processing rates,” Hull said.
>
> Some satellites generate several gigabytes of data per second, Hull
> said. “The next generation may be terabytes of information per
> second,” he said. “If a computer has to deal with 100 times or 1,000
> times the amount of data today than it did yesterday, it’s going to be
> swamped.”
>
> Hull suggested two strategies to cope with the glut of data. One
> involves prioritizing so that only the data most relevant to the
> mission is actually processed.
>
> “A weather information system may have collected temperature once per
> hour, yielding 24 readings per day,” he said. “Then a new technology
> comes along allowing you to collect a new temperature reading every
> second. That’s 600 times more information than you had before.
>
> But that doesn’t mean you need to analyze it all in depth. You’re
> really just interested in changes or anomalies.”
>
> Using semantic architectures to analyze and filter data sets up
> hierarchies of data and processing that can help ensure that only the
> most interesting data climbs the ladder for in-depth analysis. “You
> might have a network of 64 computers filtering the data and passing up
> relevant data to a level consisting of 16 computers and then to eight
> computers,” Hull said. “This can filter out a lot of junk and provides
> a higher degree of fidelity in information collecting and analysis.”
>
> Another possible solution is to use cloud computing schemes, he said.
> Cloud computing refers to the ability to construct ad hoc networks of
> computers that can share resources to tackle tough computing
> challenges.
>
> An organization might have 10,000 computers at its disposal. Cloud
> computing provides a management structure by which, for example, 1,000
> of those machines might be aggregated to solve a particular problem.
>
> “It could take a year to build a network of
>
> 1,000 computers,” Hull said, “but the cloud computing architecture
> allows this to be done quickly.”
>
> Another potential solution comes in the form of muticore processing,
> essentially assigning pieces of the puzzle to different processors
> running simultaneously on a single device. There are limitations to
> this approach, as there are with cloud computing, because most
> applications are single-threaded, Sedlacek said. Muticore central
> processing units do not increase computing power when the applications
> can’t be divvied up into discrete tasks.
>
> The premise of multicore computing is that the computing capacity of
> microchips is leveling off and that the computing power inherent in
> existing machines must be maximized and optimized. Making that happen
> requires programmers to accomplish two things, said Joey Sevin, Navy
> programs manager at Mercury Federal Systems. They must develop a
> greater understanding of computer hardware, and they must do something
> about how they write software.
>
> “It requires people to think differently about applications and how to
> write them,” Sevin said.
>
> “Programmers are encouraged to throw off code quickly, but in the end
> this is very inefficient when the application is single-threaded.”
>
> Sevin said the solution is to use middleware that can coordinate
> messaging among multiple processors. “What needs to happen is the
> adoption of a standard” for a message passing interface, he said.
>
> MPIs would allow existing computers to distribute tasks across their
> existing processors and boost their processing power. The effect of
> distributing computing assignments across multiple processors also has
> the effect of making the software less complex, Sevin said.
>
> Mercury is working on developing multiprocessor solutions for
> processing sensor data.
>
> Because data collection platforms are getting smaller and more
> complex, Mercury wants to pool processing power to support multiple
> missions.
>
> “The idea is to create an environment adaptive to different
> situations,” Sevin said. An unmanned aerial vehicle “may go out on a
> mission.
>
> When it finishes its job and transmits its data, the computing asset
> may be reallocated to some other mission in another location and with
> a different type of sensor.”
>
> This type of system is designed to handle two problems inherent in the
> collection and transmission of sensor data: latency and throughput.
>
> Latency refers to the need for computing to function in real time.
> Throughput problems arise when the volume of data overwhelms
> processors and causes delays.
>
> What sort of solution would the Marine Corps be most interested in?
> Sedlacek leaned toward simpler and leaner software. She urged industry
> to adopt open, modular and scalable software designs and to avoid
> “featuritis.” She also suggested that the Marine Corps might develop
> incentives for lean software design, and she urged software developers
> to adopt the YAGNI principle: You Ain’t Gonna Need It, so don’t code
> it.
>
> = = = ==================================
>
> www.gcn.com/print/27_8/46117-1.html

They (USN) must be using that POS toy os linux cause no where does it
say they're using Vista.
Frank