Sustainable computing, or not?

Why we need a new kind CS for the 21st century,
and why its the same as the old kind.

1. The business model of the entire computing industry
is based on a fundamentally unsustainable premise:
a form of pyramid sales,
which is quintessential of the late 20th century

The top of the pyramid is the ever faster,
ever bigger infrastructure service, and
"big iron" servers and routers and data centers,
and associated large oligopolistic service providers.

These encourage profligate power consumption,
require absurd heat dissipation, and are centralised in a risky way
(risky in terms of safety, sustainability, security and sanity).
They also require massive investments in ever faster
switch's and processors, disks, memory and software bloat.

The investment cycles are not in a smooth curve,
but are in ever larger step functions -
e.g. to build new plant for new fab for
new chip is now looking close to
getting a new drug to market -
only how much less useful?

ditto operating systems (viz vista).
ditto middleware. ditto any research programme in CS
likely to have an impact on practice.

2. the consumer end of the pyramid (base:)
requires ever increasing numbers of tiny devices run on batteries.
Originating in the switchover from PCs to laptops,
now PDAs, cell phones, and eventually
thousands of ubiquitous sensors and mote processors
per person, per car, many battery powered,
and often toxic to the environment,
with no model of recovery/recycling or even
actually a good cost/benefit requirement analysis!

3. Fundamentally, Moore's law is the wrong model, and
systems like the Internet, peer-to-peer, and cheap disks encourage
the uptake of Metcalfe's law with a vengeance -

of Course, neither Moore nor Metcalfe's laws
are actually true invariants/universals.
they are just observations of the value of
a particular combination of
scale through integration at the technical level
and the growth model of economy requiring
sustenance through ever new replacement tech.

The embedding of these "laws" leads to many
bad practice examples in terms of sustainability...
some modest ones: the Web consists of
many multiple libraries of congress' worth of store,
and the Internet's worth of computers consisting of
multiple millions of cray2s worth of CPU,
when actually we didn't add much to the global pool of knowledge post web,
and 99.999999% of those 1 billion CPUs are idle at any time!

Ditto the 2.5 billion cell phones,
which have now reached a mean lifetime of 18 months - sure this allows
deployment of new tech in phones without due regard for legacy support
for the moment. But it also means that by 2008, we will be disposing of
10^9 phones per year. That doesn't sound like something that can carry
on very long. Intel (and AMD etc), ARM, Nokia, Sony/Ericsson,
etc etc are all going to be in very very bad trouble in short order.

What will this mean for the rest of the pyramid?
well, it also means obviously that Microsoft
(and Symbian and the like) will be in bad trouble,
as the subsequent to next deployment of PCs might not happen in any
significant way at all, then post Vista OS
(and anything else that represents bloat and inability to
shift to some new steady state that doesn't have binomial expansion of
memory/storage/power needs/battery replacement duty cycle, etc etc,
will be very very dead in the water (analogy works well:)

What does this then mean for computer science research?
I think its a mixed bag.
1. fundamentally, an industry that moves to steady state moves to
process optimisation rather than innovation - so industry investment in
serious research might drop, although in some sense, process
optimisation is potentially something that fundamental computer science
can do a lot with (e.g. correct software would be an example)
2. on the other hand, the resources available at that steady state
point will be pretty staggering so exploiting them well will be an
interesting systems task.
3. what about alternatives to the high end power/heat problem
and the low end smart dust/pollution problems? good topic for DTG...

Of course, there are those people that believe technology
can work around the problems and continue "exponential" growth.

In Snow Crash, there's an image of the difference between the
Sumerian's and the Egyptians, both of whom sustained large scale
civilisations that lasted considerably longer than the Euro/US hi-tech
one has done to date, and I don't know why, but the image seems
informative in some way. Sumerian built out of clay, and wrote on clay
which was then baked to preserve it, and was abundant in the
Tigris/Euphrates flood plains. The buildings
washed away, but the baked tablets lasted for ever. The Egyptians built
out of stone, but wrote on papyrus. The buildings are still there, but
the papyrus rotted. Don't ask me what the analogy for
Mac OS X on a power PC versus Vista on an x86 is, as I havn't got a clue.


j.

reviewing ICT

reviewing ICT is the remit of various committes - ICT is the term chosen by various european luminaries to be telecom (commmunications) and IT combined (dunno why:) - reviewing it is often done by self-selecting committees- CS being a younger (sub?-) discipline is full of keen young gunslingers who love seeing other peoples work. EE being an older discipline has young gunslingers who are too busy to do reviewing so guess what ? you get semi-retired people who don't know moore's law from murphy's law. so when you combine them what happens?

search me, but i doubt its fun:)

clog

so suriving cambridge in an affordable way means dealing with non university organisations to bolster up any sort of reasoanble mortgage or rent. Two extreme alternatives are
i) to start a company (which seems to be rather short term, albeit things like xen are very fine) or
ii) to go join microsoft research, which does long term research which is very similar to that going on in the university (e.g. in terms of programming languages, adaptive computing, distributed systems and networks, operating systems etc etc, as well as some theory)....

i) lets you stay in the uni, but is counterindicated for people who want to do long term things, whereas ii) doubles your income but involves leaving

surely shum mishtake>?

the recent professorial pay review didnt particulalry help either, unless you are one of the zillion physicists/chemists/math FRS or the 2 (yes, count them) CS FRS, where it was only worth a point or two -weird, what happened to comparability and market related, eh?

clog

Systems, systems, systems - are they just the
science of the kludge?

hm - so cross-layer optimisation, for example - isn't this an oxymoron - a decent system would be layered optimally - what are layers, anyhow?

clog

so now will we seen the emergence of i-T, basically clothing made by apple with wearable gadgets made out of i-cloth? i-dunno

clog

here's one for
Steve Coast

The Goblin Ressurrection, by Goddard Slimak.

Reviewed by Mercedes Bandwagon

This is a new book about the so-called "Wst Cambridge Phonomenon", where since the move to the new Center for Metamagical Sciences, and the Picoscience centre, and the new Center For Advanced Phantasmagoria, and the Wilomena Grates Bldg, a fantastic number of new bespoke businesses have been spun out from the National Pomanian University, including
several basemetal2goldband wireless virtualisation and cleansweep broomstick companies, and one or two companies selling model checkers for Rock Star's companions, as well as theorem provers for string theoreticians.

WHen asked about the secret of his success, Professor Dame Anne-Marie ("space") Hopper remarked:
"Out here on the periphery, we are stoned, immaculate".

(ressemblance to previous books about the Goblin Reservation, Cambridge Science Park, and its denizens, is completely uncoincidental)

(No hobbits were harmed much during the making of this review.