SCP-814-1 is an ornate mahogany enclosure, housing an antique wax cylinder type phonograph, circa 1900 CE, of unique design. The internal mechanism, which is completely functional, is capable of holding up to four music cylinders. Notably, it is capable of the replay of multiple cylinders simultaneously. The manufacturer's mark, Syncope, is etched on several of the phonograph's components. SCP-814-2 is a set of four phonograph cylinders recovered from SCP-814-1's four cylinder slots. These cylinders are of approximately the same age as SCP-814-1, albeit made of hardened steel rather than wax. Each cylinder has the phrase pure tone engraved on each end, followed by a number indicating the frequency.


The territories of Syria and Lebanon are becoming the main location of the Iran-Israel War. Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Hameini has vowed to punish the evil regime of Israel after the attack on the consular building in which Mohammed Reza Zahedi, a high-ranking commander of the Quds Force, the elite foreign operational wing of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was assassinated. In Israel, political leaders as well as military and diplomatic officials said they were ready for any scenario. Asked if it was Israel that carried out the attack, Michael Ronan, head of South and Southeast Asia Division at Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said they say Israel carried out the strike. Well, I don't know. What I can say is that Israel is ready for any response from Iran. In this condition, after years of engaging in shadowy tit-for-tat operations, Iran and Israel's unofficial battle in Syria has been thrust out into the open by an unprecedented attack in the Syrian capital that killed several top Iranian advisors. Now, even with Israel already mired in the longest and deadliest ever war with Palestinians, facing ongoing clashes with Hamas and constant fire from Iran-aligned Axis of Resistance factions from at least four nations, the Iran-Israel indirect war taking place on the sidelines of the war in Gaza threatens to become the main event. It's very important to differentiate between the level of hostility we have witnessed so far and the potential for a full-fledged regional war. Eren Ezion, former head of policy planning at the Israeli Foreign Ministry and deputy head of the Israeli National Security Council, told Newsweek, it's very, very different. For Israel, the situation has presented a strategic dilemma for Israeli leadership as observed by Ezion. That is, to what extent do we attempt to directly attack Iran rather than simply attack its various proxies, including the ones in Syria? In addition to the hundreds of strikes conducted by Israel against Syria over the course of at least a decade, he pointed out how throughout the years Israel has taken some actions on Iranian soil, for some it has taken responsibility and for some it has not. Mustafa Najafi, an Iranian researcher specializing in Middle East conflicts and Iran's foreign policy, argued Tehran had already outlined its reaction to what may come next. Part of this response is done directly by Iran, which is of course limited, Najafi said. A major part is also more intense by resistance groups in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. The location of the answer also includes both inside Israel and the assets of this regime outside the occupied territories. The Persian Gulf, the Arab countries, the Oman Sea and the Mediterranean will be the target areas outside of Israel. Residents of Russian Orenburg City are furious and threaten Kremlin with rallies. The outskirts of the Russian city of Orenburg are rapidly going under the water. Residents are furious and threaten rallies already in the capital of the region, writes the Mozem Obyaznit Telegram Channel. According to the governor of the region, Denis Pasler, the water level in the Ural river is approaching a record high of 11 meters. The head of the region urged residents of flooded areas to evacuate. Hundreds of houses in the vicinity of Orenburg and several city districts with a population of half a million have already gone under water. The Mozem Obyaznit Telegram Channel contacted the victims. Everything is only getting worse. The house is sinking, says Yulia Selina, who lives in the village of Veseni, a 30-minute drive from Orenburg. Many are flooded and the leadership is inactive. Everyone is silent. The younger son was pulled out through the window. We were able to get out through the door. Yulia continues, my son was very scared. We just made repairs, bought furniture and all that stuff. The situation is aggravated by the clove in the village where meltwater flows and which the authorities did not clean up before the flood, ignoring the requests of residents. Promised payments for recovery will not be enough. No one takes into account the damage to the house. Not to mention furniture, repairs, equipment, things. We didn't take anything out. I'm not the only one. People will not be satisfied. So there will be a rally, she promises. Valeria, whose house was flooded in the village of Zarechny, works in the regional administration. On April 10th, the water approached her house and the yard completely flooded in a few minutes. As a resident of the region, of course, I believe that the payments are too small and do not cover losses. But as a civil servant, I assume that these are only primary payments, she says. Here is what the residents of Orenburg write in local publics and on the page of Governor Passler. The special water operation is going according to plan. Why are the payments to victims so ridiculous? People have lost everything because of the negligence of officials. People don't have houses, but you give 20,000? Do they have to live on it? Feed the children? Thank you to the Orenburg City Hall for spending the budget on lanterns instead of engineering protection of the city.


Welcome to another edition of RCE. This is Brock Palin. You can find us online, find all our entire back catalog on RCE-cast.com. You'll also find the links to Jeff's wonderful high-performance blog, as well as, yes, as well as all of our Twitter handles and everything else like that. I also have, again, Jeff Squires, one of the authors of OpenMPI, and works for us, our Cisco system. So, Jeff, thanks again for your time. Yes, apparently I have a wonderful blog that everybody should go read. Actually, there's been some fun stuff recently about process affinity and things like that. I love bringing up that stuff, because most people don't appreciate the complexity of the internals of your servers and how it actually affects the performance of your HPC jobs, and you don't even know it. So, go read them. They're good stuff. So, let's go ahead and roll right into our guest today. This one's been requested a couple of times and is taking a little bit to get this lined up, but we finally have it. We have with us Jeff Darcy of Red Hat, and he's gonna be talking to us about Gluster, a distributed parallel file system, but I'll let him get into the details of what's unique about it, versus the other offerings and things like that. So, Jeff, take a moment to introduce yourself. Hi, good to be here. I've been involved in distributed storage and HPC or semi-HPC for about 20 years since I was working on NFS Version 2 back at Encore. My most recent gigs have been working on Luster at Cycortex, sadly missed, and now I am at Red Hat, where I started a project called CloudFS, which was based on GlusterFS, and since we acquired the company behind that, I've been one of the architects and to a large degree, the public face for that project. Okay, so can you get into a little bit about the details of Gluster? Well, the idea behind Gluster is that it's scale-out storage, so it is based on the idea of getting a lot of commodity servers. It's largely a cost play. It's a convenience play. It's a little different from some other systems in that it has no single metadata server, and in that it is extremely modular. I sometimes say that it's not so much a file system as a way of building file systems. We just happen to build one, but you can actually use the interfaces that we provide to build others. So that's actually one of the real key things about it is particularly in something like an HPC context where you may have applications that can benefit from a very specific optimization, you can actually build that optimization in because the file system as it is now may not perform that well for you, but with just a little tweak, it can really make a huge difference. Now, let me zero in on that. What exactly do you mean by an optimization? So this is coming from a guy, I don't know anything about how file systems work. So could you give me an example of, let's say I'm gonna be running a specific application and it has a specific file pattern or file access pattern, how does that translate to an optimization that I can build into the file system? Well, there's a couple of examples that I've come up with. One is the case where this is a little bit far afield, but you have a script that's pulling in dozens of other scripts that are spread across dozens of library directories or something. And the way that things work is to ensure that we're getting current data, we actually have to go look in each of those locations just in case the file showed up there. And so we're actually doing a lot of lookups that fail. And we're not remembering the fact that we did a lookup that failed. So those kinds of operations and those kinds of workloads can perform very poorly. So I actually implemented a translator that remembers the failures. And if we failed within the last minute, then we'll fail again immediately, quickly. That can make a huge difference for those types of applications. Another one, which is probably more relevant is something kind of like the parallel logging file system that was developed at one of the national labs. And what it does is as you write out files, it actually writes them locally and then asynchronously we'll spool them back to the main store later.  But with something like this, they all get batched up into huge blobs that get transferred very efficiently. And with PLFS, the real thing, they've seen really significant speedups on a lot of real applications. And so you can do the same sort of thing in Gluster as a translator. So that catching everything locally and moving it back, one, don't you have a global file system consistency problem if one of those clients goes away and two, is this completely transparent? Is this just like a standard feature or is this an add-on? This would be an add-on. In fact, it's one that's still in development, but it's an example of the kind of thing you can do. And yes, you're absolutely right. It's a consistency problem. And what we found with Gluster is that we have defaults that are very strongly biased towards consistency, but a lot of applications don't care about that level of consistency, that they're actually prepared and able to make a small sacrifice in consistency to get a huge performance improvement. So what we've done is while we set the defaults very conservatively, we've provided a mechanism by which you can relax those defaults in ways that make sense for a particular application. So just into that just a little bit more. To do this kind of translator thing, do I have to as an application writer, and I'm writing my physics application, do I have to use like a Gluster IO library or can when using these translators, can I stick to some sort of generic POSIX open, close, MPI file open, MPI file close, things like that? There's actually a lot of flexibility there. Translators are part of our core infrastructure, which is independent of what access method you're using. So they can run on the client, they can run on the server, they can be arbitrarily reordered relative to one another. So there's a lot of different things you can do there. You can use that core stack through several methods, you can use it through our own native protocol, which uses Fuse on the clients, you can use it through NFS, you can use it through SIFS via Samba, and we do actually have a library API as well. So that's currently being used for our QEMU block storage. So it's bypassing all of the file system stuff basically. That could be used in theory from something like an MPI library, although as far as I know, nobody's gone down that path yet. So a translator is our name for our plugin interface, which allows you to add functionality or change functionality within the file system. It's actually taken from the GNU herd project, which is where one of the project founders came from. And the name comes from the fact that it translates an IO request from the user into one or several IO requests going down towards storage, but both of those are expressed in the same terms. They're the same API above and below. So that's how we can use those to stack them on top of each other and all sorts of arbitrary and perverse orders and get exactly the functionality that we need for a particular deployment. All right, so you told us what Gluster is. What is the scope of the project? Where are the aims of the project? And who's involved? Well, the project actually came out of a different background than a lot of other distributed file system projects. It wasn't a PhD thesis. It wasn't an academic or a labs project. It actually came out of a very immediate commercial need. It was a Venezuelan oil company. They needed cheap distributed storage that was better than tape, was actually the performance bar. So it's evolved in a very practical set of directions, very sort of user focused. And by user in this case, I mean very generic user, not necessarily a specialist user. So historically it's been big in areas where they have very friendly, well-behaved kinds of workloads, things like media streaming, content delivery networks, things like that. Now since Red Hat has picked it up, there's been a lot more interest in using Gluster FS as a substrate for virtualized storage for virtual machines. And really that's going to be a huge direction. There's also from outside, there's a huge push towards accessing Gluster data through the object storage interface, which is compatible with Swift, similar to S3. I'm actually a bit surprised by how much that is driving a lot of customer and user engagements. So currently, those are the big directions we're going in. It is not entirely Red Hat that's behind this. There actually is an upstream community that is separate from the Red Hat product based on it. So there's Gluster FS, which is upstream, and then there's Red Hat Storage, which is the fully supported product based on it. And they are separate. I'm actually on the advisory board for the upstream project. And there are sometimes divergences that the upstream project actually wants to go in a different direction that is more dictated by what the community wants. So really it's very driven by what people ask for. So S3, you mentioned that in Swift. Those are the object stores. S3 is the Amazon object storage and Swift is the OpenStack object store interface, right? Correct. Okay, so you guys could stand up Gluster, install locally and point your applications that were written either for Amazon S3 or written for OpenStack and they could at least access storage off of this. Correct. What we've actually done is we have submitted some patches which we're currently carrying ourselves, but which hopefully will be incorporated as part of OpenStack eventually, which actually use the real live OpenStack Swift code and sort of fool it a little bit into thinking that all of the objects are local. Now, in fact, they're not, but they're accessed through the local file system interface and then we take care of the distribution and replication and so forth. So by implementing the Swift API that way, we get S3 compatibility to the extent that Swift themselves do that. We leverage all of the rest of that ecosystem as well. And the real key thing that we do that's a little bit different than what some of the other people who are doing unified object and file storage is, in our case, it's act the same bits that you can actually take something, write it as a file and retrieve it as an object or vice versa. Some of the others, it's a common storage pool, but they're separate objects within that pool. And our feeling is generally that we want to have the same data, but accessible through as many methods as possible. NFS, SIFs all fit into that as well. So it's really a very valuable thing. Hadoop fits into that also, that you can write stuff through any application that can use a POSIX file system API and then use it directly in Hadoop without having to import it. And vice versa on the backside if you want to get data back out. So most of our listeners are HPC focused or I assume that because that's my focus. And a lot of these systems traditionally use a POSIX like interface, even for distributed parallel file systems. Can you touch just a moment for those of us who are ignorant of object stores exactly what an object store is and how it differs from like a POSIX interface? Well, they're basically similar to a file system interface, but fairly deliberately dumbed down, you might say, or simplified if you were feeling more charitable. I'm a bit of a file system bigot because I've been doing it so long. The idea is that there are certain things about POSIX that really inhibit scalability. And we saw some of this years ago from the PVFS people and others who said, having to conform to some of these direct atomicity and ordering and consistency rules really makes it hard to create something that scales. And the object store guys took that even further and they said, well, okay, we're gonna have a single directory hierarchy. We have buckets or containers depending on which actual project you're using. And then you have objects within those. You're not gonna have arbitrarily nested directories. You're not gonna have the richness of attributes. You're gonna have a different permission model. You're going to have a different data access model where it's pretty much limited to whole object get input. There's no single byte overlapping rights within the middle of an object. And all of this is done with the idea of making it simpler and making it easier to scale it. So in some cases, you can use it the same as you would a file and in other cases, you can't. And even in cases where you could, you do have to change code to use a different interface. So there's pluses and negatives. A lot of people like it. That's why we do it by everyone's good. But it's not quite as flexible as a regular file system interface. So you mentioned PVFS in there and we've had them on the show. And so there's a parallel file system which has multiple machines with multiple lines all presenting a single file system interface. And then there's the ability to do parallel IO, which is having multiple clients right to the same file simultaneously. Can you do that with Gluster? And if so, can you do it using the object interface or do you have to use the POSIX interface? Well, since the object interface is largely whole object, then essentially no, you can't do it that way. You can do it through the file system interface. We are nowhere near as sophisticated in handling that as the PVFS folks are. That's a focus for them. So I actually have worked with those guys. I was out at Argonne as part of my psychortex duties at one point, almost got snowed in in fact. It was pretty ugly. So I've had talks with them about this and we're broadly in agreement that that's kind of a special thing. What we do since we are very, very strict about maintaining the POSIX ordering and consistency guarantees, we're doing a lot of locking and back and forth. One could imagine that we could evolve in a direction where we skip that locking for applications that have their own forms of concurrency control and get better results. There's probably other issues that we'd have to resolve before we were really good at that. Right now the workloads that we work best for are the ones where those sorts of things don't happen. They work, they just don't work well for us right now. All right, so if we take this concept of a translator and some of the ideas that you mentioned previously like playing with locking and knowing what the application is gonna do and integration with MPI and so on. Obviously I have a large MPI bias since I'm an MPI guy. What do you imagine could be done just as a thought experiment here? Form an MPI perspective where the goal is to have many processes simultaneously reading and or writing to the same file to get some kind of speed up, get some kind of optimization. What do you think MPI should do to speed this kind of stuff up? What kind of hints can it give to Gluster? Well, there's a couple of different directions that I think the communication can go there. On the one hand, if MPI could tell Gluster that it knows something about what it's doing when it's accessing a file concurrently, then we could use that as a signal to relax or elide some of the locking and synchronization that we do. So we pick up a big performance gain there. There's things just in the configuration that can happen. In my experience, a lot of the scientific users are pretty comfortable running their applications on top of scratch space and then moving their results and their data back and forth. So you can skip the Gluster replication which actually has fairly serious performance implications. We're much faster without replication than with it because in our case, the replication is synchronous. And then there's the whole issue of data placement that we already have hooks, these are used by Hadoop to find out where copies of a file actually went. So that's across replication, across striping. We'll give you all the information about where the bits of the file are. So that can actually be used by a job control system or anything like that to place jobs where the data is. On the flip side, we're looking at adding features where you could actually have the application or a library tell us where we should put the data. So if you have a job that's already running somewhere, then you can tell us where to put the data that comes out of it. The degenerate case, it's just to put it where we are. We actually have that already. But another case would be telling us to put it on some other node where we know the next stage of a computation is gonna run or at least put it within the same rack, put it somewhere attached to the same switch, things like that. So there's all sorts of opportunities there for the application layer and the job manager and Gluster to communicate about data placement. I think that's actually a really interesting research area that hasn't been adequately explored in a practical context. There's some academic work, but not a lot out in the real world. Okay, so it sounds like you wanna implement a lot of these functionalities by using translators and other things. These translators, are there something that I can as a user inject from user space or is this something that has to be set by the admin globally? Generally, they are set by the admin globally. You can actually, as a user, add them on the client side. So as a user, you can affect the server side, but you can certainly affect the client side and you can cook up what we call a vol file, which is the volume definition that includes all of the translators, all of the options for the translators, how they're all hooked together, going from very dumb, very simple, what we call bricks on the servers that provide the raw storage, and then combining those in various forms, distributing across them, replicating between them, bing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you can actually put your own translators into that vol file and then mount using that vol file. So you do actually have some control over that. Now that works for translators that have already been written and built. As a user, you're gonna have a little bit of a learning curve to actually write a translator. It's a lot of domain specific knowledge, but there's certainly the possibility there to do that. When I've developed things like the lookup, optimizing translator that I've done, I've done exactly that. I've hand edited my vol files and then mounted using those. Okay, so these vol files, do they just define which translators to turn on and then settings for them for translators that are already installed, or can I actually inject my own translator that the admin hasn't installed globally but not enabled in that file? You can inject your own. The vol file contains the names of translators which are then actually found as dynamic libraries in our library directory. So the translators do have to go there, but it's all totally dynamic. So we can readily load translators that we cluster FS developers never heard of before that the user happens to have as long as they can put it in the right place and name it in the vol file. In fact, when I started cloud FS which later became HECA FS and I was at Red Hat and Gluster was a separate company. This was really the key to why Gluster was selected as the technology base was that I could do pretty much everything I needed, things that the Gluster developers had never thought of as translators. I could write them on my own, they could be packaged, they could be supported, they could be licensed separately from Gluster itself. And some of our users actually come back to us and say the same thing, that they actually want to write translators and they have their own concerns, say around licensing. And the fact that it is a fully abstracted public API and that they can build something that's physically, logically, legally separate actually is what enables them to do what they want to do.  Can you touch on some of the enterprise like resiliency features that Gluster has? Well, there's two main things that we do to facilitate data protection. We have synchronous replication. So this is a style of replication that is designed for local use within a local fast network. So that provides protection against a single failure within that data center. Then we also have remote replication. We call it geosync, georep. I don't know what the current favored term is. Now, it's asynchronous cross-site replication. It's actually, think of it like rsync, but it's actually using some highly optimized methods of finding which files need to be transferred. So it's actually like rsync plus, you could say. And that's more of a disaster recovery. Your whole data center blew up or you lost connection between two data centers. That's sort of a need. So you can actually use both of those. We are looking at adding other things that play into that same data protection space. For example, bit rot detection. We're looking at adding checksums or something like them, possibly even erasure codes as ways to further protect data against loss. And that's really what we see as the biggest thing that a lot of the enterprise crowd are looking for. It's often why they come to us instead of somebody else is that we have built-in replication and that's really important to them. Just a side note, there is actually an erasure code translator which provides protection against multiple disk or node failures with very good storage utilization. It's being developed not by us, but by a company in Spain using that translator interface. So I actually found out about this after they were kind of well into it, which was a major milestone. Here's somebody actually developing stuff and they didn't even have to come to me for the information first. So because of what you were just talking about with the replication built-in, do people typically run with RAID or is it just easier to run with boxes of JBODs? That I just have a billion individual disks and Gluster takes care of the replication for me so there's really no need for any kind of RAID. You can do both. The most popular type of deployment is actually a mixture. What people will typically do is they'll run RAID 5 or RAID 6 on each brick and then they will combine those bricks using our replication. So simple disk failures are then handled at the RAID layer and they're very transparent and the recovery is very performant to the extent that RAID recovery is. At least it can be done largely in hardware if you have a hardware RAID controller. And then node failures are handled at the higher level by our replication. So you're getting both kinds of protection. You're dealing with the most common failure mode in a very efficient way. You're dealing with the less common failure mode in a less efficient but still functional way. And then on top of that, you can have the replication to a whole other data center. So the even less common failure is handled in yet another way suitable for that need. So the metadata though, a lot of distributed parallel file systems, metadata either is mixed some way with like the data store or they're a separate host or they can be on the same host but on a different one. How do you guys handle that and how do you handle your distributed metadata? Well, this is actually what sets us apart from both say Luster which has a centralized metadata approach and Ceph which has distributed metadata but does it in a different way. So in the Ceph case, what they do is they actually have two different layers. They have an object layer and then they have a file system metadata layer that scales separately that use different protocols among themselves, different algorithms. And what we've done is actually pretty different. We found that the scaling separately is not actually all that useful. We actually have every server is both a data server and a metadata server. And both types of information are actually looked up using the same consistent hashing or sometimes we call it elastic hashing method which is based on placing both servers and objects around a conceptual ring using hash values. And then you find the server for a particular object by looking around that ring from the files hash to the next servers hash. So that makes it's a little bit similar to the way Ceph does things with Crush. It's a different algorithm but it's the same basic concept that the client can figure out which server it should be talking to based on a small amount of data plus an algorithm instead of having a big lookup table. We don't have to maintain some similar directory that tells clients which server to talk to for which file. It's apparent from the server topology and from the hash of the file, which one that should be. So if I'm running out of I-Nodes or something like that I can just stand up another couple of bricks and now I've got more I-Nodes in the file system sort of set up. Is that basically what this translates into? Yes, we actually do keep track of both free space and free I-Nodes. You can get information about that across your bricks and you can see when you're likely to be running out. The process of adding new bricks, bricks generally will correspond to servers although you can actually have multiple bricks that are served from a single server. You can just add bricks. The process is a little less transparent than I personally would like. You do actually have a series of steps to go through to incorporate it into the topology, change some of that information that we use to determine which files are supposed to be on which bricks. And if you want to, to actually migrate data from the old bricks to the new ones. I would actually like to see a lot of that be completely autonomous that at worst all you have to do is say it's there and we'll handle the rest. But that's not the way it is. And part of the reason is, again, this is an enterprise-y thing. A lot of enterprise users actually do not want the system going off and doing these very heavy weight high IO repair, rebalance, maintenance types of operations on our zone. They actually want to schedule that. They actually want to have control over when this operation takes place. So they might actually add the new brick and do the part of integrating it into the system where we update all of our information about where files should go. But we don't actually start migrating data until they tell us to. And then they do that during their scheduled downtime or during what they know is going to be a slow period. So we would like to have the option for it to be fully autonomous, but there will probably always also be an option to have it be under administrator control. So just a side note here, I have to ask, where did you guys come up with the term brick? Because at least in my world, a brick means a machine that is dead. It is dead as a brick, it doesn't respond and whatnot. So I've been inwardly laughing every time you and Brock have said the word brick throughout this conversation. Well, yeah, it's not our best terminology decision, it's not our worst. I think our worst is actually the name of the project because people see the G on the front and they think it has something to do with GNU, which it doesn't. They hear the whole name and they think it has something to do with Luster, which it doesn't. So I constantly get asked both of those. I really, obviously it's too late to do anything now, but I kind of would have wished for a different name. We've actually had people come into our IRC channel looking for Luster and I'm sure it's happened the other way too. Well, I mean, you look at Luster and Gluster in the ER and the RE, I mean, isn't it obvious? Terribly. Going back to brick, there was actually a bit of a tradition of using this.  And that's actually one of our design principles that the server should actually be providing a very base level functionality and that a lot of the intelligence is actually pushed to the client that might be on the server in most other systems. For example, replication, in most systems, that's a server responsibility. In our case, the replication is actually done directly from the client. Distribution and hashing similarly are done directly from the client. So that's kind of the idea there. There are other projects that have used the same terminology like FAB, Federated Array of Bricks. That was a project that I think preceded us. And I think it's shown up in other contexts as well. It is unfortunate that it has overlap with other uses of the term though. So that's an interesting design decision you say though that a lot of the intelligence is down at the client and it kind of sheds light on something you said earlier about how replication has a severe implications on performance and I would assume that that's because it's happening at the client and not at the server. What are some of the other trade-offs that you have experienced because of that by putting things at the client instead of the server? You just mentioned a bunch of the positive effects of that. What are some of the negative effects? Well, there's definitely a negative effect in terms of performance for replication. There's also a negative effect that I've seen a couple of times as I try to do new things that because things are at the client, if you want to do anything that involves a read modify write to update a fixed size block of data, then you're talking about a read modify write between the client and the server, which is much more expensive than a read modify write just on the server. So we've hit this when we were doing encryption using block encryption methods. We've hit this with erasure codes. We're going to hit it again with deduplication. So these are all things where it would in many ways actually be better for us to put that functionality on the server. Now through the translator interface, we can do that. We can implement the protocol or the algorithm in a translator or a pair of cooperating translators, which may run one on the client, one on the server, but may also both run on the server. And there's different trade-offs. The running it on the client means you're pushing functionality and work out to the most numerous components, which is often good for scalability. It also means that you have an availability advantage that the client already knows where the alternates are if it needs to do anything about a failure and so forth. But then there's that performance negative. So if you're comfortable with dealing with availability some other way and you want the better performance, then you can actually move some of that stuff to the server side. Now that's not necessarily supported currently by our CLI and configuration tools. The low-level infrastructure certainly can do it. I actually do that myself on a regular basis just for fun. But I think in the future, we're gonna start opening that up a bit more so that moving functionality between the client and the server, which has historically been on the client, will actually be a fully supported and transparent kind of operation. Okay, so let's talk about performance a little bit. I guess there'd be two different ways to ask this question. One would be is how is the performance scale for a normal POSIX interface as you add bricks? And then what's the performance of a single client in the, you could say, standard config of out of the box with the basic replication? Well, as I'm sure you know, talking about performance is a really good way to get yourself in trouble. I mean, we are generally not trying to be the performance king. So that's kind of a decision that has often been painful, but it's one that we made pretty early on. Scalability is excellent, at least in the IO path. So you can continue adding servers and see a very nearly linear performance increase for what we would call well-behaved workloads, large block sequential streaming type of workloads. Some of our biggest users are media services, things like that, that have exactly that kind of workload. And we have configurations with, I think the biggest, I can't say who it is, but I think it's a few hundred servers. Now, when you start getting into workloads that are more small IO, small file, random synchronous, single threaded, then we don't do so well. I'm actually a little bit surprised. I've done some comparisons myself. I think I've probably run more parallel and distributed file systems than, well, maybe than anybody. I've run, I think, 10 of them at this point, often on the same hardware. And I'm actually a little bit surprised that we generally come out pretty well even for workloads that I wouldn't expect to. But it's not really our primary focus right now. The one thing that is really kind of awful for us, maybe I shouldn't even be saying this, but what the heck, I think people deserve to be warned, is the many small files types of workloads. And I know these are actually very common in HPC. I've been burned by these many times. Or you have tens of thousands, even up to millions of files in a single directory. That can be really painful because directory operations are really kind of the only area where are using Fuse to do file system stuff in user space. And the native client really actually does hurt us a lot. A lot of people complain about Fuse. Most cases, it doesn't matter so much, but that one case, that's why I do things like the lookup optimization and things like that, because that is definitely not our strong point. We really like the streaming large file stuff a lot better. Yeah, I don't think you're alone in that space for any of these distributed file system things where you've got multiple RPC type requests going back and forth over the network all the time. Even regular NFSv3 is like, yeah, really don't give me a lot of metadata things to do. Absolutely, I think we still suffer, but yeah, it is to a certain extent a characteristic of being distributed and at some point, the fact that you are physically separated across a network is going to show. So kind of moving on from the performance thing, what's the strangest use of cluster you've ever seen? Well, I actually spent a fair amount of time considering this one. So I'm tempted to say that NASA's use of cluster is pretty far out, but that's just kind of obnoxious. I know there's a few porn sites using our stuff. I should hasten to add that I know that because I've seen references to the technical matter. Obviously, yes. The strangest use that I can actually think of that I really know something about is I actually have used cluster myself and used our replication component in particular to do a file system migration just on one machine that I set up a translator arrangement where one half of the replication pair was the old file system and one was the new one. And that way I could do the migration from the old one to the new one while the file system was live. Cool. Here's a question I like to ask developers and projects and it's sheer curiosity, just because I love to hear what people say about this. What version control system do you guys use for your source code and why? Well, we use Git. I'm not entirely sure why it's Git other than say Mercurial or Bizarre. I think mainly it's familiarity and being able to integrate with some of the other tools we use. So for example, we use Garrett, we use Jenkins, we put code up on GitHub, we have robust internal support at Red Hat for Git repositories and for all those other things that are all part of a Git workflow. So it's just kind of a default position that we've never found a compelling reason to stray from. Personally, I like Mercurial better but they're so similar that I actually don't have much problem switching between the two. Okay, so future features, you've mentioned a couple of things. I wanna know what's the next exciting thing you're gonna be working on for Gluster? Well, it depends a lot on what kind of user you're talking about. I think there's currently a very large set of directions that we're going in as far as virtual machine storage object storage and big data storage. So we have a whole team of people working on ways to make the Hadoop plus Gluster combination really something more compelling. I think other directions that we're going in, I think a lot of people in the enterprise space are really gonna like BitRot detection. A lot of people who are looking at this more as a cost play are gonna like the improved storage utilization of things like erasure coding instead of full out replication and deduplication compression. Those are all things that are kind of in the works. Personally, the thing that I am most excited about and I have to say I've been a little bit frustrated because I wanted to work on this for years. So it's kind of why I came to Red Hat in fact. And it's always kind of fallen down the priority list even though customer and user after customer has really gotten a light in their eyes when I mentioned it is more robust wide area, truly distributed replication. So we're talking about many sites. We're talking about multi-master. So simultaneously being able to write at multiple sites and have the conflicts resolved. We have some users who really, really, really want this because they're currently using AFS at 50K nodes scale. And they really would like to get away from it. But sadly, nothing has come along in how many years is it, 25 years that can really displace it. And I would really like to have this be the thing that can finally bring that same functionality that existed then into the modern era. That's funny because we're trying to kill AFS over here and we're running to so many places where it's like, oh, we don't have this permission thing and we don't have this read only volume thing. And we don't, it's like, yeah, you're really right. Nothing really touches AFS in terms of a lot of the functionality it has, but man, AFS has some, yeah, okay, I won't go there. Well, and it has some awesome things but it also kind of shows the era in which it was written. It uses some algorithms and some RPC methods and other techniques that clearly have been improved since then. If you could take the core algorithms, the core ideas and implement those on a modern infrastructure, I think you'd have something really killer. Well, and I guess I can say that I do have one more thing to add here, which is anybody who sort of started to perk up and get interested when we started talking about that, please let us know. Make your voice heard either on the community at cluster.org or at Red Hat. Let the people who actually plan the releases see that there is actually a very significant interest in this particular thing. So I am being incredibly selfish here by asking people to help me push it, but what the heck? Why not? Okay, Jeff, thanks a little lot for your time. And thank you. Jeff, this was great. Appreciate it, thanks. Talk to you guys later.


Good day, fellow investors. I recently made a video about gold, the risk reward of investing in gold. There is a lot of interest in gold here on YouTube. And then there was a great comment by Richard B, Hi Richard, that really put all the perspective into a few words. So I want to read that comment to you and then I want to discuss how to trade gold and especially how to put it in a portfolio perspective, in an old weather portfolio, what is also daily recommending. And that would let's say summarize my views and let's say the fundamental common sense views, view on gold. Let's start. So Richard B said, not all YouTube channels on gold and silver are bad. Kitco for instance is to be recommended. But I agree with Sven, many of them playing on fear and promises. So here's my guide to how to trade gold and silver using YouTube channels. 1. Listen to interviews with Pete Peter Hug on Kitco. A long-term industry trader knows his stuff. Good advice on portfolio hedging. Whenever a CEO of a company is interviewed at a trade show and they are saying things are terrible, as they were two, three years ago, bye. Whenever a CEO of a company is interviewed at a trade show and they are saying things are great, as they are now, sell. Think about being contrarian also in the gold environment. Finally, as soon as you start listening to Robert Kiyosaki telling you to buy gold and you believe him or you find yourself at 2 AM watching some guy explaining how to use acid to get gold from old printer cartridges, stop, sell everything, leave your clothes on a local beach, fake your own debt, it's time to get a life. Great comment from Richard. And there is something else I want to discuss. Citigroup just said on Bloomberg that gold may top record, that it was what, 7-8 years ago, of 1800 it might reach and go above 2000. So that's Citigroup pumping the price up now and that's what they do. In 2016 Citigroup, Citis says this could send gold tumbling below 1000 again. So be very, very careful with these predictions. And then, just to conclude everything, buy gold when others are selling again, same story all over as the same message on this channel. Be greedy when others are fearful, be fearful when others are greedy, common sense investing over the long term makes you a winner. Everything else is betting, speculating and 99% of people unfortunately end up as losers.  Those that buy now, the risk is higher than it was a year, 2 years ago when gold was closer to 1000. So that's the message here. On an old weather portfolio how to balance that? What Ray Dalio says? Well, you can say, okay, I'll have 10% of exposure to gold. I prefer gold miners because there is much more volatility and if you buy those big ones, it's unlikely that they will go bust. But you can trade. So you say, 10% to gold miners, when it becomes 12%, you bring it back to 10%. When it becomes 8%, you bring it up to 10%. So you probably make 5 trades, 4 or 5 trades in the year. You get the 2%, 1% dividend yield that they get and you have a return on that 10% asset class that you are exposed to gold, gold miners in this case. You get a nice 5, 10, 20% yield and your portfolio is hedged. That would be the most common sense exposure to gold that I can give you. Everything else will go to 5,000, 20,000, a million. Everything else is speculation and if gold goes to 20,000, also other real assets, real estate and things like that in your portfolio will also do well if you have good things. Perhaps gold can go down again depending on what's going on, depending on the restrictions on a lot of things that are things that we cannot know beforehand. We can focus on our portfolio how to balance the risk and reward in it and if you fancy gold, Ray Dalio's message from an old weather portfolio strategy, I would just go with good miners. I analyze them all and there are good miners like Polyus Gold, which is a stable miner, very low cost producer and you can play on the volatility there without a problem. You add a few more and then Newcrest is also a good miner and then you have that exposure in your portfolio. You lay back, sit down, don't get disturbed by the exuberance and panic in the market and simply rebalance the portfolio, make money in a boring, long-term way. If you fancy a boring, long-term way of making money, please subscribe to this channel. If you want to read all my analysis to find what's best for your portfolio, be it a gold miner, be it other miners, be it other commodity stocks or emerging market stocks, please check my stock market research platform. Thank you for watching, looking forward to your comments, always send me a message on Facebook or an email, always like to hear what my public has to say. Thank you, looking forward and I'll see you in the next video.


What this treaty is about is books produced in alternate formats such as braille, large print, audio, under exceptions to the National Copyright Law would be able to be shared with blind people who live in another country. Currently you cannot do that because of national law. This is an important diplomatic conference. The time has come for a treaty for the rights of persons who are blind or have a print disability. We need a simple, usable, meaningful treaty. We do not want a bureaucratic treaty or one that has no substance. We need the treaty to have access to individuals in the world and we need TPM technical protection measures not to be a block to opening a book for someone to read. The biggest obstacle is an assumption that people have too many bureaucratic hurdles to jump. In the text at the moment there's a lot of brackets, there's a lot of unagreed text which if it was to remain as it is would be very difficult and mean that our organisations which are often very small organisations not for profits would not use the treaty because they would be afraid that they would be breaking the law or secondly it's just too difficult and so what we can't have is a result that is a treaty that puts us in no better position than we are now. I think the will is here, everyone has come with the right intention to get the right result. We just hope that we are able to manage it within the time of the diplomatic conference.


Well, we're especially fortunate now to have one of the leading experts on smallpox and the person who was instrumental in the eradication efforts with us today. Dr. D. A. Henderson is now the director of the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Welcome Dr. Henderson. Very happy to be here. The first one confused me last year since smallpox has been eradicated, but I guess things aren't always as they seem. You're right Doris. You know, smallpox was eradicated by the World Health Organization. The last naturally occurring case of smallpox occurred in Somalia in 1977. In fact, smallpox represents probably the greatest public health success story in the history of public health. It is the first and heretofore only eradicated disease and we now this year celebrate the 21st anniversary of the global eradication of smallpox. In 1978 there was an additional laboratory case or two in Britain and in 1980 the World Health Organization formally declared smallpox eradicated. I wonder now if Dr. Henderson, you could give us a description of that eradication campaign. Right, in 1966 the people at the World Health Assembly discussed the question of undertaking an eradication program and it was finally decided that we would and they allocated some 2.4 million dollars for the effort per year. The strategy as we began the program was twofold. One was to vaccinate 80 percent of the population in each of the endemic areas and the neighboring countries with the thought that this would markedly reduce the incidence of smallpox so that we would then be able to move on with our second phase of the program which would be reporting surveillance to find the cases and then containment. Briefly that you would set up for each hospital and health center a reporting system so they would report every week whether they say smallpox or not and then there would be a team go out and if they had smallpox then they would vaccinate in that household and in the village and thereby stop the spread of smallpox because it spreads as a continual chain. Each individual is going to infect another individual and every two weeks you have a new case and every individual who develops smallpox has the typical disease it's not like polio or other diseases we have many atypical cases every case is a person with rash and fever and all of the other symptoms so it was very easy for us to identify a case and then contain it and stop the spread of these chains. A 10-year target was set to complete the task we missed the target by some 26, 7, 8 months and 26 days so at any rate the last case as you say occurred in 1977 in Somalia and since then there's been no smallpox anywhere in the world. Now as far as I've been led to believe there are two recognized repositories of smallpox or variole virus in the world that the Centers for Disease Control in this country and at the Institute for Virology and Biotechnology at Kultsovo in Russia is that your take on this? Well certainly from the World Health Organization when I was there and those who follow me we worked very hard to try to get the smallpox in as few places as possible so to be the least possible risk of spread of that virus getting loose again and really causing trouble and I would say up until probably three four years ago we were pretty persuaded that this was the case. Now on the basis of people who've defected from Russia we understand there are probably two maybe three more sites in Russia. We also have a problem in Russia as we all know of chemists and physicists leaving the country to go elsewhere, biologists have done the same. Are there possibly sites in other countries that may have the virus? We don't know but you can speculate. Well I'll tell you what, at this point Ted why don't we talk more about the smallpox virus? Okay Doris the smallpox is caused by the variole virus and the variole virus was responsible for millions of deaths, one of the great diseases of antiquity again just like anthrax and plague. Responsible for again millions of deaths dating from before the 12th century BC as far as we know. The Egyptian pharaoh Ramses V probably died from smallpox and that theory is based on examination of his mummified remains. After smallpox was introduced to the new world it's estimated that at least three and a half million Aztec Indians died of the smallpox. Well in fact Ted I think it's been even more severe a problem to the Indians than that and many people don't realize this but as we've gotten back in the history we began to realize that the death rates among Indians may have been as high as 75 to 90 percent. A really remarkable number of deaths and we have many accounts of whole Indian tribes being wiped out within a period of really a couple of years there were so few people left that they couldn't sustain themselves and they died out. So in fact when the pilgrims landed in North America they had very little difficulty with the Indians but what's not talked about is the fact that this was only two years after a major epidemic wiped out huge numbers of Indians along the eastern seaboard and permitting the pilgrims to settle peacefully. You know Doris I think there's the perception out there amongst a lot of people still that biological warfare is something very new product of a brave new evil world if you will and I think we showed yesterday that in fact that's far from the truth in 1346 against again the plague was used against kafa well I'm here to tell you that unfortunately even in the United States biological warfare is nothing new it dates back a couple of hundred years. During the French and Indian Wars Sir Jeffrey Amherst of the British Army was tasked with capturing Fort Carillion now known as Fort Ticonderoga from its Indian defenders and he hit upon the idea of taking the scabs of smallpox victims grinding these scabs up and placing that infectious powder into blankets and then passing the blankets off as gifts to the Indians and in fact this unfortunately worked as well the Indian defenders of Ticonderoga succumbed to the smallpox isn't this what you call the gift that keeps on giving that's right that keeps on giving right and Dr. Henderson I think probably can tell us some more terrifying stories concerning smallpox you may have learned from Dr. Alabak right I think from that time and the French and Indian wars until now we've until very recently certainly there have been no thought or threat of smallpox being used in this way in fact in large part I think it's because we've had so much vaccine that's been available and people have been vaccinated around the world but Ken Alabak who was the number two man in the Russian bio weapons production setup tells us an interesting story that in 1980 just as we decided as the World Health Assembly pronounced that smallpox had been eradicated and advised that everyone stopped now for vaccinating which they did they saw this and the Soviet Union as an opportunity and with this they developed a very large production plant for smallpox virus as he tells me the plant one plant has a capacity of producing 100 tons of smallpox virus per year and this is still extant developed since 1980 and a large scale production facility so this is something that is really very much of concern at this point in time with all of the troubles in Russia right now well smallpox I guess can be an even greater threat than some of the other agents because it can be transmitted person to person correct yes it can and I think the two major diseases which can be transmitted to person to person or plague in smallpox but actually smallpox is much easier to transmit than plague and so I think in my judgment I would rate smallpox right at the very top of the list as the most severe most serious of the problems that we face you know Dorsen I just want to reemphasize something we said yesterday from a military perspective one of the main tenants that a battlefield commander wants to adhere to is to maintain control of the battlefield so a disease such as smallpox if a commander unleashes that disease he it does its dirty work but then it affects the civilian population and continues to propagate and the battlefield commander in essence loses control of the battlefield from so from the perspective of military weapon perhaps smallpox isn't quite as attractive but to the terrorist who doesn't care what he unleashes on humanity this may be in some sense the ideal weapon right how does the virus cause the disease well following an asymptomatic incubation period of about 12 days actually ranges from 7 to 17 days but you can almost set your watch by this 12 day average following that 12 days there's then an infection that develops in the respiratory mucosa proliferating virus particles circulate around the lymphatic system to the regional lymphatics from there a minor viremia ensues and virus spreads to the liver the spleen the lungs the bone marrow once that happens the prodromal symptomatology starts you get two to three days worth of fever nausea malaise the I don't feel goods during that time a major viremia ensues seeds the skin and following that the characteristic exanthem that most of us would know smallpox by develops okay well as well as dr. Henderson dr. Don Hopkins a former deputy director at the CDC was also someone closely involved with the smallpox eradication efforts in the 70s in India and Sierra Leone so let's listen to him describe cases of smallpox that he'd treated it was a really sad thing to see when you knew somebody had smallpox so they were just coming down with it because you and they knew that was between them and God as to what the outcome would be people felt very ill this this this virus is said to make people feel as though their skin were on fire even before the rash begins they have headache backache and felt generally flu like symptoms felt miserable already a virile a major this as the virus progresses people would get these severe rashes on their skin the same thing often was happening in their throat and in their intestines and so you have people who are turned into monsters before their eyes before the eyes of their of their family and who often die some of them who got hemorrhagic smallpox were were transformed even more they were just bleeding from all of their orifices most people apparently died just because of overwhelming viremia but also with severe diarrhea just as their skin could be seeing to to to to descovate internally sometimes people would be losing the entire lining of their bowel or having fluids to ooze into their into their lungs sometimes the virus would attract would attack vital places such as the heart directly for example and as infection wore on sometimes people get secondary infections of the open wounds on on their skin but sometimes with very severe rashes people would just slough great chunks of their skin which would then be open just as if they had been burned to secondary infection it was also a peculiar stench associated with all of this decaying flesh on a living on a living person and so to go into a village where you had several people like this and other villages terrified some of them on immunize was a very it was a very sad thing to see knowing also that you had nothing to offer a person other than palliative kind of things really when they have progressed to the state of already having the rash you know Doris as a pediatrician I think you could see it would be easy to confuse this disease initially with chickenpox and in fact that's the primary disease in the differential diagnosis of smallpox not too many other things that would look like this so initially on the first day or two or maybe three of the xanthum it would certainly be very easy to confuse it I think would be easy to confuse a case of smallpox with the case of chickenpox once the disease progresses though and you get to the point you saw in some of these pictures I think you could see it's pretty easy this is a no brainer diagnosis essentially and I guarantee that after you've seen a case or two you'll never forget it won't be too tough to make the diagnosis there after Ted I think you're absolutely right on that and I'd say 90% of the cases turn out to be very typical but not at the beginning it gets to be a little bit difficult right at the beginning and I think perhaps we can see a succession of pictures here which may portray this the individual once he was infected with the disease would have a very high fever would feel aching pains in the back and headache he'd have nausea maybe vomiting may even have enough of intestinal pain that he might look like an acute abdomen and this goes for two to four days normally the individual usually goes to bed he's feeling really rather miserable then the rash begins now we have here we have day two you just see small macular macular lesions coming up and we go on to look at subsequent days you'll see this is the same child day by day this is I should note at what we call an ordinary case of smallpox it's not a serious case day four you can see it's becoming a little more apparent and you will note that the the lesions if you look at those on the face you'll see them all at the same stage of development they're all kind of pustular if that were a case of chickenpox you would see scabs and pustules and little macules all in the same area but here you see all those lesions are the same now we're up to day seven we move on to we have day nine next day eight and at this point the patient is feeling very miserable indeed and he has the most of the lesions are going to be on the face on the arms on the legs there will be some on the trunk but not as many and we call that a centrifugal distribution it's in contrast to chickenpox in which there are more lesions on the trunk and many fewer on the face arms and legs why this is so we have no idea we go on to the next slide now this shows the foot in a hand now you'll see the pustules on the palms of the hand there and similarly in the soles of the foot this is also classically smallpox you'd rarely see those lesions in chickenpox on the palms and soles now let us move on to the next one now you see scabs are beginning to form and some of them you'll see on the upper chest they're beginning to fall off they leave depigmented areas for a period of time we go on to the next now we're up to day 20 now most of the scabs are separated and the individual will have on the on the face wherever one of those pustules is present there will be a scar so that the individual will be really quite extensively scarred so as we think about it the difference between smallpox and chickenpox and chickenpox is the one disease that really was confused most often of smallpox with chickenpox you have the centrifuge smallpox of the centrifugal distribution and in chickenpox centripetal you have the lesions appearing in any one area are all the same with smallpox and thirdly you will see them on the palms and soles and with that you shouldn't have any difficulty in the diagnosing it this is a truly horrible disease I mean does everybody have the same type of symptoms well Doris says Dr. Henderson alluded to about 90% of patients would be expected to develop what you just saw here virial a major there are variants of the disease however again that child you saw was virial a major but virial a minor and I think we have a slide of that this woman here this Ethiopian woman you can see doesn't really look that sick and in fact she's still able to get out and about go about her daily chores take care of her family despite having this virial a minor disease virial a minor features milder systemic toxicity smaller pox lesions it has a much lower mortality rate 1% in unvaccinated victims versus the 20 to 40 percent that we would have seen with virial a major but Ted what determines whether you get major or minor well I think Dr. Henderson might be better able to talk about that probably strain differences amongst viral strains there were two major two differences two types of virus one was a virial a major which caused the severe disease and that's what we saw throughout all of Asia and a lot of Africa the other disease with virial a minor which only caused 1% death rate and we saw that in Ethiopia we saw it in southern Africa and we saw it in Latin America so that I think if we were worried about this is a bioterrorist agent we would be looking at virial a major as being the one that would be used I don't know if you wanted to say anything about any of the other variants flat type smallpox hemorrhagic smallpox right I think in Dr. Hopkins pictures there there are a couple of patients that had the hemorrhagic form these are particularly of concern the individual comes down with this sort of disease with all the hemorrhaging and it's very atypical there's no real rash as such and so that you're very apt to miss this diagnosis entirely when we've had these cases admitted to hospital they are pose a special problem because they excrete a lot of virus they expose patients they expose staff and in a bioterrorist attack these are cases that are likely to get into the hospital before the diagnosis is made because they have a shorter incubation period as well so that the ones they hemorrhagic cases and what we call a flat cases which the skin just sort of forms a velvety kind of swollen texture are very difficult to a diagnosis indeed well it seems the clinical pictures very diagnostic of smallpox is there any other way to diagnose the disease well in the laboratory I think the very straightforward way to get a diagnosis very quickly and that's to take a little of the postulate fluid or a little material from a scab and you put it under the microscope an electron microscope and you will see a picture there it is of this very characteristic kind of brick shaped organism now you can't tell whether that is smallpox or vaccine vaccine the vaccine virus or cowpox or monkeypox but if you're seeing that patient as sick as that you know it isn't cowpox you know it isn't vaccine and unless you're in Africa it's not going to be monkeypox so that's smallpox okay now smallpox is contagious does that mean that anyone who comes in contact with a smallpox patient will get the disease well Doris when smallpox roamed the earth about 30 percent of nonimmune people who came in close contact with a victim would be expected to develop the disease that incidence would increase in places with a low relative humidity as was seen in parts of Africa where this disease held on the longest I guess it's difficult though in the individual case to decide who's going to become infected and who isn't and Dr. Hopkins I think has had extensive experience with exactly that question okay well why don't we take another look at Dr. Hopkins describing his experience with the infectivity of smallpox in in some instances you you really couldn't predict this virus I recall very much an instance in which we had an explosion of smallpox around a prominent man who had died of smallpox both of his wives had been infected and in fact one of them gave birth just before her rash appeared when I arrived in the village this baby had lain on the floor of this mud hut between the mother and the mother's co-wife both of whom had severe smallpox rashes the baby was about a week old and had not been infected I vaccinated that baby that day and came back a week later to see a very nice vaccination scar and I visited that village several times the baby survived I still do not know or understand why that child was not infected because in fact pregnancy put women at much greater risk of dying of smallpox and the fetus was also at risk on those circumstances the fetus and the mother often got severe smallpox and would die but that child at the best one could tell didn't even get infected in other instances there were situations where people did not even know they had been exposed to smallpox they either had encountered somebody who was in the prodrome and didn't yet have a rash or they simply didn't know that somebody had a rash they didn't notice but one of the advantages about this disease was that people who were infected to others generally unless they were in the end stage of the incubation disease they had a rash and not only that they had a rash on their face so you generally wouldn't know it but sometimes every now and then one would encounter people who didn't know how they had been infected or or by whom and in those instances it was airborne from somebody that they didn't they didn't even see the rash well once you've been exposed is there anything you can do to prevent the disease from occurring well I think you can prevent the disease if you're vaccinated beforehand and it would appear that if one were to vaccinate someone within say the first three four or five days you might prevent death from the disease now at one time we had vaccination was worldwide and in this country every child was required to have vaccine by school entry so that we were a very well vaccinated population but most of the rest of the world was too then in 1980 with a declaration that eradication had been achieved the decision was made to stop vaccination it was a wise move because the vaccine is not without some risk now we've had no vaccine used in the US for probably 25 years so we have a very large susceptible population as far as vaccine is concerned we now have probably enough to vaccinate five six seven million people in storage at this point in time but we have no vaccine manufacturing capacity any anymore in this country and indeed we don't have any in the rest of the world so that is a much vaccine as we have right at the moment something we're going to have to be very careful about using do members of the military still get vaccinated well Doris the general public stopped getting vaccinated in 1972 in this country for a while after that the military continued to vaccinate then they stopped a few units started up again there were some minor service specific differences but basically sometime in the 80s the military stopped vaccinating as well I think it's safe to say that probably virtually no one under the age of 25 right now in the United States has been vaccinated well I'm just slightly over the age of that and I was lucky enough to get vaccinated as a child so I'm safe right well I wish I could say yes but we now we know that the vaccine given once is not going to be fully protective and it was learned very early that revaccination was going to be necessary so I'm not sure that you or anybody else at this point who's vaccinated 25 years ago is going to be protected against the disease that person I you know I was vaccinated in childhood if God forbid I ever came in contact with smallpox could I at least expect to get a milder case of disease I think some of the people would get a somewhat milder case and might not excuse me might not die as a result of the infection which would be I think fairly important but indeed after 25 years we have the feeling it's not going to be a lot of protection that you will have we're in the same boat together all right now if I get exposed to smallpox and I've never been immunized or it's been a long time what do I do next well Doris one of the first things you should consider is to get vaccinated again the vaccine is licensed it's very effective that's not to say that civilian practitioners would have access to it necessarily but in a national emergency like a smallpox exposure hopefully we would be able to procure a vaccine and give to you so you'd want to consider getting vaccinated the vaccine is effective we know that from the eradication campaign in Africa it's administered by intradermal inoculation with a bifurcated needle a process that became known as scarification because of the permanent scar that resulted in in fact we believe that if you didn't get a scar you didn't have an adequate vaccine take so that thing that's right there on the arm that's it right that's it the scabbing and the scarring show that you have had a good clinical take so for a while at least in the past you were protected if you didn't have that again that's an indication that the vaccine you had been given might not have been effective if you get revaccinated however you might not develop a scar the second time around you usually do develop a vesicle five to seven days post inoculation you get some surrounding erythema and induration of that vesicle lesion forms it scabs over and it gradually heals over the next one to two weeks that would be the way we would normally expect it to play out now dr. Henderson you said the vaccine is not without some risk what are some of the other side effects beside the scarring well there's several not let me mention those and for just a moment but i think it'd be useful to look at a picture of a normal vaccination because it's very few people have seen this in this day and age and it you can see it looks somewhat ugly there's this custular lesion in the center you'll see some erythema around there it's redness out there for quite a distance the individual may have some fever he may have some lymphadenopathy associated with this and this is just a normal reaction i think there are many who look at that and say well there might maybe there's some bacterial infection there and maybe we ought to do something about it but in fact this is not bacterial super infection this is just the normal reaction that one may have now if we can see a couple of other reactions i think we have some that we can show here here you see a number of lesions around the main lesion that may come about as a result of the individual scratching the lesion and spreading it around that area when you get that kind of spread there's nothing to worry about in fact all each of these lesions will basically go through an evolution as though they'd all been inoculated at the same time but it's not a big problem however you can spread it to other sites and they can be a problem and here you see a woman who has rubbed her eye after having been inoculated and she has a bacterial infection of the eyelid now that shouldn't be a problem but if it gets onto the cornea it can be very serious and and that is not so good we go on to another one here now here is a situation with a child i think this is a childhood leukemia and people who have a vaccine or immune deficiency disorder may have this very severe form of a vaccine in which the organism keeps growing it's called vaccineinacrosum and this can often be fatal and this is quite a serious matter to have that for a vaccineinacrosum you can use vaccineinimmune globulin to treat it but it's not a pleasant disease are there certain people who shouldn't be vaccinated well doris as dr henderson alluded to there is a condition called eczema vaccinatum and that can occur in people who have eczema and i think we have a picture of that eczema is a significant dermatologic disease in many patients and eczema vaccinatum is a horrible condition that is associated in cases with mortality and so eczema was a relative contraindication to vaccination i should point out though that you know if you were truly exposed to smallpox smallpox is a very deadly disease and you might still consider immunizing or alternatively giving vaccineinimmune globulin to those patients one of the worst side effects was seen in immunocompromised individuals and we just saw the picture of a belukemic child who was inadvertently vaccinated in this day and age with the advent of modern intensive care bone marrow transplantation and the hiv epidemic we see far more immunocompromised patients than we ever did before and people with hiv or these severe forms of immunosuppression probably should not be vaccinated even if they get exposed to smallpox and that's going to be a judgment call but the alternative for an hiv patient for example would be to just give them vaccineinimmune globulin instead of immunization there's an issue though with pregnant women and i believe we have a picture of a fetus who died of fetal vaccinia when his mother was vaccinated during the days of smallpox immunization now this brings up a kind of a tough conundrum for us again smallpox a very deadly disease smallpox deadly to the fetus if the mother gets smallpox as well and so pregnancy is not an absolute contraindication to vaccination if you get exposed to bona fide smallpox and you're pregnant you probably should still be vaccinated this really isn't that common a condition but it's a condition clinicians should be aware of well dr. hinderson and it sounds like the vaccine can be kind of dangerous to use yes i think in showing these pictures i think this emphasized too much the reactions to the vaccine when in fact serious reactions to the vaccine were not all that common one in five hundred thousand was worth the number that would have a serious reaction it isn't to say that they wouldn't have some lesions on another part of the body that was not serious but serious reactions one in five hundred thousand and that's not a very high number we'd like to have none but no vaccine is totally safe every vaccine we have protects and you you want that protection it also has some risk and you're weighing benefit and risk all the time as one looks at it i think ted as you've said if you're faced with the situation where you're exposed to smallpox what contraindications are there and i know during the global program and smallpox eradication we considered this very carefully and we finally said you know smallpox is so dangerous compared to vaccination that the only contraindication that would would be appropriate would be that if the individual looked like he might die the following day then you won't vaccinate him because he might be wrongly blame the vaccination for the death so that i think this is i think puts it into perspective is to just how important the vaccination is under the time in terms of a threat okay what is vaccinia immune globulin well doris a vaccinia immune globulin or vig uh is a way to provide passive immunity to people exposed to viriala but i want to emphasize that vig is really designed to treat the complications of vaccination more than it is to be a treatment for viriala the u.s army maintains a modest supply of vaccinia immune globulin and it can be used for those eczema patients and pregnant women uh and severely immunocompromised patients what about public health measures i mean wouldn't cases of smallpox be an emergency situation uh we always regard smallpox as an absolute international emergency because if smallpox really is out in the community the potential for spread across the world is there and so that to regard this as an absolute emergency is key now just how smallpox might spread and the potential of smallpox is an aerosol became apparent to us in 1970 and that year there was a an electrician a german electrician working in pakistan who came back to a town of macheta in germany he had some diarrhea he had a fever they thought he had typhoid fever and so they decided to isolate them they isolated him in one room of the hospital and were able to verify that in fact there were only two nursing sisters who saw that patient they vaccinated everybody in the hospital or gave them vaccinia immune globulin they vaccinated a hundred thousand people in the town they uh they quarantined the hospital so nobody would leave and what happened well let us see the next picture i think this is the this is the picture actually of the german electrician now he developed smallpox three days after he was admitted into the hospital uh he was immediately evacuated to a german smallpox hospital yes they had special smallpox hospitals in germany and in britain which were kept fully uh equipped to be opened only if smallpox was introduced into the countries i think it's an illustration of how much the countries worried about smallpox so he was only in that hospital a very short time now what happened can we see the next slide here you see the green three days or four days where he exposed possibly could have exposed others and you see this big wave of cases of some i think it's 17 cases that occurred and those cases occurred in rooms adjacent to his they occurred in rooms on the second floor of the hospital he was on the ground floor there were some of those cases which occurred on the third floor of the hospital there was one case in a visitor who had can't come to the door of a long corridor opened it way the patient's room is way at the other end opened the door asked for directions closed it again and uh 11 days later he had smallpox now what was what was strange about this what was strange was that the patient had cough with smallpox we rarely saw cough uh we suspect he may have had a complicating influence at the time and there's nothing that's going to produce an aerosol quite so effectively as cough so that we figure in this case that this was an aerosol of smallpox which covered three floors of a hospital spread from that patient and i think it illustrates what the potential of smallpox in an aerosol to spread to infect to really cause a lot of trouble and bear in mind those people in the hospital most all of them had already been vaccinated in childhood and now they're older and they came down to the disease and some died so there is some real cause to be concerned with an individual in that situation this is a scary disease right you know Doris i think every parent out there is familiar with the fact that if your child has chickenpox and their lesions become scabbed over it's safe to go back to daycare back to school or wherever it's important to remember though that in the case of smallpox patients are infectious to others from the time of onset of the exanthem until the scars are completely or the scabs are completely healed until the scabs have fallen off if you will so very different in that sense from chickenpox infectivity as dr Henderson stated is enhanced in the presence of a cough contamination via contaminated bedding or other fomites really is not an important way of transmission only occurs fairly infrequently okay is there anything else we need to know about decontamination well just that all objects in contact with the patient the linens the clothing the ambulance and its surfaces etc require disinfection and that would best be accomplished by sodium hypochloride solution by steam or by fire the regular decon of soldiers after exposure to an aerosol remains the same as it would be for most other agents bleach or soap and water as a field expedient if you don't know that personnel have been exposed until after the first patients arrive it's been long enough by then in fact 12 day incubation periods been more than long enough so that decon of the unit at that point wouldn't accomplish anything you need to remember again the incubation period for smallpox is much longer than with many of the agents we talked about yesterday for example okay is there treatment for patients who have the disease well Doris besides supportive care there's really no specific treatment at this time usamred is working on some new pox viral therapeutics now and there have been some good results seen with a specific antiviral drug sedofavir all right dr john huggins from usamred is the primary researcher on the side of side of a fear sedofavir thank you trials let's hear from him what his preliminary results are when we recognize that smallpox was perhaps a disease that we were not quite as ready for as we ought to be we ask ourselves what were the vulnerabilities and clearly therapy for smallpox was a vulnerability that the u.s had and so we ask a question what potential therapies would there be for that and one of the things that we noticed is that the the enzyme that replicates smallpox is essentially the same enzyme that replicates herpes viruses and because of that a whole class of drugs developed against the various herpes viruses had a potential to work against smallpox so we went to the cdc and tested these drugs against smallpox and found that side of a fear a class of compounds that are licensed for cmv retinitis also inhibited smallpox virus virus is difficult to work with and particularly do animal studies but also monkeypox and cowpox and other viruses that we have animal models that we could really test a drug to see if it would work and using those models we've been able to determine that in fact side of a fear does work and we're continuing to aerosol infect animals to simulate a smallpox infection and we can in fact treat those animals we're trying to determine at the moment how late an infection we can treat but it looks very encouraging for us certainly in the incubation period it looks like that it's going to be very effective we can prophylax animals that we're going to infect and we can treat animals at the moment 24 hours after we infect them and whereas the control animals develop a bronchonemonia much like patients with monkeypox do and like smallpox fatal smallpox cases do a control animal will develop fatal bronchonemonia and die with say pulse oximetry values down around 50 whereas the drug treated animals never fall below 90 and are essentially asymptomatic during the entire treatment period so it looks like we've got more work to do but it does look like this drug has good good potential to work against smallpox I think that clearly since smallpox has been there is no naturally occurring smallpox we're never going to be able to do the classical two drug efficacy trials that the FDA normally requires we are going to where monkeypox exists and it has become a reemerging disease in the the old zaire and we're going to look to see if in fact there are enough cases there that we can do a clinical trial but like a lot of other biowarfare agents we're probably never going to know truly that it works against smallpox until we actually have to use the drug luckily there is very little difference between smallpox and monkeypox both in the virus and in the way that say monkeypox infects monkeys so I think we've got very good surrogate models and we can treat monkeys and we can measure the same things that a normal patient would would measure so I think we're going to come very close although we're clearly never going to know that it works against smallpox until there's actually a biological incident Doris I just want to clarify something for the studio audience you know Dr Huggins works at USAMRA and I bet there are people out there saying hey I thought there's only smallpox at CDC and at Colts Ova how's this guy working with smallpox just wanted to reassure people that he did that smallpox research at the CDC and not at USAMRA all right well Dr. Henderson I think we ought to now I think this drug that he's talking about certainly sounds pretty promising to me I don't know if you have any take on that yeah I think as we've looked at it it does look very promising but I think from the stage where it is now till it's actual use in humans there's a lot of work to be done yet and I don't think we we want to be too optimistic too early because we don't have very much of the drug there's a lot of testing to be done yet all right well we'd like to thank you very much for being with us thank you and now it's time to move on to Venezuela and the equine encephalitis or V and we'll be right back with our next guest


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