IDF Fall 2005. Day 3


by Anna Filatova
08/25/2005 | 11:53 PM





What Is a User Aware Platform?












User Aware Systems Features: Closer Look

Take Care of Yourself

Another aspect of the user aware systems is the ability of a system like that to take care of itself . This feature of a user aware system will be of great practical value in datacenters. We can be talking about tens of thousands of discrete server elements within a limited space. And this server space needs constant monitoring, so that we could identify the failure and respond to it before any data loss occurs. Here is an example:

On the picture above you can see a thermal scan of the data center room. Should the air conditioning fail, we need to act quickly. This is not a kind of situation that human administrator can respond in time to prevent problems. This is when platforms can handle the change of the environmental conditions and respond appropriately, like enable reserve air conditioning units, for instance and backup the data from the system in risk.

IBM introduced the notion of autonomic computing to describe systems like that. For the past years we’ve gone from dozens to tens of thousands of servers that need to be managed. We are at the point now when IT shops use 80% of the investment on maintenance. When you look at the environments today, there are different hardware pieces, it is a tremendous conglomeration of technologies. In this environment there is lack of standards so we need some kind of instrumentation to resolve problems. Autonomic computing is about building intelligence into the systems at different levels. Besides, it has to be an open standard approach and then you can build intelligent behavior on top of that. Intel delivered hundreds of self managing features in numerous products. One of these features is the mechanism for capturing event info.

Take, for example, Intel’s AMT Active Management Technology, which gives us the tools for reading and analyzing the events. Intel does a lot of research of the autonomic computing potential. One of the latest developments looks as follows.

There are wireless Intel modes that measure ambient conditions around the servers in a datacenter (server utilization, internal temperature, external temperatures and humidity in the room).

Say we have a situation when we’ve got two servers, and one of them is gets extremely dangerously overheated. What is going to happen in this case? Intel modes should pick up the changes in the ambient thermal conditions. The server that got overheated will be detected, and the load will migrate from it to another server, so that the system could hibernate without threatening to lose all the data.

Power consumption is another essential issue for contemporary data center. Actually, data centers operate more on a human time scale. If you zoom into the system you will see that changes in the platform power consumption and user requests are happening at a minor grain. Even though a demand is going up and down in just tens of microseconds, the power supply cannot respond fast enough and thus we are losing a lot of power. This may seem just a tiny power loss, because the time considered is less than a tenth of a microsecond, however, if we sum up all the tiny losses like that the total will not be negligible any more:

What of we would like to have a more optimal power use? Something like that, for instance:

How can we do it?

Main components of every mainboard are powered by voltage regulators. It rakes a lot of space and power. What if we removed all the voltage regulators and associative components into the “soon to be obsolete technology” waste basket. This is what will remain from the board:

Look how much space we could save this way on the mainboard PCB!

And here is what Intel suggests to use instead of all those obsolete-to-be voltage regulators and components:

This embedded solution will be only 35x35mm big, will operate at 100MHz frequency, will be 85% efficient and allow switching the voltage level. CPU, chipset and CMOS voltage regulator all-in-one. Intel even demonstrated a prototype mainboard platform for it, which was much smaller than the regular boards, I wish I had managed to take a picture of it, because they rapidly moved it off the stage after that: much be top secret, I assume :).

Know Where You Are






Do No Harm

As we have already indicated in the beginning of this presentation, another and probably one of the most important aspects of any user aware system is doing no harm to the user . It is not dramatic at this point, but has significant financial importance for network security. Computer viruses cause billions of dollars of damage around the world. The problem is that the viruses propagate so quickly that if you do not respond quickly enough you will lose control over the situation. The diagram below shows how fast the “witty worm” got spread when it hit one of the networks:

The solution at this point represents combined efforts of hardware and software products developed by Intel. This system below is equipped with Intel manageability engine silicon that analyzes the network connections and isolates the infected platforms.

According to Intel, this solution has been already tested in real conditions for about 8,000 hours and hasn’t revealed any false positives so far. In other words, no worms have escaped it :)


Well, we have just seen how greatly the system intelligence develops nowadays. It looks like in another 10 years we will create highly sophisticated user aware systems to help humans control important and complex spheres of our life. However, doesn’t this scenario look familiar to you? Machines get smart and take control over the human race completely. I could mention about a dozen examples when this happened (literature, motion pictures). I know you may say: hey, this is just science fiction crap, do not worry about it. But there were times, when an airplane was considered a wonder, and now we have them all over the place.

Technology breakthroughs are exciting. The power they give to us is huge. But maybe one day we should question ourselves: do we know what we are doing? Just a thought :)

P.S.: More news from the IDF showcase is coming, so stay tuned! :)