Waves, BIG Waves and Outage Explanation

Quite the news day this Tuesday, September 29, 2009

1. Google Wave will send out 100,000 invitations to Google Wave tomorrow. This is shaping up to be 'the' killer app of the year/decade. With the hype machine in full swing we'll see if it lives up to the promise. I have my request in for an invite!

2. BIG wave : after a magnitude 8.0 earth quake was recorded near American Samoa, a Tsunami warning for the South Pacific was issued. A Tsunami advisory was apparently issued for Northern California.

3. The Google Apps Sep.24 outage was a result of a high load on Google Contacts. Contacts is an integral part of Google Wave.

Cloud Computing Analysis From Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Just a quick link to an outstanding blog post by Irving Wladawsky-Berger. I've linked to him before, because I thoroughly enjoy his thoughts and analysis. Among the amazing amount of cloud computing hype out there, Irving truly gets it and shows us how clouds and computing have evolved and will continue to.

Check out his August 31 post on The Data Center in the Cambrian Age. He compares cloud computing to the Cambrian Age, a geological period where evolution accelerated rapidly into more complex life forms. He also references an excellent paper done by Google engineers Luis Andre Barroso and Urs Hoelzle on Wharehouse-Scale computers.

Data Centre Stock Index Launched

The Broad Group has announced the "World's first global data centre market performance index". The index is a partnership with Data Centre News and AHV Associated LLP, a corporate finance advisor based in London. The index is a capitalisation-weighted index of large companies in the data center sector from all over the world. The index has shown so far that the U.S. dominates companies in the sector and that the sector is yielding good returns for the leading public companies engaged in data centres.

I of course, MUST protest about the "first data center index" claim of course. :) Just about a year ago I started my own capitalization-weighted index of companies I felt were at the heart of the data center industry. I recently posted an update with the graphs for how it has been doing. I maintain it in Google Spreadsheets, and would be happy to share it if anyone is interested.

The Internet turns 40

As a follow-up to my post yesterday on BBN -- I found this article at ComputerWorld about the Internet turning 40. September 2, 1969 (very good year) computer scientists at UCLA created the first network connection between two computers. Companies present during this exciting time were GTE Corp., DARPA, Honeywell and Scientific Data Systems.

The article interviews UCLA distinguished Professor of Computer Science Leonard Kleinrock, who was one of the men who enabled the two computers to exchange data. The UCLA web site also has a personal history/biography of Kleinrock: "The Birth of the Internet"

Raytheon Acquires BBN Technologies

Government contractor Raytheon has acquired BBN Technologies. Most people (I think) won't even recognize the company name BBN Technologies. I've been in IT long enough (barely) that I remember BBN from the very early days of the Internet. BBN is a Massachusetts company known for the development of packet switching, including work for the ARPANET; predecessor to the Internet. They also developed the first TCP protocol for Unix. Wikipedia has the wonderful merger and acquistion history for BBN:

BBN was acquired by GTE in 1997 and BBN's ISP division BBN Planet was joined with GTE's national fiber network to became GTE Internetworking, "powered by BBN". When GTE and Bell Atlantic merged to become Verizon in 2000, the ISP portion of BBN was included in assets spun off as Genuity. In March 2004, Verizon sold BBN to a group of private investors. In September 2009 Raytheon entered into an agreement to acquire BBN

Following the acquisition, BBN Technologies will become part of Raytheon Network Centric Systems.
I had not been to the BBN web site in quite some time ; upon browsing, they have some pretty amazing research projects listed:

1. Flexible Intra-autonomous-system Routing Environment
2. Smart Environment for Network Control, Monitoring and Management
3. Density-and Asymmetry-aware wireless Networking
4. Proprietary waveforms for wireless networks
5. Terabit router traffic engineering

Network World has a very nice article (back in May) on DARPA military research projects. Check this one out (from the Network World article):

DARPA's Quantum Entanglement Science and Technology (QuEST) program is creating new quantum information science technologies, focusing on loss of information due to quantum decoherence, limited communication distance due to signal attenuation, protocols, and larger numbers of quantum bits (Qubits) and their entanglement. Key among the program's challenges is integrating improved single- and entangled-photon and electron sources and detectors into quantum computation and communication networks. Defense applications include highly secure communications, algorithms for optimization in logistics, highly precise measurements of time and position on the earth and in space, and new image and signal processing methods for target tracking.

Now -- I'm off to read patent 7,242,774 : Quantum Cryptography Based on Phase Entangled Photons