So, hello and welcome to this special eGee webinar on how to measure the Earth and introduction to geodesy. My name is Simon Clark, I'm the eGee's projects coordination officer. I will surely introduce the speakers, but to begin with, I just want to note that this webinar will last a maximum of one hour, with time dedicated to audience questions and answers at the end. If you have any questions, you can ask them at any time by inputting them into the Q&A box at the bottom of the screen. You can also upvote questions you think are relevant and want the panelists to answer. This webinar will also be recorded, and uploaded to the eGee YouTube channel within a week's time. Our YouTube channel is You Geosciences. So, to introduce our today's speakers, we have Andres Kovar, a postdoc at the Institute of Geodesy and Gras University of Technology in Austria. Rebecca Steffen, a researcher at the Lars Materiat, the Swedish mapping, cholesterol and land registration authority. And Benedict Sodja, assistant professor of space geodesy at BTH Zurich, Switzerland. So, Andres, would you like to begin? Hi, everybody. Thanks for this nice introduction, Simon. And let's start with the technical part of today in this webinar, which we titled How to Measure the Earth and Introduction to Geodesy. Before we start with technical definitions, I want to raise the question, what is geodesy? And we asked this question actually at this year's General Assembly in the Geodesy 101 short course that we held, and we got quite a variety of answers, starting from very technical ones, like coordinate system, satellite observations, gravimetry, but also some more general and a little bit more fun ones, like job security fun, and a lot of applications like faults, tsunami early warning, and so on. And to give this a little bit more rigorous context. Generally, when we talk about geodesy, we mean that it's the geoscience of accurately measuring and understanding Earth's geometric shape, Earth's orientation in space, and Earth's gravity field, and mass change within the Earth system. So we have these three subfields, which in practice are very closely interconnected. And each of these subfields gives us key insights in how our very dynamic planet changes. And it gives us very key insights and what, for example, we can do to mitigate climate change, for example. Starting with the geometric shape of the Earth, when we talk about this, we do not only mean, for example, the topography, so the land area, the land surface, where we, for example, would measure land subsidence as a cause of groundwater collision. So geodesy can measure if land sinks, whether it be inland, or in this other plot that I show here in the coastal areas, so we have coastal subsidence, but we also measure the ocean surface. We now have a very long time series of changes in sea surface height, which obviously reflects the sea level change that we have. The second subfield is Earth's orientation in space, and this essentially is the connection between Earth and space. So the connection between terrestrial applications and space bond applications. So if you in your scientific studies use, for example, the image of a remote sensing satellite, then you have to very accurately know where the satellite was at a given point in time in relation to the point on the Earth surface that you want to investigate. And this is where the orientation in space and Earth rotation comes into play. And finally, we have Earth's gravity field. And as you know, if we have a mass somewhere, this generates a gravitational field. And so by measuring the gravity field, we can essentially weigh things. And in an Earth science context, which things can we weigh. For example, ice sheets or glaciers. So by measuring the gravity field, we can determine how much mass the glaciated area loses over time. And the same thing, we can apply to, for example, large aquifers, so we can essentially look below Earth's surface through the gravity field and see where the groundwater is lost or groundwater aquifer is not recharging anymore. So we can weigh the ocean so we can create a time series of ocean mass change. But also look at solid Earth processes like the cosysmic mass change when we have a large earthquake. So how much mass is actually moved when to plates are displaced by an earthquake, for example. And to make this a little bit more concrete. I look through the general assembly. 2022 geodesiduation abstracts and just compile the bird cloud. And you can see a lot of the stuff that I already mentioned is reflected in these abstracts so we have obviously Earth, because that's more or less always the thing that we want to do. So geodesicization in some way. We have deformation, we have gravity with change. So we are looking at temporary changes obviously. But, and I just blew these words up a little bit. We also have a lot of applications in there. So, geodesy is always involved with quite a lot of other disciplines. So, we look at ice sheet mass change. We have observations, faults, surface deformation, earthquake sense on and with a few geodetic techniques that we have. We have observation time series that reach now 2030 years. So now we can also start looking into effects of climate change that we can see in our measurements. And kind of reverse this process with this word cloud and just look at how many are in all of the abstracts that was submitted to this year's GA mentioned geodetic techniques or core concepts like global navigation systems, or the grace satellite mission, sea level at the Archimetry, we can see that almost all EU divisions kind of interconnected with geodesy and vice versa. So to answer the question geodesy or just partly answer that I would say that geodesy is the Geoscience of accurately measuring and understanding Earth's geometric shape, its orientation in space and gravity field. And it is very densely interconnected with the whole geoscientific field. And with that, I will then hand over to Benedict who will talk about geometry. Thank you very much Andreas for the first part of the talk and some for the introduction. It's now my pleasure to tell you a little bit about geodesy and its role to determine the geometry of the shape of the Earth. Now, why should we do this. As we have seen in the first example shown by Andreas, the Earth is not completely solid and rigid. There's actually a lot going on. And the most important aspect is of course, when humans are affected, for example, in the case of strong earthquakes or earthquakes and geodesy can in this case contribute with measuring the change of deformation. And not only in such extreme examples but also for very long and slow processes, for example, the load due to melting glaciers or related to post-glacial rebound, geodesy can make very important contribution to our understanding of these physical processes. Now, how do we determine the geometry and the changes in the Earth's crust? We have several space genetic techniques that can be used to monitor the Earth and the shape. Maybe most important of these shown here would be the global navigation satellite systems, GNSS, which I will talk about in more detail, but there are also quite a few other suitable techniques such as very long baseline interferometry, which observe extra galactic radio sources, satellite laser ranging, SLR or Doppler orbitography and radio position integrated by satellite, which is the Doris system. Since we are now focusing on GNSS, I will give you a short introduction. GNSS stands for global navigation satellite systems in the sense of global meaning that it's accessible anywhere, anytime on the world, and it's also independent of weather. It can be used for navigation, which maybe most people know about. For example, you can determine your three-dimensional position and the change in position for the velocity and it can also be used for precise timing. And yes, it's a satellite system, which means that all the services are provided by a lot of satellites that orbit the Earth. And yeah, there's an unlimited number of users that can access the signals from the satellites. In the case of GNSS, maybe most people are more familiar with the term GPS, which is just the American system, but nowadays also the Galileo, the European system and the Jonas, the Russian system and the Baidu, the Chinese system are available. So by finding the observations of these different global navigations at light systems, you can get even better accuracy of your determined positions and velocities. And yeah, since we have an unlimited amount of users that can use these techniques simultaneously, it's also possible to put up a lot of geodetic observation stations. And nowadays, there are at least 20,000 geodetic quality GNSS stations available, which means that for these stations, we can determine their positions with an accuracy that is at the low millimeter level. Now, in the next few minutes, I will show you some examples where GNSS can be used in different countries and parts of the world to measure certain geosynthetic phenomenon. For example, if we start in Sweden, and we have a station here called Red Zero, and yeah, our GNSS system is in place to send the signals, which can be then recorded by the station. And we do this over long time spans, you can get a time series of the station positions and how it changes over time. You can get then a three dimensional coordinate time series like in this pot shown, for example, for the east to the north and the up component. And then you can see actually strong movements. First of all, in the horizontal coordinate components, you can strongly see the impact of plate motion. And this can be up to several centimeters per year and will be visible in most GNSS time series that you are dealing with. Quite interesting for the station in Sweden, however, is the strong change in the up component for the vertical. And here, this part is related to the post-racial rebound, which Rebecca told us more about within this webinar. We can also put a station at another place on the earth, for example, in New Zealand, and the time series might look completely different. Here, we have another very striking phenomena, namely a big jump in the time series. This is, in this case, related to a very strong earthquake, which happened in the year 2016. Calipura earthquake, magnitude 7.8, and you can see that the coordinates, primarily the horizontal coordinates have been affected significantly by offsets of more than half a meter. Since we are already speaking of earthquakes, this is, for example, also visible in Japan, where there's a very dense network of GNSS stations available. And this animation shows the deformation due to the Roku-Oki earthquake during the year 2011, which caused an offset of multiple meters actually in the horizontal component. And you can see the ground deformation lasting much longer than during the earthquake. It's also then causing an aftershock here, which can be well observed by GNSS. Maybe a very different example, a completely other part of the world would be here in Hawaii. This is an example of using GNSS to monitor the volcanic volcano and the related deformation of the surface of the earth due to the changing magma within the volcano. And you can see that there are ground deformations away from the center of the volcano, which can be quite interesting when monitoring the characteristics and the state of the volcano and if there would be the potential of future eruptions. Yeah, finally, an example from California where GNSS can be used to monitor seasonal deformations due to the load from snow and water. You can, for example, see that during the winter months, there's a lot of accumulation of snow and then also water while in the spring and summer. All these melts and this load is then removed and as a result, we can see strong uplift in the vertical GNSS components as you can see in this plot. We have uplift of several millimeters up to a centimeter in California due to this changing hydrological conditions. So these were some examples from specific locations all over the world. If we put all these stations together and compute their positions in a joint manner, you can actually determine a global coordinate system, which is very important for jealousy and many different applications. And we refer to this coordinate system as the terrestrial reference frame. In this plot, you can see the changes of these coordinates, the linear changes as in velocities, where you can clearly see the plate motions that drive these very strong motions that you see. The terrestrial reference frame defines this coordinate system in terms of where the origin, the orientation and the scale is based not only actually on GNSS data but in combination with the other techniques that I mentioned earlier, for example, very long line interferometry, the laser range and doors. And overall, it captures very well the long term behavior of stations all over the world. So why do we actually need this terrestrial reference frame, there are quite a few applications, for example positioning to make sure that all these techniques that we are using work that well. These are for love system monitoring, but quite an important application also for climate would be for sea level monitoring. And there the origin of the reference frame is very important since if you would make a change or an error in the sea coordinate of the origin of the coordinate system has been shown that this dramatically affects the sea level that has that would be derived from these machines. And yeah, this would result, for example, this one centimeter change in sea level difference at the millimetre level, which is already the level where we want to determine at which we want to determine this signals. And if you want to find out more about terrestrial reference frames, I can only recommend you to come back next week. We will have to talk by several years on also this seminar series. But yeah, in that context, I should find it also mentioned that the reference frames also supported now and officially recognized by the United Nations has been a resolution on terrestrial reference frame in order to maintain them and improve them into the future. And with that, I will finish the geometry part and over back to Andreas. Now we move from geometry to gravity and mass change. And in the context of jealousy, when we talk about gravity or Earth's gravitational field. We typically talk about the physical shape of our planet. It reflects Earth's mass distribution. So, as you all know from your first physics lectures. If we have an aggregation of mass particles, we do have a unique gravity field that is generate and Earth is nothing different. It's just a very large aggregation of mass particles. And since the gravitational field reflects this mass distribution and changes thereof observing the gravitational field and essentially gives us data of a key quantity for many Earth and space sciences. So we look at the gravity field model. So essentially, once we've gathered all our satellite data, our terrestrial observations and so on, put that through our processing chain, we end up with a gravity field model now as we call it. And these typically do have some static components or a mean field, but also temporal changes that we see. And this particular model, for example, contains a long-term trend. And just by looking at this trend, we can see that our gravity measurements very well reflect geophysical signals. So we can see these large red blobs in Antarctica, Greenland and Alaska. So we see in our gravity measurements essentially the ice mass loss that we have in these large ice sheets. If we go to seasonal changes, so to the middle panel, there we can see the annual amplitude of the seasonal cycle. And this is dominated by terrestrial water storage changes, so by hydrology essentially. We can see, for example, the Amazon basin, or if you look at the bottom plot in Southeast Asia, we can see the Ganges or the Mekong basin where we have these large mass variations that we see in the gravity field. And if you look at the static, so the non-time variable part of the gravity field, we can see quite a lot of topographical features like deep sea trenches, so the Mariana trench, for example, we see island chains like Hawaii, but also see large mountain ranges such as the Himalaya or the Andes. So a static gravity field gives us information or constraints for the structure of the Earth. If we go back to this time variations, the changes that we see in Earth's gravity field are driven by geophysical processes. And in turn, if we continuously measure and monitor gravity field changes, we can get quite a lot of important information about these processes. I've just plotted four examples here. This is obviously not a complete list, but I've already mentioned in the introduction ice sheet mass loss. But we can also look at, for example, hydrologically extreme events like flooding through gravity field, ocean currents, and solid Earth processes like earthquakes or geoshares aesthetic adjustment, which we'll back up and talk about later. We have a few tools on how we can monitor and observe the gravity field and its changes, and two of the most important tools we have for that are the satellite missions grace, which was an orbit from 2002 until 2017, and the successor mission grace for on which was launched in 2018 and is still in orbit and giving us very good data. I've mentioned in the beginning that essentially geometry gravity field and the orientation of the Earth is very much interconnected with integral geodesy. And we can see that here because the primary measurements that we actually use to determine the gravity field geometrical ones. So, in these two missions we use GPS tracking so the position and velocity of the satellites, as well as very precise intersatellite ranging measurements to determine gravitational changes from changes in the satellite motion. But we cannot observe gravity is the gravity field solely from space. We also can put gravimetry gravimeters for example, directly on the ground, which you can see in the left picture, we can mount them on ships and airplanes or helicopters for example in these data. Also widely used for geophysical applications. Why do we have such a variety of different sensors for observing the gravity field. Because one caveat that is present in geometry is that the further essentially go away from a surface, the lower the spatial resolution, I get. So essentially if I move away from this surface, I only see a smooth version of the gravity field. So for extremely localized phenomena, I would use terrestrial geometry, but if I want to look at large spatial scales, I can use satellite geometry. And if I use satellite geometry, this is the advantage that I also get higher spatial coverage. Essentially, grace and grace for long. These two satellite missions I talked about, give us a clover map of gravity field or mass changes every month. And we can essentially put these one after another. And so we get a time series monthly time series of almost 20 years at the moment. And the question is now we have gravity measurements and more most geophysicists interested in mass change because I want to directly see how much ice is melting or how much ground water am I losing. And that's a little bit tricky, because essentially the mass and the gravity field is not unique. So you can have infinitely many mass distributions, which explain the gravity field that we observe. But we kind of if you take the information that we have about the geophysics that are gone in the system, we can essentially restrict our solution space, because we need that. Okay, most of the mass change that we expect happens on a very small, very shallow layer around the surface. And if you think about the geophysical processes that we observe atmosphere mass change, oceanic mass change or the hydrosphere to happen at or around a surface which is very shallow compared to the complete radius of Earth. So we have this direct connection between gravity field and the mass distributions at Earth surface. And with that we can now do very, very cool things. Because one of the advantages that we have with crematory is that we measure the integrated mass change. So we don't have a single geophysical process that we specialize at. We measure everything that goes on. And if our measurements contain everything, then we also can start looking at each individual sub process. And essentially, our measurements are the sum of atmosphere, ocean, hydrosphere, ice sheets and so on. So if we want to look at, for example, water storage changes, so hydrologically applications, we can take our measurements and just subtract everything else, if we have a reasonably good idea what's going on in the other subsystems. For example, if I want to look at solid earth processes, I can do the same approach. Just take the grace mass change, subtract everything else, and I can look at for example, the mass changes that an earthquake has caused. And this very, this versatility that gravimetry or satellite gravimetry gives us is very much reflected in how much this data is used, and how important it is to geoscience. So let's look at some stats from the Grace Telos website hosted by NASA, and grace and grace for on the second most cited NASA satellite mission in the intergovernmental panel for climate change assessment report six, and it contributes to 14 essential samples of Gecos. And another very almost surreal start is that, as of August this year, and there are five over 5000 publications that involve grace or grace and grace for on data, which JPL tracks. So I guess they're much more. And with this very optimistic outlook on how much grace can contribute to geosciences as a whole. I will then think. I will hand over to Rebecca. Yes. Thank you, Andreas and Benedict for giving me a good introduction into the geodesy. So I'm now showing you an application of Geodesy, especially classical as a static adjustment. This adjustment is operated as GIA. And you see in this word cloud of GA. There are many poses as related to GA. We, of course, have class as a static adjustment, but we also have sea level change. We have viscosity we have lotus fears or many poses as from different geoscientific disciplines are affected by GA. But what is GA. So GA is response of the solid earth to ice mass changes. So if you, for example, have an ice sheet here, and if we melt this ice sheet, we get a response of the solid earth in form of an uplifting. And in addition, we get a response of the sea surface because the melting ice or the ice sheet itself is in gravitational attraction to the water. And when we decrease the mass here, we also release some attraction so the water decreases as well, which also in turn means if we get a new sea surface, we also induce subsiding or uplifting beneath the sea surface as well. So now it's the go on and have no ice left in the lower graph. We have an ongoing rebound because the earth is not entirely elastic. It responds in the first part of the years to respond to elastically, but with mantle being whiskers Lee, the other time dependent process involved. So when we have no ice left on the surface, we still have the on rebound ongoing in the area where we had an ice sheet. This also means that we have an additional adjustment of the sea surface. And because we have the mantle, something something has to fill them gap in here where we have uplifting, we have mantle flowing in, which also means that the bulge developed here doing the classification is collapsing. So this is a general concept of GA. And now we can observe this with different disciplines we have geodetic observables, where we have 3d land motion observed by genus s and Inza and satellite technique. This was explained by Benedict already. We have cavity changes found base and satellite data. We have changes in the earth rotation parameters, for example, to polar wonder, polar motion and length of the day. And we have also can see relative sea level changes, for example, from tight gauges and satellite at imagery data. In addition to this we also have parallel observations, more geological observations. Again, relative sea level, where we observe the shoreline deformation, lake limits, tilting and seismicity that we have seen in the past. I don't want to focus on these I want to focus now on the geodetic observers today. So from Benedict's talk we have the 3d motion of the areas where we had or have ice sheets. For example, in northern Europe and Canada where we had large ice sheets, about 20,000 years ago. And also in Greenland where we still have large ice sheet line. We still in all areas we see uplifting. In Finland, Scandinavia, northern Europe we have up to 11 millimeters per year of uplift in a city called, around the city called Umeå and north central Sweden. And it's a bit larger uplift in Canada, it's up to 40 millimeters per year. This is mainly because we had a larger ice sheet here as long ice sheet had a larger area and also larger sickness than the northern European ice sheet. And we also see land uplift in Greenland because Greenland ice sheet was much larger 20,000 years ago than today. So we of course in the time-dependent process of the viscous mantle also in the Greenland observations. In addition to the vertical land uplift we also see a horizontal motion as shown for the northern European data set and the velocities are going out of the uplift maximum. Not only GNSS can contribute to observing land uplift induced by or due to GA, we also see it from INSA where we measure also the change in height and the change in the east-west direction. This is an example for Iceland where we also can clearly identify the uplift happening due to the recent ice mass losses on the Iceland glaciers. As we already saw from Andrea, so we have gravity changes also affecting the solid earth, we can see how solid earth are moving, so we have the satellite data from GRACE, now from Fenuskendia, to the northern Europe and for the northern America and we see a positive signal which is due to the mantle inflow. So it shows us more how the future is going on whereas the GNSS is giving us a more today snapshot of the land uplift. We see a similar signal when we use current data, for example for these data sets absolute gravity data will obtain for several years. So we have here a time series for station Vasa which is about here in Finland and absolute gravity was measured several times over several years, you see a long time span from before 1990 until 2020. And so we see a decrease in the gravity change compared to the GRACE satellite where we had a positive gravity change. We now have a negative gravity change also seen for the entire area using several absolute gravity observations. This is due to that the land is uplifting so the station on the surface is getting further away from the center and so further away from the gravity midpoint. Then we have the changes in the Earth rotation parameters as one of the GA observables we have for example to polar wonder and polar motion. These are observed by several satellite systems so what Bennett already mentioned via API doors and SLR I used to look at look at the Earth rotation parameters and what does it mean why does it change when we have an ice mass changes. We have the rotation axis of the Earth shown by this black line and when we decrease the ice mass the rotation axis moves because the shape of the solid Earth changes and the GA changes. And this is also observed over many years meanwhile and we see a change in the rotation axis wandering around towards the Hudson Bay in Canada. But this observed change in rotation or observed polar motion cannot be explained only by GA. We also need to include other processes and for example geodynamic processes, geodynamic mantle correction models also help us to explain the entire Earth rotation parameter changes. Another parameter is the length of day and again because we distribute water and ice masses, we get a different we get shorter and longer days. For example, when we have built an ice load during a glaciation towards along the poles. This is similar to when a figure skater closes gets the arms closer to the body, it spins faster than when the arms are wide. And opposite happens when we melt the ice sheet, we get water towards a crater. We get a bulge around a crater and it's similar when the figure skater spins the arms outside and then it's slower than having the arms closer. And this was an also observed can be still observe is a change in length of the day. And the last genetic GA observers relative to sea level. This can be observed by tight gauges. Tight gauges exist for several hundred of years in some areas of the world. And why we see here from 1880 to 1889. We had only a few stations and these were increasing remarkably in the last 100 years. But you see that most of these stations are located along the northern hemisphere. Also seen the graph appear most stations are not hemisphere why we only have a few in the southern hemisphere, of course would be better to get a homogeneous data set with stations. All areas in the world. But how does the state get station results look like. So we get a change in water levels tight gauges measuring the change in water level you can exclude some or we can calculate out some. Sickness for example ties. And then you can look at this trend over many years. And this is for Stockholm station in Sweden, one of the oldest station, and you see a clear decrease in water level, which is not really a decrease in water. It's a land uplifting and that's why waters get getting further away from the from the land basically. The line, the trend line shown here is the induced GA or this is a GA uplift. And the deviation from the water level from this line is showing us that we have no additional sea level increase happening in the area. And this can be done for several stations as I told you already, and you see them. This is the GA effect in most of the station and you can correct for this and then you can analyze these data that with respect to other processes. As I already said, we have only a few tight gauge stations available. We would like to have a complete map of how the sea level is changing. So we can also use satellite at imagery a genetic method as well. And then we cover most of the oceanic area and combines them with tight gauges station and GPS data, and get a complete view of sea level change. And this is shown here we have and the sea level change obtained from at imagery. If you now take even the ocean mass change by grace, which is ice melt coming into the ocean. We can then see the straight changes, which of course and isn't a valuable result for ocean aquifers to study the temperature differences and salinity. We can now take all these observations. And now we want to model GA because when we model GA we can say something about the future how Glenn uplift is going on in the areas where we had ice sheet very still have an ice sheet. How does he see a model look like so we have two inputs we have an ice and ocean loading, and we have the earth structure we model entire earth.  And we can vary the Earth's parameters there are many variations possible. And in addition is that how the GA or how the solid earth responds to the ice and ocean loading has an effect again on the ice and ocean loading as well so we have to iterate several times to get the realistic result. GA models unfortunately have some uncertainties. If you look at genus s velocities. For today we cannot from these alone we cannot identify if we had a large ice loss or small ice loss depending on what time it was, or if we have a large ice loss and a weak earth versus a small ice loss and strong earth. An observation of genus s data today wouldn't tell us a difference so we also need some logical data to give us modifications. In addition, if you have the one day uplift rate versus a 3d uplift rate this means on me that one day is an homogeneous Earth model with only variations and steps, while a 3d model is lateral heterogeneous Earth model way more realistically including seismological observations. We did see that there is a difference in the uplift rate. And we have to explain our uplift rate that we observe, of course with 3d models 3d Earth models. Another factor is that GA models can have different rheologies and different rheological parameters. And one is the Poisson ratio giving us information about the compressibility of a model. And there are two options and these two options give us can give us complete different results in horizontal velocities. So we have geodynamic parameters as much as the parameters which are important to include in our GA models to explain our observations or genetic observations better. And GA is for some it's what they want to achieve, what they want to look at, for some it's only a noise basically. So what Andreas already showed we can have a graze trend and if you now take a GA model output we can look at the differences. And these differences can be taken into account when we look at the atmosphere changes, ocean changes, hydrological changes, ice sheet changes or solid earth without GA. So you saw that GA involves many disciplines, which EGU divisions deal with GA. Of course it's geodesy that we have observations, but there are many other disciplines in EGU looking at GA as well. So we have genomics because we are doing the modeling, the choir science is because we have the ice sheet we need, ice mass balances and so on. And with this I would like to wrap up our geodesy webinar. So you have seen that geodesy can help you to study mass changes with grace. For example, ice lows, groundwater depletion, earthquakes, GA. And we can also look at position changes with GNSS, similar observations as above but also landslides and other sea levels as well. And geodesy provides a global trusted reference frames for accurate sea level monitoring, which is needed to look also into the future. And of course there's also much more. And with this I already hand over to Simon. Thanks so much for that. We have a short amount of time for questions as a few I can go through the Q&A box. And the first one I want to ask is, which areas are involved in gravity measurements? And how are they handled? I think that's the open question. And I want to jump in on that. Yeah, so I will try to answer that very broadly, because the measurement errors that we have very much depend on the system that we use. If you think about satellite gravimetry, then the measurement error that we have in satellite altitude, then that's a purely geometrical error, because we use in grace and grace for long. We have GPS measurements and these inter-satellite distances that we use. And this propagates then into our gravity fields. The key fact of satellite gravimetry is that this error, the measurement error gets exponentially higher, the smaller spatial scales we look at. This means, essentially, if you look at the gravity field level, we can treat the satellite gravimetry measurement error with a low pass filter. So filtering grace gravity fields with a low pass filter essentially gets rid of most of the observation measurement errors that we have in there. So let's go down to, for example, you have one gravimetry. There, the system is quite complex because you need to track the state, the position, the velocity of the acceleration of the plane that you have, you have to take care of all the vibrations. And I feel that's a very much sensor setup to sensor setup approach and how to deal with the errors that you have there. So I don't, I can't give a concrete answer for that. Thank you. Just speaking of grace, I'll quickly move on to another question of what is the output of grace itself. So there are, there are, in the grace community, we talk about data levels and for the user, the most interesting data levels, the data output levels that we have is level two, which is gravity field. So here you have potential some meter squared per second squared, and then you have level three data, which is already converted into mass change at mass change is typically expressed in equivalent water height. You can think of it as a shallow layer of water around the surface, and you have to increase this layer by one centimeter for the layer and reduce it one centimeter there to explain the gravity field that we measure. So thank you. Moving on from that you mentioned gravity field models. What advice to have someone who wants to carry out an internal accuracy assessment for this models. There is a don't think there is a straight forward answer to that. One advice that I would give is, if you have terrestrial gravity data available. These are a good starting point to evaluate satellite models, for example. That's what we do when we, when we produce such a gravity field model to get a feel of how good it performs. When we talk about the mass change lever, then you have a little bit more options because the data there is a lot more varied. You can use gnss displacements, essentially loading observations, which can be very easily correlated with the mass change that they measure from grace. So these would be the two approaches that I would take. And so much for your answers. I think we have time for just one more question. I was looking at this pops more application focused. Can GIA for example be used to measure sea surface geographies or other such applications. That's too specific. They worry about it. Well, I mean GA itself not GA is just one of the process that if you understand it really well, and are able to model really well using all that advanced methodologies. That's a good correction model for all other disciplines at the end. That's the only way how GA can you contribute in this direction. Excellent. Thanks for that answer. And maybe one final question before I wrap up. Last question here is how do I understand the scale parameter in terms of the threshold reference frame. Yeah, you can imagine like, if this would be the size of the earth and you would change the scale, then you would basically increase the size or increase it. So it's basically a change in the height of all your observation stations. And since the height is quite delicate parameter determine, which is typically the most errors. It's actually quite challenging to determine the scale accurately. So there are techniques that are better suited for that, for example, very long based on the geometry and father techniques like genius as you would need really precise knowledge about the face centers of your antennas. So it's quite important, especially for a sea level change. Because this is also related to the height. But yeah, it's still a lot of effort being put to determine the scale very precisely. Excellent. With that, we're just about to run out of time. So to wrap up this webinar, I want to thank our speakers, Andreas, Rebecca and Benedict for joining today and delivering such information. I thank all the attendees who came today, listened and asked questions.


Welcome back to Capital Beat. It's Friday, February 5th, 2016, and it's week five in the legislature. We are going to talk a little bit about paid sick leave and some other issues. And joining me, as always, is Vermont Press Bureau reporter Josh O'Gorman and Senator Phillip Baruth from Chittenden County. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you. The paid sick leave bill we thought was coming to a close this week with passage in the Senate on a 21 to 8 vote. The Senate made some changes, defeated an amendment that would have allowed for a small business exemption. And then we got to Thursday, and there was a little bit of development. So maybe you can sort of set the stage for us of what transpired this week and what will happen next week. Sure. Just so people know, the paid sick leave bill is designed to help people who work in jobs and who have historically worked in jobs in retail mostly, food service mostly, where they have no paid time off at all, no vacation time, no combined time, no sick time. And what that means is that these people, often at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, they have no ability to stay home with a sick child.  So when you go through the drive-in window at your fast food place, you may be served by someone who is contagious, but they had to make that choice. Can I afford to lose a day's wage or should I stay home? Right. And they made the decision to serve you your burden. Right. So that's who the law was designed to help. At the last minute, there was a move to carve out businesses with five or fewer employees. The problem with that is that's a third of the group we were trying to help. In addition... About 20,000 people. Exactly. In addition, those five or fewer are overrepresenting the population who don't provide the benefit. So it was really, as I view it, a move that struck at the very heart of what we were trying to do. And so all the way through the committee process, all the way onto the floor, we had managed to do many, many other things to help small business, but avoid that. And this is a kind of final procedural move to try to get that. So it's my understanding that the bill that you passed in the Senate kept in place what the House passed, which was three earned sick days allowed in the first two years of employment, which would then bump up to five days after that. With an important caveat. Yes. So as I say, in the Senate, we were very concerned about small business. So my colleague, Senator Ballant, added an amendment to protect new business, startups.  One year from the day you hire your first employee. Yes, exactly. And then the other thing that was done is my colleague, Senator Snelling, who is a business-minded Republican, but somebody who has typically spoken as well to issues like this. She put in an amendment to have any business with five or fewer employees have that same ramp-up period of two years. So with those caveats, that was the bill we were looking at. As I mentioned at the top, it was a 21 to eight vote on Wednesday, and the amendment you mentioned from Senator Brian Campion, a Democrat, failed on a 14 to 15 vote, but it did have at least five or six Democratic votes in favor of it. So we fast forward to Thursday when Senator Bill Doyle of Washington County asked to reconsider his vote, and that triggered a whole new process. Perhaps you can break the rules and the process down for folks who may not be familiar what happens at that point. So just so you know, when the framers put the system together and the people who wrote the rule books like Mason's and other people, their overriding ideas that it should be very hard to pass legislation, and it should take a long time, and I think that was a wise way to set it up. So for instance, a motion to adjourn is always preferred and in order. So no matter what's going on, if you say everybody should go home, the rules prefer them, and when you think about it, it's a very good way of slowing the process a little bit, making sure that we're sure of what we're doing. So Senator Doyle used a very little used procedure, which is if you vote with the winning majority on any issue, within 24 hours you can ask to reconsider. I think that's fair enough. The question is, having reconsidered that question, do you open up the entire debate again to a myriad of other questions? And that's where we're still trying to get clarity from the Senate Secretary among others. So Bill Doyle asked to revisit the final vote on the bill and the vote on the Campion Amendment, and that's his right. But my feeling is that we should be limiting ourselves to that, not redoing the entire debate that produced the 21 to 8 winning vote. So how common is this for somebody to move to reconsider their vote and reopen up something that had been finished really more or less the day before? It's not common at all. It's usually used when everybody in the chamber thought they were doing something and a piece got dropped out. And so most everyone wants this piece in. One of the easiest ways to do that is to have a senator reconsider their vote very quick, you put in the amendment and you move on. That's the way it's usually used in a sense with the will of the body moving in one direction. It's very rare, as in this case, to have a 15-14 vote and then to have somebody use it strategically to get a new vote. Now if you go back to the death of dignity debate, as you remember, incredibly hot button issue, we fought for years, usually 15-15 or 15-14, those kind of votes. So after two days of debate, we managed to pass the death of dignity bill. And then I don't know if you remember, but Bob Hartwell, who was actually Brian Campion's predecessor in that seat, said he wanted to reconsider his vote and after an hour or so of discussion, he pulled that back. But that's the last time I remember it being used in that way by effectively the losing side and going to someone on the winning side and saying will you reconsider so that we can have another bite at the apples. If the Campion Amendment is adopted, then who will benefit from this legislation? Is it, I guess, retail workers who work at chains, fast food restaurant workers who work at chains, but it sounds like it won't be like small independent workers, I suppose. Well, any business with five or fewer employees would not be obligated to provide paid sick leave. So I suppose you could say they gain, although they would be doing just what they do now. The people who lose are the 20,000 plus who literally have no option but to go to work sick. I have three girls and I work in a state house and it's in Montpelier and my wife is in Burlington.  I mean, if things here aren't crazy, I stay home with the girls and she goes and teaches. But that's because we have the liberty and the luxury of two incomes. You have a lot of single moms out there and that's who this disproportionately is.  If you've got kids, this is a feature rather than a bug. Kids get sick. So this legislation is very, very business friendly at this point. We've carved out many things that were offensive to the business community. We've given them lots of ramp up time. But at the end of the day, the question is, will we mandate it? I believe, like the minimum wage, this is something that's a minimum for everybody and we shouldn't be saying, well, you work at a business with four employees so you don't get it. That doesn't make any sense to me. I spoke to Governor Peter Shumlin this morning about this very topic and he said he would like to see the original Senate bill passed without the small business exemption and to get to his desk quickly. So we know that on Wednesday, if Senator Doyle switches his vote, it becomes the amendment goes from losing 14 to 15 to potentially winning 15 to 14. So what happens between now and Wednesday?  Well, I think Senate President Pro Tem John Campbell was very wise to put the question out a few days. And that gives us all time to rethink and reconsider. I think in large part, even when we're talking about it here, we're talking about the Campion Amendment as the small business exemption or the business friendly thing. What people need to hear again, I tried to make this point on the floor, but I think it's worth communicating as many times as possible. We have already done a great deal for small business, including Senator Snowing's amendment which gives them two full years before they would need to do anything. So communicating that is number one. Number two, there's a report in Vermont Digger this morning of some behind the scenes action, which personally I found troubling. And I think that that's something that needs to be looked into. I won't go into great detail except to say that it involved people from the other chamber, trying to work our chamber, things that we usually in a civil way try to stay away from. So that's another part is cleaning up our process, making sure that everybody's working in an above board and methodical way. To be fair, they did use rules that are available to any Senator at any time. There was no unethical behavior here from my reading of what happened. They simply, they- I don't know if you've read the Digger account. I have. So the question would be, is there reporting accurate? Is there reporting a full accounting of what happened? And I can't speak to those. But what I'm saying is that I found that account troubling in its presentation of what was going on to produce the motion by Senator Doyle to reconsider. I also think if the intention is to use reconsideration to open up a whole host of other amendments, to me that strikes at the heart of the process. So we will have passed a bill and then on one person's say so, we will then revisit the entire debate. That seems to me counterproductive and really not in the spirit of the rules as written. But again, not a violation of Senate rules. It's permitted under the rules and I would- We're seeking an interpretation of the second part. So you're right, reconsideration is allowed. And let's- But the rest is interpretation that we're still getting from the Senate secretary. We should point out that this is the type of lobbying effort that happens every day in this building by paid lobbyists, by lawmakers. I disagree. Well. If you look at the digger story, they're talking about an extraordinary form of pressure on a single member. And I think as they describe it, I just think it comes up to the line, if not crossing it in terms of behavior that you don't want happening every day in the state house. All right. So again, I can't speak to the complete nature of the reporting. Maybe you will provide another angle on the story. But I woke up to that this morning and it didn't help my breakfast. So we'll agree that the rule was used in a way that's allowed. Yes. How we got to that point, perhaps- And then what happens after that? Thereafter. Those are both cloudy, but you're absolutely correct on the rule itself. All right. Senator Baruch, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it. Yeah. Great. Thank you. Good to talk to you. And welcome back. We're now going to talk to Speaker Schap Smith. Thank you so much for being here. Hey, it's great to be here. Good. We chatted with Senator Baruch earlier about paid sick leave. Your chamber passed this bill last year. Pretty slim, margin 72 to 63, I think it was. The Senate has made some changes that they say are even more palatable to small business. I'm assuming you've had a chance to look at those changes. How are you feeling about those Senate changes at this point? Well, the bill in the House was the result of a pretty delicate negotiation between business interests and those who really felt that working for monitors needed some help. And that was a compromise that we felt pretty comfortable with. I have some concerns about what I'm seeing coming out of the Senate. It's not clear to me that it would work in the House. Now, the Senate bill that passed out of committee and came to the floor was one that we were discussing, and we felt we were pretty comfortable with. I think that the five-person exemption could create some real challenges. How about the, so there were two amendments, as we briefly talked about earlier, the Campion Amendment to put in the five employer or fewer small business exemption, and then another one from Senator Dianne Snelling that essentially bumps out the waiting period until 2018 for small businesses with five or fewer. Is that something you all accept? So I haven't seen Senator Snelling's amendment, so I can't really speak to that. I was referring to the Campion Amendment, which I think would run into some real challenges in the House. Now, look, we resolve these challenges all the time. My sense is it would go to a conference committee and we would deal with it there and come back. Do you think it's headed to a conference committee no matter what, whether there is this small business exemption or not? I can't speak for the leadership of the committee I have talked briefly with Helen Head. I think that the bill, as it came out of committee, is something that we would be willing to look at and probably would be acceptable, although I can't say for sure. OK. All right. We'll move on to a couple of other topics. It's been a few weeks, about a month now, since the governor put out his plans for the session. What can you tell us about where some of these initiatives are at this point in the House, particularly with the budget and other funding mechanisms? So the budget, we are just starting to really dig into the budget. The Appropriations Committee got the budget last week and they're trying to understand all of the moving parts. The Ways and Means Committee is taking a look at the revenue that was recommended by the administration. And our evaluation right now is, is the revenue that has been proposed appropriate? Is the size of the box for the revenue appropriate? Is there a place within the budget that we could find some more savings? And what about the new proposals that have been put forward? So we're digging into that. Conversation has been good. Mitzi Johnson, who's the chair of Appropriations, was checking in on a daily basis and has his Janet answer. So I feel good about the process. Was there anything that's been ruled out already by your members? I'm sure you've had some informal polling and discussions with the Democratic caucus at this point. Well, you may assume more organization that really exists. No, we haven't ruled anything out. And frankly, I think it's hard for you to rule anything out unless you have got some sort of alternative. And so it's really important for us to fully understand what the budget is, where the spending is, and then we can understand, are there areas that we can change for the revenue side? One of the proposals that Governor Shillman offered was expanding attacks that's currently on hospitals and nursing homes to include doctors and dentists. So as to help close the so-called Medicaid gap, is that something that you would support at this point? I want to see how it works in other states. I do think that it's something that's open for discussion. I think the challenge there is that if we're going to raise that money off of the providers, we have to make sure that we're putting money back in their pockets in increased reimbursement. We don't want it to be a net loss for them. So that's what I need to understand fully in looking at the budget. Looking back, in hindsight, do you think that the 0.7% payroll tax that you proposed in 2015 would have been the right move in hindsight now to close that gap or what? I thought it was the right move last year. I was somebody who supported that idea. I do think that the challenge around that particular revenue source was making sure that people who were paying it felt like they would get a net benefit from it. In other words, the whole theory is that the Medicaid shortfall ends up being subsidized by insurance premiums. And so there's a hidden tax on insurance premiums. We needed to show businesses who were paying a payroll tax that that hidden tax was going to be reduced. And I don't think we did that effectively last year. The pop bill is working its way through the Senate right now. And it looks like it won't be voted on today by the Senate Finance Committee. It'll bump into next week. Are we really running out of time here for your side of the building to do its due diligence? Well, it's clearly going to need a lot of diligence in the house. It's going to be something that hasn't been really fully vetted in years past. So it's not something that starts from a building block already. I think it's too early to declare that we're running out of time. My hope is that a bill will show up in the house either at the end of February or shortly after we get down the town meeting break. Which end of the end of February, really. Right, shortly after the time break. But at that point in time, we can focus on it. I've been very clear with the governor that we won't look at the bill. I have also been clear with him that my read is that it doesn't have enough support right now in the house. I'm not saying that that will be the case later. But that people have real questions about it, not only about the substance of the bill, but about whether this is the time to do it. Yeah, I mean, there was a real conspicuous lack of applause during the governor's state of the state address when he announced that initiative compared with other things that he had announced. I didn't notice that. Look, I think that regulation of marijuana is something that is going to happen in the state of Vermont. And I think that it's something that we have to make sure we do right. And it's not about doing it quickly. So I'm curious to see what the Sears bill does. I haven't had a chance to fully look at it. I'm looking forward to briefing on it soon. I think Senator Sears will appreciate you attaching his name to it. Do you think that the governor has the ability to sell it to the House at this point? Essentially, you and I have talked about this before. And you've said it's up to really one person, the governor, to sell it not only to the House, but to Vermonters. Well, is that possible still? So I think that the administration needs to work hard to demonstrate that this is a workable format. And the governor is going to be part of that. But it's not just the governor. It also has to be Vermonters. And I think that people's ambivalence is a reflection of many of their constituents. And I agree with the governor that the war on drugs with regard to marijuana has been a failed war. The question is, what would be successful, and is this it? And that's, I think, the real question. I had a group of kids come in from my son's middle level. And they came and talked to me about the legalization and regulation of marijuana. And they were split. And they were really concerned about whether this would increase access to marijuana among young people. But the thing that I asked them was, how hard is it to get marijuana now? And they all agreed it's actually pretty easy. At the middle school level. At the middle school. There were some middle school and high school. And so that tells me, and they said that it was easier to get than alcohol and cigarettes. So that tells me that we've got a problem on our hands already. And the question is, will this address that problem? Before we let you go, have you been following the presidential race? I have. Yeah. Do you have a prediction for the primary in New Hampshire on Tuesday? I think it's too early to call. Too early? Yeah. But I think that there's probably a good chance that a Vermonner might win the race. Fair enough. Very good. All right, and before we wrap up today's show, we're going to talk a little bit about our experiences on the campaign trail following Bernie Sanders. I was out in Iowa for the caucuses. I spent the weekend and a few days out there. And I've got to say, I very much appreciate our primary system and our ballot voting system. Yeah, tell us a little bit about the insanity that it is the caucus. Did you see anyone flipping any coins to decide new races? There were no coin tosses at my precinct that I was at. But it was, I won't even say controlled chaos. It was just straight up chaos. Hundreds and hundreds of people packed into a church trying to figure out how many Hillary supporters were there, how many Bernie supporters were there. And in the end, it wasn't going to make much difference because it was very clear that the Hillary people outnumbered the Bernie people. But the way they counted did seem a little haphazard. And I wonder how that might have impacted things if the count was closer than it really was. It's a sort of a throwback system of government. I'm not sure it's the most effective and efficient election system, but it is what it is. And as we all know, Bernie Sanders came in second place in Iowa, lost by 3 tenths of a percent to Hillary. We think there's some questions about, as I mentioned, the system. Bernie sort of clings to that at times. Other times, he says, yeah, Hillary won. So because of that showing, he took a lot of momentum into New Hampshire where you were this week. Tell us a little bit about what's happening on the ground there. Absolutely. So shortly after Iowa, I guess he flew into, I think, Nashwood about 5 AM on Tuesday morning. And there was a big gaggle of faithful who were there to meet him at the airport. And he had an event in Keen. And I talked with an 18-year-old who had spent much of the last night before putting up just Bernie signs all through town. So as soon as I rolled into Keen, I knew exactly where I was and where I was going. He was certainly welcome. And we should know that's kind of a college town with Keen State down there. Really strong Bernie country. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is how liberal it was. Rather than demonizing single mothers, when Bernie mentioned single mothers, everybody applauded. So that gives you an idea of what sort of people are coming out to it to his rallies. Interestingly enough, though, I drove about a 30-mile stretch of secondary highway. I didn't see a single Democratic sign at one point. I saw tons of Trump. I saw the occasional Jeb. I saw some Kasech. I did not see a Hillary or Bernie sign for about 30 miles. And so I don't know if that means that their people aren't supporting them or if there was an effort to take down the signs. Or maybe they were smart enough not to stop their car in a highway. Yes, I suppose that might be true. So we've seen the latest polling in New Hampshire. Bernie's up anywhere from 20 to 30 points. What's realistic in your view after seeing what's happening on the ground there? Well, Hillary's done well in New Hampshire in the past, but I don't think that history is really going to help her in this particular instance. Because Bernie has just, even though it's on the other side of the Connecticut River, he certainly has a lot of well-wishers there. Even before he ran for president, I imagine. So I think we're going to see a Bernie victory in New Hampshire on Tuesday. And we should say that that will be a fairly remarkable thing, given that Hillary Clinton ran there in 2008 and won the New Hampshire primary over Barack Obama then Senator Barack Obama. So a Bernie win this year, eight years later, would be a pretty mighty feat taking down the Clinton machine. Yeah, and hopefully it might give him a little bit of momentum going into South Carolina, where he is not leading by anything. And not likely to win. So we'll check that out in a few weeks. We'll leave the show there this week. Thanks again for joining us. And join us again next week on Capitol Beat, a joint production of Vermont Press Bureau and Orchimedia. And you can find the shows at orchimedia.net or brahmamprespiro.com. Thanks again. We'll see you next week.


Hey everyone, welcome to our event, Peer Storage, the path to sustainable IT. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, Ajay Singh joins me, the Chief Product Officer at Peer Storage. Ajay, it's great to have you back on the program. Great to be back on Lisa, good morning. Good morning. And sustainability is such an important topic to talk about. So we're going to really unpack what Peer is doing. We're going to get your viewpoints on what you're seeing and you're going to leave the audience with some recommendations on how they can get started on their ESG journey. First question, we've been hearing a lot from Peer Ajay about the role that technology plays in organizations achieving sustainability goals. What's been the biggest environmental impact associated with customers achieving that given the massive volumes of data that keep being generated? Absolutely, Lisa, you can imagine that the data is only growing and exploding and there's a good reason for it. Data is the new currency, some people call it the new oil and the opportunity to go processes data, gain insights is really helping customers drive an edge in the digital transformation. It's going to make a difference between them being on the leaderboard, a decade from now when the digital transformation kind of pans out versus being kind of somebody that you know, quite missed about. So data is super critical. And obviously as part of that, we see all the big benefits, but it has to be stored. And that means it's going to consume a lot of resources and therefore data center usage has only accelerated, right? You can imagine the amount of data being generated. You know, recent study pointed to roughly by 2025, 175 zettabytes, which each zettabyte is a billion terabytes. So just think of that size and scale of data, that's huge. And they also say that pretty soon, today in fact, in the developed world, every person is having an interaction with the data center, literally every 18 seconds. So whether it's on Facebook or Twitter or your email, people are constantly interacting with data. So you can imagine this data is only exploding, it has to be stored and it consumes a lot of energy. In fact- Oh, go ahead, sorry. No, I was saying in fact, some studies have shown that data center usage literally consumes one to 2% of global energy consumption. So if there's one place we could really help climate change and all those aspects, if you can kind of really, you know, tamp down the data center energy consumption. Sorry, you were saying? I was just going to say, it's an incredibly important topic and the stats on data that you provided. And also I like how you talked about, you know, every 18 seconds we're interacting with a data center, whether we know it or not, we think about the long-term implications, the fact that data is growing massively as you shared with the stats that you mentioned. If we think about though, the responsibility that companies have, every company in today's world needs to be a data company, right? And the consumers expect it, we expect that you are going to deliver these relevant personalized experiences, whether we're doing a transaction in our personal lives or in business. But what is the, what requirements to technology companies have to really start building down their carbon footprints? No, absolutely. If you kind of think about it, just to kind of finish up the data story a little bit, the explosion is to the point where in fact, if you just recently was in the news that Ireland went up and said, sorry, we can't have any more data centers here, we just don't have the power to supply them. That was big in the news and you know, all the hyperscalers that's crashing the head. I know they've come around that and figure out a way to round it, but it's getting there. Some organizations and areas, jurisdictions are saying pretty much no data center the law, you know, we just can't do it.  And at Pure, we believe that, you know, today's data success really ultimately hinges on energy efficiency. You know, so to really be energy efficient means you are going to be successful long-term with data. Because if you think of classic data infrastructures, the legacy infrastructures, you know, we've got disk infrastructures, hybrid infrastructures, flash infrastructures, low end systems, medium end systems, high end systems. So a lot of silos, you know, a lot of the inefficiency across the silos because the data doesn't get used across that. In fact, you know, today, a lot of data centers are not really built with kind of the efficiency and environmental mindset. So they're the big opportunity there. So Ajay, talk to me about some of the steps that Pure is implementing as its chief product officer would love to get your thoughts. What steps is it implementing to help Pure's customers become more sustainable? No, absolutely. So essentially we're all inherently motivated like Pure and everybody else to solve problems for customers and really forward the status quo, right?  And while we're doing that, the challenge is how do you make technology and the data we feed into it faster, smarter, scalable, obviously, but more importantly, sustainable. And you can do all of that, but if you miss the sustainability bit, you're kind of missing the boat. And I also feel from an ethical perspective, that's really important for us. Not only do all the other things, but also kind of make it sustainable. In fact, today, 80% of the companies, the companies that are realizing this, 80% today are in fact report out on sustainability, which is great. In fact, 80% of leadership at companies, CEOs and senior executives say they've been impacted by some climate change event. It's a fire in the place they had to evacuate or floods or storms or hurricanes, you name it, right? So mitigating the carbon impact can, in fact, today be a competitive advantage for companies because that's where the puck is going and everybody is skating, wanting to skate towards the puck. And it's good, it's good business too, to be sustainable and meet these customer requirements. In fact, the recent survey that we released today is saying that more and more organizations are kickstarting their sustainability initiatives and many are aiming to make a significant progress against that over the next decade. So that's really part of the big, the release. So our view is that that IT infrastructure can really make a big push towards greener IT and not just kind of greenwash it, but actually make things more greener and really take the lead in ESG. And so it's important that organizations can reach alignment with their IT teams and challenge their IT teams to continue to lead for the organization, the sustainability aspects. I'm curious, Ajay, when you're in customer conversations, are you seeing that it's really the C-suite plus IT coming together? And how does peer health facilitate that? Because to your point, IT needs to be able to deliver this, but it's a board level objective these days. Absolutely, we're seeing increasingly, especially in Europe with the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that's unleashed, we definitely see it's becoming a bigger and bigger board level objective for a lot of companies. And we definitely see customers starting to do that. So in particular, I do want to touch briefly on what steps we are taking as a company to make IT sustainable. And obviously customers are doing all the things we talked about and we're also helping them become smarter with data. But the key difference is, we have a big focus on efficiency, which is really optimizing performance per watt with unmatched storage density. So you can reduce the footprint and dramatically lower the power required. And how efficient is that? Compared to other all-flash systems, we tend to be one-fifth, we tend to take one-fifth the power compared to other flash systems and substantially lower compared to spinning disk. So you can imagine, cutting your data center consumption is say 2% of global consumption, roughly 40% of that tends to be storage because of all the spinning disk. So you had about 0.8% of global consumption. And if you can cut that by four-fifths, you can already start to make an impact. So we feel we can do that. And also we're quite a bit more denser, 10 times more denser. So imagine one-fifth the power, one-tenth the density, but then we take it a step further because, okay, you've got the storage system in the data center, but what about the end of life aspect? What about the waste and reclamation? So we also have something called non-destructive upgrades where using our AI technology in pure one, we can start to sense when a particular part is going to fail. And just before it goes to failure, we actually replace it in a non-destructive fashion so customers' data is not impacted, and then we recycle that. So you get a full end-to-end lifecycle from all the way from the time you deploy, much lower power, much lower density, but then also at the back end, reduction in e-waste and those kind of things. That's a great point that you bring up in terms of the reclamation process. It sounds like Pure does that on its own, customer doesn't have to be involved in that? That's right. And we do that. It's a part of our evergreen service that we offer, a lot of customers sign up for the service. And in fact, they don't even retell them, hey, that part's about to go, we're going to come in, we're going to swap it out, and then we actually recycle that part. The power of AI, I love that. What are some of the things that companies can do if they're early in this journey on sustainability? What are some of the specific steps companies can take to get started and maybe accelerate that journey as it's becoming climate change and things are becoming just more and more of a daily topic on the news? No, absolutely. There's a lot of things companies can do. In fact, the fourth item that we're going to highlight, the first one is, they can just start by doing a materiality assessment. And a materiality assessment essentially engages all the stakeholders to find out which specific issues are important for the business, right? So you identify your key priorities that intersect with what the stakeholders want, your different groups from sales, customers, partners, different departments in the organization. And for example, for us, when we conducted our materiality assessment, for us, our product, we felt was the biggest area of focus that could contribute a lot towards making an impact from a sustainability standpoint. That's number one. I think number two, companies will also think about taking an Azure service approach. The beauty of the Azure service approach is that you're buying, your customers are buying outcomes with SLAs. And when you're starting to buy outcomes with SLAs, you can start small and then grow as you consume more. So that way you don't have systems sitting idle waiting for you to consume more, right? And that's the beauty of the Azure service approach. And so for example, for us, we have something called Evergreen One, which is our Azure service offer where essentially, customers are able to only use and have your systems turned on to as much as they're consuming. So that reduces the waste associated with underutilized systems, right? That's number two. Number three is also, you can optimize your supply chains end-to-end, right? Basically by making sure you're moving recycling, packaging and eliminating waste and that thing. So you can recycle it back to your suppliers. And you can also choose a sustainable supplier network that's following sort of good practices across the globe. And such supply chains that are responsive and diverse can really help you also, the business benefitted, you can also handle surges in demand. For example, for us during the pandemic with this global supply chain shortages, whereas most of our competitors, lead times went to 40, 50 weeks, our lead times went from three to six weeks because we had the sustainable supply chain. And so all of these things, the three things are important, but the fourth thing I say is more cultural. And the cultural thing is, how do you actually begin to have sustainability become a core part of your ethos as a company across all the departments? And we're at pure, definitely, it's big for us around sustainability, starting with our product design, but all of the areas as well. If you follow those four items, they'll do the great place to start. That's great advice, great recommendations. You talk about the supply chain, sustainable supply chain optimization. We've been having a lot of conversations with businesses and vendors alike about that and how important it is. You bring up a great point too on supplier diversity. We can have a whole conversation on that. But I'm also glad, Adi, that you brought up culture. That's huge for organizations to adopt an ESG strategy and really drive sustainability in their business. It has to become, to your point, part of their ethos. That's challenging. Cultural change management is challenging, although I think with climate change and the things that are so public, it's more on the top minds of folks, but it's a great point that the organization really as a whole needs to embrace the sustainability mindset so that it as an organization lives and breathes that. My last question for you is advice. So you outlined the four steps organizations can take. I look how you made that quite simple. What advice would you give organizations who are on that journey to adopting those actions, as you said, as they look to really build and deploy and execute an ESG strategy? No, absolutely. Obviously, the advice is going to come from a company like Pure, our background kind of being a supplier of products. And so our advice is for companies that have products, usually they tend to be the biggest generator, the product that you sell to your customers, especially if there's got hardware components in it, the biggest generator of e-waste and kind of from a sustainability standpoint. So it's really important to have an intentional design approach towards your products with sustainability in mind. So it's not something that you can handle at the very back end, you design it upfront in the product. And so that sustainable design becomes very intentional. So for us, for example, doing these non-destructive upgrades had to be designed upfront so that one of our repair person could go into a customer shop and be able to pull out a card and put in a new card without any change in the customer system, that non-destructive approach, it has to be designed into the hardware and software systems to be able to pull that on. And that intentional design enabled you to recover pieces just when they are about to fail and then putting them through a recovery, in a waste recovery process. So that's kind of the one thing I would say, that philosophy, again, it comes down to if that is seeping into the culture, into your core ethos, you will start to do that type of work. So I mean, it's an important thing. You know, look, this year with the spike in energy prices, gas prices going up, it's super important that all of us do our bit in there and start to drive products that are fundamentally sustainable, not just at the initial install point, but from an end-to-end full-life cycle standpoint. Absolutely, and I love that you brought up intention. That is everything that peer is doing is with such thought and intention and really for organizations and any industry to become more sustainable, to develop an ESG strategy to your point, it all needs to start with intention and of course that cultural adoption. Ajay, it's been so great to have you on the program talking about what peer is doing to help organizations really navigate that path to sustainable IT. We appreciate your insights and your time. Thank you, Lisa, pleasure being on board. Great to have you. For Ajay Singh, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the special event, Peer Storage, The Path to Sustainable IT. The Path to Sustainable IT


Live from the San Jose McKennery Convention Center, it's theCUBE at Open Compute Project U.S. Summit 2015. Hey, welcome back. I'm Jeff Frick here. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Open Compute Project Summit 2015. This is the sixth OCP Summit. We were here last year, about 20, I don't know, about 3,000 people. It's really had a small intimate affair and in fact, Frank said they don't want it to get much bigger. So really excited to have our next guest, Thomas Summers, CEO of Rex Computing. We had Thomas on last year. Welcome back. Thanks for having me. So last year we were on, we talked a lot about your story, feel fellow, probably the youngest Cube alumni that we have. So congratulations on that and we decided to get you back on and get an update. So what's going on with Rex Computing? What happened since we saw you about a year ago? Yeah, so it was about, it was January of last year, it was the last summit, so about 14 months, but lots happened. So we've moved away from just focusing on the board level and integrating other chips and instead into actually building our own processor architecture. And we're looking at actually being able to tape out those chips and have the world's most power efficient processor. Yeah, so back up a step. So what's your guys core focus in? You're looking for big, big iron, big computing power. Yeah, so when we started Rex Computing, the goal was we wanted to have the most power efficient supercomputers in the world. And we thought at that point, it may have been possible to use other people's processors and as we were developing that and the system that we showed last year at OpenCube was getting there, but we realized that there are a lot of fundamental issues with how processors are currently designed and built and we were kind of crazy enough to say, well, maybe we could do a bit better. Right. So that's what we're doing. So it's interesting how the power discussion has evolved over time as these data centers have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger and power becomes a real big issue. But you would think for a supercomputer that wouldn't necessarily be the case because if it's a dedicated unit to do really big problems, is power such a big deal? Why is power a big deal in supercomputing? Yeah, so part of the biggest single user of supercomputing is the United States Department of Energy. Well, the Department of Energy is tasked with actually maintaining our nuclear stockpile. Most people don't realize that's the DOE's job and so they do weapons testing or simulations in addition to making sure that these current warheads are still safe. That's one of their big jobs, that's the nuclear national security agency. The NNSA portion of the DOE, but they run a number of the national labs and they have some of the world's most powerful computers. But for the entire Department of Energy, their power cap by executive order, by the president is 20 megawatts and so they have these huge tasks which need to be accomplished and they have this 20 megawatt budget. So and right now their biggest computer which is the number two in the world is called Titan and that contains about 17 petaflops of sustained computing power. And the Department of Energy's goal is to get that up to one exaflop which is a thousand petaflops and they still have this 20 megawatt budget. So while they're currently at about three to four gigaflops per watt in terms of energy efficiency, they need to be at 50 to be able to even be think of exascale being at all feasible. So they need over an order of magnitude power improvement to even think that this thing is something they can reasonably put together. And there's actually a presidential directive as to the limit of the amount of power that they can consume. Yes, and that's the 20 megawatt limit. So talk a little bit about the evolution of supercomputing and high performance computing from what used to be, remember the good old days, the pretty craze with the little bench around the computer on the outside and really dedicated specific devices for that versus using cloud and x86 architecture in massive scale, especially from like AWS or a place where you can basically rent massive capacity. How is that game changing the uses of supercomputing and then what you really focused on the power consumption in supercomputing? Yeah, so when most people think of supercomputers, they think of the Cray one, the system you just described. And so Seymour Cray is thought of as the founder of supercomputing, but the Cray one wasn't actually his first system and what most people consider the first supercomputer and held the record pretty much throughout the 1960s before he went and founded Cray Research or Cray Computer Company at that time was called the CDC 6600. And so that was from 1962 and in most people's opinions, the first real supercomputer. And that was a single machine, had one processor and it was just aiming at doing things as fast as possible. When he moved to the Cray one and started his own company with that, the whole idea was vectorization, where you could take a very large dataset, put that into a vector instead of taking each number and doing an operation on them individually. The idea was put that in a vector or a big, they're not sure if you remember math class, but... Yeah, I don't remember the vector part, but keep going. We've got a really smart audience, so they're hanging with you. Yeah, to explain the basics of it, just you have an array of all the numbers that you're operating on and the thing that a vector processor and what the Cray one did was take multiple of these vectors and multiply a huge set of these numbers all at one time. And so it was a huge, massive improvement over the scalar processors of the time. And back then, 1975-ish with the Cray one, we were down to 10, 15 micron transistors and we were still in the low megahertz for most things. And so what most supercomputing companies, including Cray did was they just kept cranking up the clock speed and they eventually get the transistor smaller which helped the clock speed problem. And so they kept doing that for a while until they realized we're not really getting the same returns from just making things smaller. So then they started making more distributed out systems. So that was the Cray two, you had multiple processors. There are still these vector processors but thought of actually sharing the computation and putting it on different pieces. Then Cray made the Cray three and Cray four which his idea was almost 25, 30 years ago, we should move to some new non-silicon. So his idea was going to Gallium arsenide which was a really crazy proposition at the time and it wasn't successful and that kind of was when Cray started to diminish. And then the Cray run, yeah. And so at that point then a bit later on but in the mid 1990s, this whole idea of cluster computing started coming about where you can take a bunch of off the shelf processors that were typically reserved for personal computers and put them together and distribute that work. And there was a lot of IBM and Cray were calling that weak scaling where the whole IBM, what's now known as FUD, if you're in certainty in doubt was saying that we have our big iron systems over here, we have a big beefy processor and then they were making those systems that were selling for ridiculous amounts of money and then there were these new systems out there which was focusing on having many processors and do parallelization instead of vectorization. And it turns out that in terms of cost per flop, cost per doing the actual job, it would make a lot more sense to go to that parallelization. And so that's kind of what went out but the really interesting thing getting into today is the fact that we're sort of going back to vectorization. Because today's GPUs are vector processors. Like you can think of a... Oh that's right, all the Nvidia GPUs and all that type of stuff. Exactly and so the only reason that they're successful right now is because Nvidia was able to take the old idea of a vector processor and put in a package that appealed to gamers so that they were able to have a huge volume and thus have the cost down. And now they're bringing back that old technology back to the big iron HPC systems and finding some success. But it's my theory that that won't last long. Because of the processor or just because it's not a specifically purpose-built processor or I mean where do people put in their money? You've still got, we just covered the IBM System Z event earlier this year and they're basically repositioning as an integrated system around the modern workloads of cloud and mobile and social and some of those things. And then you've got the massive rise of the hordes of x86s in these massive data centers that the two coexist. Are they workload specific? Which is why one is better than the other? What do you think? Yeah. And then where does your piece fit? Yeah, where does your piece fit? Yeah, I'm not really in the business side of the computing. So specifically the IBM, their work or not really workstation, their mainframes. The mainframes are pretty different from like supercomputers. They're really focusing on getting as many IOPS and things out of that while not focusing on raw computation. And so I think IBM is in their own little world over there which there's the big banks and there's others that have been using IBM systems for going on 50 years. Sure. And so there's a small market there but it's not something I really focus on. But when it comes to the real high performance computing where you're focusing on compute, the main reason why I think that both the x86 world and kind of these general purpose or the when I say general purpose not in being able to do any computation but the sense that what's currently in your laptop and in our phone, a lot of people try to build up like that arm is a lot different from x86. They're really basically the same. But in my mind when I'm coming from computer architecture the way that these x86 processors and arm processors and anything that's really used today including GPUs are built for a old paradigm. They're thinking of the constraints that existed when these things were initially designed 30, 40 years ago and those constraints aren't the same today and we have different problems which I could talk about as well. Right, well I mean it begs the question. So how do you define a super computing problem differently than a high performance computing problem or a mainframe or a C of Amazon servers? Yeah, so I would say that HPC is mostly defined by the fact that you have to do a specific operation very quickly and you have, I think of HPC as being actually very similar to embedded in the sense that with an embedded system you have a lot of constraints on power, size and it's really meant to be doing a specific task. HPC is basically just the room or the warehouse size version of that. But it's actually from the problem solving both software and the electronic engineering mechanical side it's very similar problems faced and there are similar solutions to it. And so the difference with the mainframe like I was saying is like that's focusing on IO on the Amazon I think that's focused on being able to have many different tasks all and being able to spread the compute function to different things kind of dynamically while the big iron HPC, the things that are developed there kind of flow into the Amazon and those very large distributed scale but that takes time. But I think that we're facing a huge problem in HPC and that the top 1% right now and that's when we start affecting the Amazons more and more in the two to five year timeframe three to five year timeframe and then be affecting all of computer in the five year out. So that's why we're focusing on the HPC technologies coming down is what you're saying. Exactly, so in my mind, by focusing on the problems of the top 1% of computers right now we're going to be affecting the design and development of all computers in the future. Right, so if you could describe some of the classic use cases for the HPC we already described the one in the Department of Energy and making sure the nuclear warheads are all safe and sound which is very important. And we always hear about kind of modeling of the atmosphere and you know, it's big massive models. Where do you see, what are some of the entry points you see that computing horsepower coming downstream into some applications where it doesn't exist today? So I think the thing that excites me the most and ties into what I was just saying about how embedded and super computing is close together in problem set. I think it's actually going to be getting closer in that having embedded super computing where if we have self-driving cars or having them in UAVs, you have a very, very constrained when it comes to actual power budget and cost but you still need to have a lot of actual compute power going on there. And while, you know, the cloud is developing we're still pretty bound by latency and bandwidth when it comes to it. The speed of light is fixed, right? Yeah, exactly. If someone fixes, you know, finds a new domain of physics and breaks that, then they win that. But since I like obeying the laws of physics, I'm going to focus on, you know, trying to fix it at the compute level.  Yeah, and because the root problems that affect HPC really do affect everything else. And what most people don't realize is like doing the actual computation isn't the power intensive part. That was true 40 years, 30, 40 years ago when these architectures were designed. But to give an example, doing a 64 bit double precision floating point operation which is like the most power intensive like computation itself takes 100 picojoules of electricity, which is a very small amount, but when you have very large system that adds up. But actually moving those 64 bits of data from your DRAM to the actual registers of your CPU so that it can actually operate on it, takes 4,200 picojoules. So there's a 42x, it takes 42 times more energy to be able to move the data to your processor than to actually operate on it. It's the age old problem, right? Do you bring the data to the processing or the processing to the data? But you're saying even within the chip you still got that same basic issue. Yeah, and so the requirement, we have to improve that by over a factor of 10 to actually make any of these very, very large scale systems be able to function. And the problem with current architectures is that they don't accept that fact. All these things were designed where it's acceptable to have a lot of data movements. When the data movement today is actually what's costing you the most. Right, right, and there's so much more data in a useful application. Exactly. All right, well, Thomas, we're getting the time that I want to give you the last, give us a quick update on the company, kind of where you guys are and what we're going to be talking about if we see you at OCP 20, OCP Summit 2016. Yeah, so we're developing a new processor architecture, new instruction set, new core design that is based on this concept that memory movement is expensive and doing the actual computation is much, much cheaper. And so it's not some crazy non-vuan Neumann or anything like that where we're sticking to the basic computer root. So it's relatively simple to program, but we're developing a 256 core version of this processor and we're hoping to actually have this chip taped out in the next 12 to 18 months. So it's a potential we'll have something next year not guaranteeing actual silicon, but shortly afterwards, hopefully. But I guess the other big thing related to open computers is I'm the co-chair for the open compute high-performance computer root, which we started up in this past year. Are you the one that they talked about in the keynote that said, why is there no HBC? Yeah, I said, go ahead and start it. Yeah, so it's been a, I won't take all the credit for it. It's been a collaborative effort, but yeah, I did talk to Frank about that last year. Yeah, good for you. But the part of, so what we're doing with the open compute HBC project or my little bit that I'm focusing on is kind of the open silicon. I really believe that having these closed proprietary X86 and GPUs and things just isn't going to work in this community because what OCP has done so far is open up everything above the processor. And I think that there really is a good case and a lot of reasons why we should be opening up things like the instruction set and the actual interconnects that go between chips because if you can build systems with those things in mind, then you get much more efficient overall compute platform. Right, right, interesting. Well, Thomas again, thanks for stopping by. Thomas Summer, CEO of Rex Computing. Check it out, feel fellow, for sure the youngest CUBE alumni, and I say that with great respect and admiration for what you're doing. I'm Jeff Frick, we're at the Open Compute Project Summit. It's number six, it's 2015. Be here all day, wall to wall coverage. Open source meets hardware infrastructure brought to you originally by Facebook. It's an interesting story, it's only going to get bigger and we're excited to be here. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We'll be back with our next guest after this short break.


Rational regulation of electrochemical reconfiguration and exploration of activity origin are important for electric catalysis. Here, a novel COSY-204 at MZine tubular catalyst is rationally designed to achieve rapid complete reconfiguration engineering during the hydrogen evolution reaction process. This article was authored by Luchi Wang, Isen Hao, Liming Deng, and others.