be a smooth four-manifold with topological condition that B1 and B2 plus are 0, 1 for B2 plus. B2 plus, this came about because the U-plane integral or the integral of the Coulomb branch of the Ashley 2 Gates theory is only non-venecing if B2 plus is smaller or equal to 2, 1. It seems hard to evaluate it for B2 plus as 0. So we'll focus on the B2 plus is one case. The B1 is 0 is more to simplify the discussion, to avoid zero modes for one of the fermionic fields. Then one of the Incudians was a lattice L, which corresponded to the second cosmology over the integers. And we mod out the torsion. We have a quadratic form or a bilinear form on this lattice just from the intersection or integration of the wedge particle of two forms over the four-manifold. So this is B. And we can extend it over the reals. Actually, later we will also use complex arguments. If it has a quadratic form, then q, qk is just simply Bkk or we will write it as k squared. Then we have the following piece of information. j is the period point. Let j be the period point. But in other words, it is the unique self-dual 2 form in the forward light cone. Since B2 plus is equal to 1, we have one positive direction. So there's also therefore only one direction which is self-dual in front of h2mr. So we can say it's in the forward light cone or it is effective that it has positive inner products with curves in m. And we normalize it to be of norm 1. qj is equal to questions about that. Feel free to ask yesterday after the talk to a few questions about this notion. But we have we work on a manifold of B2 plus as 1. And for that reason, there is a unique self-dual 2 form which spans this direction in h2mr. And we call this one the period point. And it depends on the metric because j is star j. The self-duality condition depends on the metric for the watch time. Then using this period point, we can project elements of k in h, or let me say, k in l. You can project a k in l to a positive and a negative component. k plus is Bj and then log times j. So this is a times r. And similarly for k minus, this is then k minus k k plus. All right, then we set up this u-plane integral as follows. So I denoted us phi mu j, and then we could include an observable o. And we arrived at the following expression. It's d tau, where it's d tau bar, nu tilde tau times a sum over fluxes or sum over the lattice, psi mu j tau bar, and then this observable o. So let me just recall the different elements, nu tilde of tau was d tau, then a u times to the power of the Euler number of m. These are the curvature couplings. And then there is a term bu to the power of the signature. Other lectures were using here the E of m, but I used k. And then the sum over fluxes psi j tau tau bar reads the sum over k in the lattice, possibly shifted by a half lattice element. Actually, the whole thing is multiplied by 1 divided by the square root of y. y is the imaginary part of tau. Then we get a sine minus 1 to the b k. I will say a bit more about all the ingredients I haven't discussed before in a minute. Let me just finish this expression. The bilinear form b kj, then we get q, which couples to the negative definite components of k, and q bar couples to the positive definite components of k. Is there a question? Can you even know where k is k? Yeah, very, very good. I'll get there in a second. First, I'll say something about mu. Mu lies in l divided by 2, a half lattice element. Then the capital K, for a complex manifold, one can take the canonical class. More generally, it is an integral lift of the second Stevel Whitney class, w2m to the lattice l. y is the imaginary part of tau. I already mentioned. And just recall the topological observables we discussed yesterday. We can take for O the point class, which corresponds to two times this observable u, which was a trace of phi squared. We can also exponentiate it e to the 2pu, where then p would be a fugacity for this point class, the point observable. And so another class of observables was i minus x. This minus sign will maybe become apparent a bit later. But this is a surface observable. And so x is a two-cycle in the manifold n. Questions? OK, so our task today is to evaluate this u-plane integral. And so let me give a little intermezzo about modularity and modular forms before we're turning to this integral. We'll leave the integral for the moment. So just to introduce some notation and some modular objects, let me start by recalling the modular group as of 2z, which is simply the group of integer matrices, a, b, c, and d in z, such that the determinant is equal to 1. And then a modular form is a function f from the upper half plane h to c, such that f of a tau plus b divided by c tau plus d is equal to c tau plus d to the power w. And then it gives back the function by itself. And this w is the weight. So this is the classic definition of a modular form. In a sense, it's quite surprising that there are even examples, especially holomorphic ones, because it's a strong condition on the functions. Good examples exist. And so typically, the examples have an even weight w if you want to satisfy this equation on the nose. If you allow complex phases, you can get some more interesting examples. For example, the datacent eta function, eta has weight, w is 1 half, and it's defined as follows. Theta of tau is q to the 1 over 24, n is 1 to infinity, q to the n. And it has weight, w is 1 half. It transforms into azzol to z, but it will pick up some extra phases compared to this form. All right, to get more interesting examples, we should also look at congruent subgroups. We will just mention one of them. It's noted by gamma upper 0n. And this is the subgroup of azzol to z, which is just the elements of azzol to z. But with b is equal to 0 modulo n. So in particular, n is 4 will be important for us. Maybe for completeness, let me mention one other one, namely gamma n, which is a subgroup of this one, in fact, cd in azzol to z, such that abcd is equal to the identity matrix modulo n. So since it's a subgroup of the full-modular group, we have more examples. And in particular, the Jacobi-Theta series are modular forms for gamma 2, 1 half modulo forms gamma 2. And I'll just recall the definition that the 2 tau is equal to the sum over r in the half integers q to the r squared over 2. Theta 3 is basically the same thing, except that we take a sum over integers n in z, qn squared over 2, and theta 4 is equal to the same thing as theta 3. But then we have a minus 1 inserted, minus 1 to the n, q to the n squared over 2. And yeah, one thing you see is that modular forms have a Fourier expansion just because you can have 1, 1, 0. And then 1 here, that transformation implies that they have a Fourier expansion. And often, the coefficients have interesting arithmetic information. OK, so these are some of the modular forms which are useful for the following. And as the title suggests, you also need some modular forms. This is a generalization of the theory of modular forms, which I will just explain by giving two examples. So this subject of modular forms, for those who don't know, that goes back to the 20s by the Indian mathematician Robin Hoodian was looking at some q-series which were different from the classical modular forms. And there were some open ends which finally got resolved in the 2000s by Sviggars and Sagyay. So one of the type of q-series people discover is the following function f of tau, which reads as follows. It's minus 1 divided by theta 4 of tau. And then a sum over integers n and z. And we get a bit more complicated expression, minus 1 to the n, q to the 1 half n squared minus 1 divided by 8. And the denominator, 1 minus q to the n minus 1 half. One can expand this quite easily using a computer. One get the following series, q to the 3 over 8.  And in fact, it's one of the q-series which appears in umbral moonshine, a paper by Chang, Duncan, and Hart. OK, so this is a more complicated function. And it does not transform as a modular form. So yeah, the main statement is it does not transform as a modular form. But we can quite easily modify it to a function which does transform as a modular form. So f tau, however, the following function does be considered a so-called completion f hat of tau. f hat of tau and tau bar. This is a non-holomorphic function. And on the right-hand side, we get the holomorphic part f of tau plus an additional term, which reads as follows minus i over 2. And then an integral from minus tau bar to i infinity. Then the dedicate eta function to the power 3 and the square root of minus i w plus tau dw. So we add this so-called period integral to it. Although it's not quite an integral over a period. And the integrand is the dedicate eta function we had on the board a minute ago. And then there is an additional factor. And one can show that if you do a modular transformation, that this function spits out a similar integral. It transforms back to this function. But it transforms with a shift. It spits out an integral similar to this one, which is then actually a period integral. It goes from, say, 0 to i infinity if you do the tau to minus 1 over tau transformation. So then the claim is that this holomorphic part kind of absorbs that shift. And then this whole thing transforms as a modular. So this function f hat does transform 1 half model of form for gamma 0 form. So yeah, I'm not going to derive this. You have to believe me. And if you take the tau bar derivative of this f hat tau tau bar, then we see that we get no contribution from f. But we just act on the period integral. And we get minus i divided by 2 square root of 2y times the complex conjugate of tau cubed. Let me give one more example, which is related to this one function, which is denoted in the literature for specific reasons as 8s and then super 2 of tau. And it reads, we can express it in terms of f tau. In fact, 24 times f tau. And then there is a term, which is actually a model of form theta 2 to the 4 tau plus, sorry, this 2 comes outside, theta 3 to the 4 tau, divided by eta tau cubed. And if you make a series expansion, this reads as 2 cubed to the minus 1 over 8 and minus 1 plus 45 cubed plus 231 cubed squared, et cetera. And people may recognize this as the famous model of form, which gives the dimensions of the Mace Monsang group. So this appeared in the context of Mace Monsang following the work of Eguchi, Oguri, and Tashikawa. And then I think this formula appeared first in the paper by the Bokar, Merti, and Saki. Sorry? Is it a character of some theory? Yeah, there's a character of a two-dimensional theory. Yeah, that's right. In the sigma model, we have target space k3. But it won't be very important in this talk, but it is indeed the case. So again, this is a mock model of form. And it does not transform as itself as a model of form by itself. But we need to add a non-hologomorphic term. We can read off the non-hologomorphic term by this one. If we add 24 times that non-hologomorphic term, then it transformed actually as a model of form for s out to z. So now this extra term makes it transform as a model of form for s out to z. So maybe one last thing, too, of this intermission about modularity is that since we have this kind of symmetry group of the functions, we don't have to consider the functions on the full upper-half plane. We only have to consider them on a fundamental domain. Domain, so if we consider h, modulo, the full modular group, the classical fundamental domain people take is symmetric around the vertical axis. It's the keyhole fundamental domain, which has boundaries at minus a half and a half. And then this is part of the unit circle. And in fact, the two boundaries are identified under the modular group. And also these two arcs are identified under modular group, just that the only kind of open end is at the top. And for the other congruent subgroup h, mod gamma 04, it turns out we get six copies of this keyhole fundamental domain. And like this, so we get, again, the keyhole fundamental domain. But we get another five images. These ones are the horizontal copies like this. And then there are two inversions, one going down to tau is equal to 0, and one going down here to tau is equal to 2. So if we go back to cyberquitten theory, then the cyberquitten solution basically gives these quantities like u and the adu in terms of modular functions. We have for u of tau, you saw yesterday, it starts with q to the minus 1 over 4. But we can completely give a full expansion in tau. And this reads then 1 half theta 2 to the 4 plus theta 3 to the 4 divided by theta 2 squared theta 3 squared. And this combination is invariant under gamma 04. And just one other quantity that we use is this quantity, the adu. It appeared as one of these topological couplings. And this one reads 1 1 half times theta 2, 2 of tau times theta 3 of tau. OK, so this is very strong that we have now in all, we know u explicitly as function of tau. And now if we go back to the u plane integral, now I can specify the integration domain because you might have noticed that when I wrote down the u plane integral that I didn't specify on the domain. So we get since this order parameter u is invariant under gamma 04, we know now that we should integrate over this fundamental domain. So we are integrating over 8's, gamma 04, and then d tau, which is d tau bar, and then this quantity mu tilde tau times psi mu j. And for this integral to be well defined, it should actually be invariant under the choice of fundamental domain. So if you would take a different choice of fundamental domain, one should be able to show that the integrand remains the same and one can in fact do this using these expressions and model transformations of this psi at the possibility of the observable. And I could also mention how nu tilde looks like, nu tilde in terms of model functions. It actually is quite simple. It is minus i over 8 times theta 4 to the 13 minus b2 over eta to the 9. OK, so it is quite useful if you want to demonstrate that this is in fact a well-defined integral independent of the fundamental domain. It is a useful expression. Do I need questions? All right, so this integral was evaluated by more written for small values of b2. Say b2 is 1 and b2 is 2. And also one way to do it is you can start from an so-called empty chamber and then use wall crossing to get to the chamber you are interested in. This quantity. So this is the contribution. To mention that, let me draw the picture of the u-plane, just the plane where u lives, which has these three special points, i infinity and lambda u is equal to minus 1 and plus 1. So if you compute the full path integral, you get a function support from these strong coupling singularities. And for the manifolds with b2 plus is 1, you get a contribution from the rest of the u-plane. So we are calculating the contribution from the coulomb branch to the full path integral of the theory. But it only contributes for b2 plus is 1 and 0. So yeah, so thanks for asking the question. We see that these points u is minus 1 and u is plus 1 and that corresponds to these two cusps at the bottom of the real axis. And the weak coupling is at tau 2 i infinity. So in fact, this integral is an improper integral because it does go all the way to i infinity. And also if you look at the measure, it is also non-compact if you go down to the real axis.  And then let us also, and then at the other end, we cut it off at 0.1 over y, imaginary part of 1 over y. So then we can determine the integral on this compact domain. Let me call it h mod comma 0, 4. And then with y as a subscript. And if we are lucky, we can take the limit of y to infinity without any issues. Yeah, so the two sides are identified. Yeah, I'm not quite sure at the bottom. I imagine that this one and this one and this one are, no, I imagine that this is identified and this and this. And then we can go over the, in the middle. So it is, yeah, you can think of it as a sphere, which then has kind of three cusps and the other questions. OK, so to continue working with a generic, so maybe let me first include this cutting of the domain. I'll put the y here and then the limit of y to infinity. OK. And now in order to continue with the evaluation, let me say something about the classification of the lettuces, classification of lettuces with p2 plus is 1. So for the let, if l is old, this is a major, yeah, a major topic for definite lettuces, but it appears quite straightforward if, in fact, if you have p2 plus is equal to 1. Since if l is old, we can decompose it as follows. It's just, we can bring it to the diagonal form. The lettuces l is unimodular for any form manifold and we can bring it to a diagonal form since that it takes this form of one positive direction and b2 minus one negative directions. And if l is even, then l also takes a simple form. It is this two-dimensional self-dual lettuce. So this has intersection form 0, 1, 1, 0, plus n times the negative e8 lettuce, b2 minus 2 over 8. Some number times the negative e8 lettuce. OK, so we'll use this decomposition of the lettuce. I will focus now for l odd just to make things not too technical and for the mistake within the time. Now I pick a convenient metric which satisfies this or respects this decomposition. So I take for this period point j that j is equal to 1 and then I take b2 minus one zeroes. And in this case, our sum over fluxes psi mu j in fact factorizes. So we can write it as some function f little f mu 1 tau, tau bar, which has all the non-holographic dependence, times a theta function or a theta series which sums over this and over the negative definite part of the lettuce. So this is a theta series l minus mu minus. And this, let me spell out this function f mu 1. So mu is just the first component of this conjugated class mu, our tau bar. It complicates i to the pi i mu divided by 2 square root of 2i times the sum over k in l plus mu minus 1 to the k minus mu. k and then q bar k squared over 2. And then this second theta series, theta l minus mu minus is more classical.  So if we pick a convenient metric with respect to the standard form of the diagonal form for the odd lettuce, then our sum over flux psi factorizes it to the two of these functions. And if you want to pick another metric, you can do so by using the Waclasing formula, say starting formula. OK, so if you evaluate this function f mu, one gets the following. tau bar is equal to 0 if mu is an integer, basically because of this term at the bottom. Whereas if mu is a half integer, we recover the cubic eta, the dedicated eta function to the power free. This should be just set. I hope that that resolves the question. This is just one component of the lettuce. Does that help? And I have omitted the one subscript from all the mu's in this line, so it's just a number here. All right, so maybe given this is answer, people may see where this is going. We can now, all the non-olomorphic dependence of the integrant is in this function. And we saw when we discussed the model of forms, we had an anti-derivative of eta tau cubed. So we can write the integrant as a derivative to tau bar and devaluate using stokes theorem mu j. Let me say for an observable e to the power 2p u. Find us the limit of y to infinity. Just need a little bit more space. So this is equal to the limit of y to infinity, the integral of h mod gamma 0 4, gamma 0 y. Now we have here d tau, which is d tau bar. And we have nu tilde tau. And then in this series psi, we can write it as the d tau bar of f hat, tau tau bar times this series over the negative definite lattice tau, which is just the function of tau. OK, so we can then apply a stokes theorem. It's the limit of y to infinity of the integral over d tau and the boundary of this domain y. Then we get nu tilde tau f hat of tau. So since we go to the boundary of, well, let me just tau tau bar, theta l minus nu minus tau. And here I still wanted to include e to the 2p, the point observable e to the 2p u. Same thing here. So if I continue with this integral, the integral of d tau over the boundary here, if we do first the cos of infinity, it's the integral from minus half to three and a half. So this will just pick up the constant term in tau, or actually four times the constant term because the interval has length four. So we get that this is equal to the limit of y to infinity four times the constant term of mu tilde tau tau. And now let me write the tau bar in terms of tau and capital Y because that's where the cusp at infinity is. So I write as tau minus 2 times i y and then theta l minus mu minus tau to give the constant term of this one which I've noted by the term q to the zero. And there are two more contributions from the other two cusps, which let me just abbreviate it here as sending tau to minus one over tau. And for the other one it is sending tau to two times tau minus one and all the q to the zero. And now as a final step if you take this, you see that the only capital Y dependence in a sense is sitting here in this non-holomorphic part of this model of form. In fact, that part is sub-leading. If you take this limit y to infinity keeping tau fixed then that period integral disappears and you are just left with the holomorphic part. So we can take this limit y to infinity and just write and just take the holomorphic terms in the bracket.  And then we have the contributions from the other two cusps, 2 minus 1 over tau to the 0 plus tau minus 1 divided by tau. So in fact, if we take a simple example of say p2 which says p2 is equal to 2 1, then one reproduces the Donsen invariance determined by Lothar. And in fact I think the expression is actually quite similar to his expression. Although he completed it I think using Warcrossing starting from the hitchable surface and then blowing down. We also see it as actually quite a universal expression because in fact we had a power here, nu tilde to the power 13 minus b2 theta 4. And in fact we get theta, this one can be expressed as a power of theta 4. In fact the theta 4 of this one is actually cancelling the ones of this one. And then it appears actually to be quite a universal answer for the U-plane integral for manifolds with an odd intersection form but otherwise leaving b2 arbitrary. Again in this way evaluated for arbitrary smooth manifolds with p2 plus is equal to 1, b1 is equal to 0. Are there any questions? So maybe let me make a couple of comments if you want to include the surface observables. I want to include the surface observables e to the i minus x plus i plus x. So I am including a, this is the q closed surface observables which couples to the negative, to the anti-self dual part of the connection if you go to the IR. And somehow if you want to connect to expressions in the literature of mock model of forms it is most natural to include also a q-exact observable, q-exact observable which couples to the positive definite part. And then the U-plane integral takes basically what this amounts to. If you include this is that the sum over flux is psi mu j tau tau bar is replaced by, will include also elliptic variables. So we get psi mu j tau tau bar and the rho and the rho bar where rho is an element of l tensor c and it is explicitly written as x divided by 2 pi times du dA. So this is determined in terms of this 2-cycle x and it is multiplied by this combination du dA which makes it transform effectively with a weight minus 1 which is then a Jacobi variable. And then one can also basically run the same game but then using Opel-Lech sums rather than these mock-modeler forms. One thing I should add is that this q-exact operator was a bit subtle. We run into a problem with calculating the one-point function of this observable using the regularization I was using in this talk and we had to develop a new regularization including counter terms to cancel the infinities which showed up and all that can be done. So it is a good observable to include, especially if you want to match to the literature on Opel-Lech sums in the modular form literature. So we have seen that we can very explicitly evaluate this u-plane integral now for pure accuracy to Gates theory and we hope this helped maybe to also evaluate similar integrals for theories of other more complicated Coulomb branches. Thank you for your attention.


As the war in Ukraine continues, its effects are felt around the world. Even here on campus, PhD student Anna Vakarova shares her story. So all my family, all relatives and friends are mostly currently staying in Ukraine. I'm also married to Ukrainian. His family is also staying in Ukraine right now. With both her father and her husband having to stay back to fight, Vakarova feels there's no safe place for Ukrainians to go. There is no way to be safe, not for any Ukrainian, not anywhere in Ukraine, in my country, but around the globe. With the situation changing each minute, every day is a new battle for Vakarova. Every day of mine starts with checking the news and then crying. Every day ends in the same fashion. And every day I am very grateful to every donation, every humanitarian aid. Every minute of thousands of volunteers spent to help my people to get to a safe place, to have food, to provide necessary medication. Living without any food, water or electricity are just some of the hardships her loved ones are facing. So the war caught my family, my friend's family, in a small town here here. And as you might know, currently the majority of Russian forces are collected near here. So they want to block the city and then attack it. So they start by attacking and bombing all the small towns nearby, especially in the northern border. And so my school friend and her family, they were staying in their house in one of the small towns when the war outbroke. And they spent 10 days there without electricity, without any communication, without gas. And then they pretty shortly ran out of food and water. Also, they described that no humanitarian aid could reach that place because it was bombed or shot by Russian troops. Fakarova is hopeful that the Russian sanctions will prove useful over time, but she's concerned. More time means more lives lost. And I don't want to be greedy and selfish, but unfortunately we all see that it's not enough. Maybe we should give it a bit more time so that Russian economy can actually experience all the destroying consequences of the sanctions. But unfortunately every minute or every hour of our delay costs lives of civilians in Ukraine. Through all the hardships and uncertainty, Fakarova says that Ukrainian pride is still high.  And I am proud to be Ukrainian more than ever now.


name and organization President of the Irish Wind Energy Association Could I say it minister? Thank you very much for what you said about renewables, which I thought Really set the scene for where renewables can go forward from Ireland in a European context And I think what you have said covers both the onshore dimension in terms of The projects that are getting built at the moment and which are very important in their own right They what you said about major onshore and then which Is now becoming an increasing priority of the Irish Energy Association offshore you mentioned the whole issue of jobs and Just to make one suggestion is that I think the experience of the UK in recent times when they announced Offshore initiative shows that the whole supply chain and what can be delivered in the supply chain With a clear statement from government as to how they are going to develop forward in this case the renewable sector I think that would be really important and would be a very welcome addition to what you had to say. Thank you minister Would you like to respond to minister? Well, if you want to take a few I mean yes, I respond to Patty. I mean and in terms of Onshore, I mean, I think everybody is is is is fairly familiar with The record and the potential there and the fact that the reef is reef is to Has been approved and has been approved by government It's got state aides at turns and been approved by government and it's it's it's presumably on our website already and in terms of inviting applications and In terms of offshore, I mean Patty will be aware and some other people here will be aware that we've had a number of discussions with our British counterparts And I think we've probably taken them as far as we can take them for the moment Because the British are engaged in their own internal consultation process at the moment, which will very quickly conclude Because it has kind of reached the stage where we need to start to talk about the nuts and bolts of what would constitute an Intergovernmental agreement up to now there has been a lot of polite shadow boxing and various things You know round and about Inspirational statements and all that kind of thing and during the course of all this Intellectual ferment Charles Henry told me he managed to pick up a castle in Scotland and will not out be looking at the wind Flows there while he's out shooting grouse but He is I think Personally committed to the notion of an inter governmental agreement with Ireland and There's some rethink I think going on within the present British government and the the energy secretary Chris Hume has has the environment secretary has left the government recently and I don't know what will come out of the present consultation but The next engagement really has to be about what would be the shape of such an intergovernmental agreement that would govern the kind of Export possibilities that you're talking about and so on supply chain and I Think it's next week. I'm meeting the IDA and this is one of the questions that we're going to talk to them about I mean you know you You have to I think be able to demonstrate An export potential Before you know, we're seriously in the business of the supply chain operating from this island that would service that and we have to look at that and you know It it it does pose. There are a couple of projects that are Examining the possibilities of locating in Ireland whether any of them will actually happen I don't know but it is something that will be on the agenda. I think next week is our meeting with the idea Thank you very much Minister now because it's such a large crowd and We may have a lot of people who want wish to ask questions I'd start with taking two questions at a time and please confine them to questions rather than speeches. So, okay Thank you very much. I'm the ambassador of Finland and my name is Perti Mayanen and Everybody will after this remember my name As you guess Mr. Minister, thank you very much your friend presentation and in your presentation you already underlight the importance of the energy efficiency This is a very topical question also for the reason that the European Commission is preparing a draft Directive or it's it it is ready already and being discussed in the parliament and there are many many Important proposals in this directive including the the application to reach the 1.5 reduction energy reduction Every year I'm mainly asking you to clarify or Describe the overall iris position concerning the new directive and which way we are going at the at the moment And it says especially your opinion on this one point to five Object objective. There is also a discussion very important discussion concerning the reference year When we start comparing these reductions and this is 2011 at the moment and and there are very strong differences in Opinions and one more thing is that this process is getting very complicated for the reason that there are these 2,000 Amendment proposals by the European Parliament at the moment. So, thank you very much Sorry, Frank groomer grid and minister once you comment on your position regarding any proposed increase in the renewable targets both in European countries and You know what effect that will have here and your willingness to Increase the renewable targets going forward post 2020 obviously Yeah, well and I Can tell the ambassador that yes, we're very supportive of the objectives in the energy efficiency directive It seems to me that one of the one of the few things that we can meaningfully do meaningfully do is reduce consumption Our experience of dipping our toe in the water in terms of retrofit and so on you know would bear that out Indeed, there's also a target in the energy efficiency directive about the retrofit of public buildings and we certainly have Tremendous capacity in that area in this country Yes, you're right that our strong differences of opinion As a result, I think the Danes probably think that rather than Complete a directive that they're not happy with that it may well survive to the Irish presidency And it may not be got over the line before then but That that that is our view Well, we've been operating within the targets that are set and I'm Whereas I said in my remarks that I'm Assured by expert opinion that we have the capacity to meet our targets from on the shore and then with something to spare I don't think that that would necessarily drive me to reviving unilaterally revising unilaterally our targets. I'm more interested in looking at the issues that have been raised with me by the offshore wind people in terms of What the potential is there? I mean, I should have said in the interest of accuracy when I said that government has approved our proposals for refit to for on for for onshore government has not approved refit for offshore and There are reasons for that going to need me, but I think people understand But that doesn't mean to say that the capacity about which petty tea and spoke That is there because we're richly endowed with these resources That we shouldn't set about examining the capacity there for developing an export market And that's the big challenge of our discussions with the British Thank you In the light of the very positive experiences we've had with agencies in this country and I can think of two for example the idea and With regard to industrial development and sustainable energy island with regard to renewables development Looking at hydrocarbons, which will continue to be important and looking at carib and the emerging debate on shale gas Are you minded to look at an agency approach? You know where the promotion if you like would be long in one area and regulation and policy in another and Thereby set out to inform the players the public debate and bring us I would say to a happier space when it comes to achieving your ultimate objective of development and resource development There's another one down here at the back Minister, thank you for your contribution. Cratton Healy is the name and two points. One is about a Cratton Healy Board of SAI and various other hats Wind associations and so on Minister two things I'm delighted to hear you you believe we'll meet our targets, but given what's going on with the curtailment issue We really really need to address that there was a meeting of the SCM committee yesterday with the wind industry We're waiting for an outcome as to how they will Approach the subject, but it is the witness Pretty much a consensus in the wind industry that the the government The department will need to do something about the refit scheme to solve the curtailment problem And I'm wondering would you comment on that and the second point is I'd be interested in you're thinking behind the constitutional claim to wind energy That you in your in your address. I'm wondering what the implications of that are if I might thanks Well, the implications Gratton is not to put you out of business It is merely to remind the audience of what is stated in the Constitution and that whatever measures and Whichever direction we go in in the future that you know, it has to be for the benefit of the people of this country and so on and You know, we have managed to reasonably successfully in a market economy rides the challenge between the Constitution and Nurturing the market economy and I Be interested in talking to you David About that idea.  There's there's no disputing That I Suppose it's in the area of shale gas that it probably arises more dramatically Are more sharply anyway in terms of the division of responsibilities to which you refer You know It's The debate is one way so far, you know Even though there isn't any hydraulic fracturing going on in this country, you know One would get the country impression From the depth of feeling being expressed in different parts of the country including a meeting I saw Television last night in Karakin Shannon, I think it was and You know It's not that the technology here is new but the phenomenon of shale gas is new in this country as I understand it and In terms of separateness, I mean The three companies were awarded licenses to do initial exploration work and desktop study and all that kind of thing But if they go to the next phase or seek to go to the next phase I mean, it has to go through a very rigorous environmental Impact assessment process and all the rest that goes with that if it's an offshore Hydrocarbon it has to go through a planning process and all the rest and so on You know that that What what would what would a separate agency bring to the party? As I say, I would be interested in talking to you about that. I mean obviously the shale gas one is is is causing a lot of Concern now whether that concern is stoked up on Evidence to based information is something that it's too early to say You know We certainly don't yet have the expert advice that would enable me to be satisfied that I could make a call on it One way or the other Even in the United States I think the EPA study in the United States has taken some four years and I presume when that emerges this year It'll be a major a major contribution To this document. I think it wasn't helped in the United States by The intervention of the former vice president who managed to push through legislation that exempted fracking from any of the normal Checks and balances that would normally have applied. It's referred to in the States as they the Halley Burton loophole and That hasn't you know Enhanced public support for for the process But suddenly I'd be very glad to to talk to you about would would a separate agency dividing the functions make it more efficient and Less problematic for me I I don't know. Gratton. I know your views very well on curtailment and As you know, we're we're discussing that I Honestly, I honestly couldn't Agree with your use of the word consensus In the industry because I have to say that different players in the industry have Represented somewhat different views To me on it, but I read your paper. I don't know whether that paper was published or not and I Must say I found it very informative and a very accessible and lucid account of Of the entire issue I'm not sure that I would agree with they will all be ruined says Hanrahan before the year is out conclusion But it I know that The curtailment issue Is and has been represented to me by different by different interests in the in the industry and We're looking at it Gratton. That's that's all I can say to you. I'm not trying to delay on it or anything like that we have Additional problems on our plate as a result of a more recent sim decision Which certainly came as a major surprise to me and I think to most in the industry So we have to have a look at that as well, but I don't want to stick my own into that until I Find out a bit more about it and my understanding is that the industry is engaging with sim at the moment I don't know if that process has started yet or not Thanks Ronan Tynan member of the Institute first of all minister Thanks very much for a presentation that clearly is focused on jobs and growth in a very challenging brief you have My focus very much is from the ICT sector though in fairness as a perspective And I was delighted that you mentioned energy ICT and innovation is also an area where there are clearly major opportunities In fact, I'd even suggest you that the security sector is one that in this area They also have a lot of potential as this is the way I want to ask your question I mean it certainly probably isn't the first thing a minister for energy would be Briefed on but the whole question is cyber threats in the electric areas getting a lot of media play Anybody who follows this will be quite surprised actually and the reason of course is doing research this area myself at the moment Is these threats seem to become far more Serious with time and perhaps the reason we haven't had a problem is because those in the industry Have been doing a reasonable job in meeting that challenge So one I was curious to know are you aware of that? Is it an issue that you're concerned about you find your fellow ministers in this area concerned about it Is it an issue that you think should get more airplay is getting more airplay? For example, Ireland's infrastructure in the cyber security area is not really perhaps as obvious as it is in other countries With institutions appointed a lot of emphasis even on the military side and so forth So just to throw that at you. I mean obviously one doesn't want to be the first minister I'm sure to have that problem and luckily despite the I will admit the airplay or the attention this gets We still haven't had a major. Well, in fairness there have been some attacks on electric networks But I'm just curious really as to your perspective on that issue. Is it something you've noticed on your agenda? Thanks very much indeed Brian britain national offshore wind association Minister it would be remiss of me if I didn't say here today that your decision on the offshore refit Has put the offshore industry back by one or two years However, we very much welcome the as pati has said earlier on on behalf of the ars wind energy association Your commitment to engaging with our neighbors in the uk and the focus on intergovernmental agreement between the two countries I would also like to ask you That as part of the discussions that are taking place as directed by the eu to encourage Trade between eu member states that we're also looking at a market mechanism So that if Hungary or Czech Republic or whatever are short of renewable energy We have a major resource here that we should be seeking to supply to those states And I would like your commitment that that will be pursued at european level And finally in the context of moving forward Is it possible to look at public-private partnerships as we move forward? Particularly when you meet with the agencies because many companies in this country have invested a lot of money in the offshore industry And we need to work very closely with the agencies to capitalize on the supply chain opportunities that are afford Thanks Ronan, um We really haven't uh, we really haven't resolved on List of priorities for our own presidency yet. I mean great deal will depend on where the current presidency finishes up and so on Whether as the Finnish ambassador says the energy efficiency directive is still there The infrastructure package is clearly priority And I mentioned the energy ict interaction because we have some competitive advantage in this country in the ict area Now, unfortunately, the bad news I have for you is that yes, indeed I am the first minister to be landed with the cyber security Responsibility It has been recently passed over to me from the teshiks department and Beware of of greeks bearing gifts So, uh, yes, um We are Attempting in the unit to put together some skills in that area. I don't know about your suggestion about more airplay I think their whole existence is designed not to get too much airplay And all the rest but yes, I am aware of it and Yes, we are attempting to To cope as best we can I would agree with your remarks that The industry has been doing a relatively fine job In the area so far and so on I understand Brian. You're disappointed and I accept that entirely and I know the amount of work That you have invested in it and and I know that your investors as well You know Put a lot into it um The decision was made for a number of reasons cost being a cost imposed on consumers cost especially imposed on business and large enterprise users I mean very close to the top And so on we're in extraordinary straightened circumstances and I know I need to Do well on that point To this audience, but we are at the moment in such very difficult circumstances All I can say to you is that I'm very anxious to progress the discussions with My british counterpart and my assessment of his Convictions are similar. I think he wants to do likewise and You know any doors that we can open For you or that haven't been opened already, you know, we're very anxious to help in that regard and The public-private partnerships is something probably that we should discuss in the context of The next white paper in this area. I mean in the interim Because we have made the decision we have made on offshore refit Doesn't mean to say that the department and the agencies that are there will not try to be as helpful as we can To your sector of the industry as best we can Thank you very much minister On the right Our minister, thanks very much. This is most useful today um, Dan Haneweg, uh, like Gratton a variety of different hats One of those that's actually achieved the issuance of the guarantees of origin We are that the very first in the country who's actually had them issued We are ready to trade when the when the when the uk side are ready to receive So, uh, you know, we'll be patient and we understand the the process that is going through And if it is achieved within the timescale of the of the expiry of the of the guarantees of origin That would be most welcome indeed separately There's a feeling here a drift of thought that the very very large energy store, which I think we all know about is a bit of a slam dunk and Would the minister be kind enough to bring it in competition In energy store to the point where the full measure of its Various different devices of scale Could significantly enhance the performance on the grid This in itself will substantially change the the curtailment issue because the higher the firm base of Generating on the system the higher the 50 percent of the at the current cutoff point will be And it's actually quite important to to move quickly into these Energy storage devices that also provide significant grid services. Thanks Thanks very much. I'm matt emcee farmers journal minister. Was it a coincidence or did I did I miss your non referral to biomass in any form? Thank you Well, uh, I don't want to reaffirm Dan, you know, we're We're as anxious as you are in terms of the In terms of the relationship with britain now some of You're a major your remaining question about energy storage and so on is As the late shameless sprint and said about the Dublin port tunnel away above my head And we we we should talk about it and see Whether we're in agreement or not. No, you're right matt. You're right. It's a complete coincidence complete omission We have the new refit in place refit three since last week or the previous week for biomass And I'm aware of a few interesting projects in the pipeline in that regard and I was I attended the The bioenergy conference last week And again, we had some very interesting discussions in this area I suppose, you know, it comes into the section of the My remarks, you know, where I was dealing with the state participation and state land and state companies, you know Probably also need to get some clarification there You know about Whether this is the best way that they're organized and The new new new era authority is established now And one of its roles is as shareholder executive And I would imagine that it will examine whether the present configuration of The organization of state companies, you know, is the is that the most Is that the most efficient? I And I was going to say something there chairman. I forgot I was on the record The the The point is anyway that eventually refit three came through and I think, you know, most of the Small companies represented at the conference last week, you know Seem to signal that that was the green light for them to proceed now whether there is greater capacity in that area you and the farmers journal and your Avid readers would probably know more about it than I do. I mean, there are questions about You know the future of agriculture after the present regime ends And that gives rise to certain questions as well, you know, no longer as you know Will we have a sugar quota and so on and so forth and you know some of the Some of the possibilities that might arise there. I know that Simon coveney for example is Is interested in that and uh, we're looking we're looking at it together In terms of the bioenergy area So it is only a coincidence or a no mission rather that it's not in the script It is not that I don't think that it's uh I'll be it smaller but very important contribution On the renewable side Thanks minister any final question. I think we're coming to the end one here. Is there another one that we want to group with it? Just one Two, okay. Good afternoon minister. Just a point of clarification. John McNamara B&M in relation to Refit two you mentioned it had stated clearance and passed by cabinet and that was on the website Is that open for applications? I may be I may be wrong about it being on the website But if it isn't it will be it was approved by cabinet on Tuesday. Okay. Yeah, so it's just a question of Doing the the necessary mechanical work together. Lovely. Thank you Yes, and there was one Sweeney minister from SEI Just just to I don't I understand what you you've said about refit for offshore wind and so on I just want to ask is is there um, is it open to consider Would you like to stand up so that we oh, sorry. Yes. Yes. Yeah, uh, is it open to consider? Sort of refit as a more complex instrument to being capped and at certain levels and and so on I'm thinking particularly as an incentivization to to enterprise development and specifically in the case of wave and tidal Which are not likely to produce any any sort of a charge on the tax payer for Quite a number of years to come but but to think of it as a form of Of incentivizing early stage Development and and small scale project development here. Is that is that still open? I mean I can understand the resistance to make to commitments to large positions on On the on the consumer, but but refit. I think May have a role as a kind of an incentivization policy for technology and industry development I'm just wondering is that still open as a topic Well, the refit just agreed The refit just agreed on as you know started life in 2010 And in fact the projects go back to 2010 and so on so any question of redesigning it Would have produced a delay of a further 12 months Or so and so on so that wasn't clearly feasible I mean, I don't have any It's a fairly arcane science. I don't have any preconceptions about looking at what happens after 2015 In terms of redesign and so on I'm I'm I'm quite willing to to take expert advice on it I mean in the ocean energy sector I don't understand that to be an issue that confronts me today or tomorrow There are other issues that confront me in terms of maintaining Maintaining the research efforts that is going on in that area and I visited I visited I mark Last week at at Hal Bowlin and so on and you know, certainly some very impressive work Going on there and I'm going to UCG UCG next week To talk to them amongst other things about that particular subject So the the main effort is to ensure that somewhere We find the money to ensure that the research work going on In an area that we may well have some advantages in personally. I think we have In the future is protected, but I think the The design of Future feed-in tariffs or whatever is certainly something that's open and that we should be prepared to look at I mean up to now. I mean the representations being made to me by the industry is to the effect that They need to get their full whack out of the existing system You know in order to be able to remunerate investment and you know, there are some Critical metrics if we were going to to tackle redesigning it, but in principle, I'm not opposed at all to looking at that


I guess this would be the, we have the lot, this is the Swiss stuff. So today, so just kind of like how it's, so today there's a bunch of the Swift technical tracks too, just so you know. And those are in the, where people are talking about the next versions of Swift, what's gonna be available and that. And those are happening right now, not that I'd ask you to leave or anything, but those are pretty much queued up all day today. We also, besides this track, right before this one, there was another Swift session about how to store some objects. And then this afternoon at 4.30 is a workshop on installing Swift. So if you're interested in that session, welcome everyone. That'll be this afternoon at 4.30. And I think it's just right next door here. So if you wanna go through the process of getting Swift up and running and we'll go through that whole process. We'll actually do it in two ways. We will walk through the command line installation steps and then we'll go blow through an automated install of it. So that's what we have going on this afternoon at 4.30. Last bit of housekeeping, there's a book, shouldn't say it now, but afterwards if you wanna pick up a book on Swift, if you have it, there's some, having that or booth, we have a few here for those who are interested. Again, walks through how do you Swift, how to install it, things like that. So hello, my name is Joe Arnold. I'm the CEO of Swift Stack and I'm here with Dan Wilson. Dan, can you introduce yourself? Sure, yeah. Hi, I'm Dan Wilson. I run the Global Infrastructure Architecture Team at Concur. My role there is to transform our data centers from monolithic to highly available scale-out architectures. And so through this talk, what we're gonna do today is we're gonna just introduce what Concur does. A little more detail, introduce Swift Stack and what we do. Then we'll run through a super high-level introduction of OpenStack Swift, just to orient us. Then we'll start to get more into Dan's use case at Concur, the problems that he was trying to solve and then how he went about solving it, some of the pros and cons of the existing and the new system. And then we will talk about the global replication functionality available in Swift and some of the benefits it has. So let's get started at Concur, yeah. So for anyone that doesn't know Concur, we automate business travel and expense claim reimbursement. We also have Tripit as our property and we're growing very rapidly. There's quite a number of people in the Fortune 500 that are using our systems, but believe it or not, we've grown more in the last year in a small business segment than any other segment of our business. And Swift, so Swift is a object storage system. It's created specifically for unstructured data. So that means not databases and running operating systems. It means everything else, so that's documents, images, videos, log files, snapshots. It kind of goes on and on, but it's a lot of the bulk of a lot of the data that's out there. It's designed around principles around being highly reliable, scalable, and being able to deploy on lots of different types of hardware, typically commodity-based hardware. And Swift Stack, what we are, is we provide a product around OpenStack Swift. We like to make it easy to get started and be able to scale really easily, so you can add nodes quickly into environment, and then also be able to deploy on lots of different types of hardware. So what we have is two components. On the right-hand side, we have something we call Swift Stack Nodes, which is a Swift runtime, and that includes UI for users so they can get access to it, a load balancing or load balancing integrations, a few different authentication options like LDAP, Active Directory, and then Swift itself. So we are, the company has, we have the project technical lead. We also have a lot of the core contributors to the project, so we're able to drive a lot of the innovation and do a lot of the fixing in Swift itself, and then we install on standard Linux distributions of Unto, Red Hat, CentOS, that can be blown on all sorts of standard hardware. Then we have a controller which helps manage, deploy, operate, scale, scale the environment, so that's what we piece together. Okay, Swift introduction. So we talked about reliability, reliable, highly scalable, and hardware-proof. Really what that means is it's a, it's an object storage system, means you can reference the data via a URL over HTTP. It's not blocks, it's not a file system, and when the data goes in via HTTP, it gets distributed internally using a consistent hash ring to place data across different nodes in the cluster. It gets configured with zones and regions which we'll get into later. It's an HTTP API, so building applications around it. It's high concurrency, supports lots of users. Also then it's highly scalable, it's multi-tenant, so you can have lots of user accounts, and then it can be tiered out, so each layer in the architecture can be scaled independently. It's designed not to have a single point of failure. Any node can get plucked in or dropped in to that environment, and if it goes away, failures get routed around. And we assume, as a philosophy, having unreliable hardware that we run on top of. And this happens all the time in the data centers, of course. And I've even gone and unplugged, unplugged, unplugged things around. We've had lots of disaster strike, but it's designed so that it's okay if those failures happen in system. That exists in the software. And we've actually, we do mix and match different hardware vendors underneath the system. So how are people using this? They're using this. One, they have applications that talk directly to the storage system, building clients, and that's what Dan was doing with Concur. So there's all sorts of language support available. But then there's also other services in software like file system gateways, desktop clients, backups are far, archiving, file sharing, things like that, that people just use out of the box. And then in the data center, people will put data in and out of that as part of backup jobs, application data, log data, things like that. The project started in 2009 with Rackspace starting to, want to build a competitor to Amazon S3. So they built something called Rackspace Cloud Files. It got open sourced as part of the OpenStack, one of the first two projects. And over the years, there's been lots of additional things that have happened with the ecosystem. We've amassed a lot of developers, over 136 developers who have worked on the project and it's deployed in lots of places and there's lots of contributors. So it runs some of the largest storage clouds that are out there, including of course Rackspaces, but also IBM SoftLayer, HP's cloud run on OpenStack Swift. So that's in a nutshell a bit about OpenStack Swift onto the use case here. Okay Dan, so what does Concur do and why does it need Swift? Well, Concur, one of our critical parts of the Concur system is where you can take a picture of a receipt while you're traveling, upload it into the Concur system so that it's tracked and stored. And we do some processing against it as well. We have a new feature now where we're OCRing the data on there and creating the expense entries for you so you don't have to actually fill out your expense report. Just kind of nice. But the history there is that actually before we had mobile, you had to tape the receipts to a piece of paper, up a fax it in to our system and then we would convert it to a PDF and store it on our file system. So that's what we wrote our storage for. It was that type of a design. So it's changed a little bit. All right, so. Now it's scaled up quite a bit as well. Like a year ago we were processing 150,000 images a day and now on an average day we're processing 1.5 million images. I'll walk through for us the, what did the architecture previously look like? So this is a rough picture of what it looked like before. Essentially every machine that was doing image processing would pick up its work from a queue but it wasn't just the image that was being processed that picked up from the queue, it was the step that it had to process. So for example, the scan step there, it knew it had to scan the barcode off of the image. So it pulled the image off of our Windows file share, ran some customized code to look for the code 39 barcode on the fax and then once it recognized the barcode it would throw it away and store information about the barcode back to the storage system. Then it would tell the queue that it's ready for the next step and any of the servers in our processing tier could then pick up the next step and it would once again, pull the image off of the storage system. So you can see there's a lot of back and forth on our network, it wasn't very streamlined or optimized. And we decided, since we had to fix that queue tier and the processing tier anyway, it was the perfect time to bring in an object based storage system that we could give us the internet scale that we really needed here. So this is the way it works now. Uploads and faxes, you can see entering in on the left there, it's our queue tier that we can scale out individually. Each one of the imaging servers are processing servers and they get their work from the queue and the picture below shows the steps that they perform once they get their object off the queue. They linearly go through scan, convert, thumb, reduce OCR and future steps and as they perform their work, the data about the image or the files that are produced get stored to Swift stack and a Swift stack once again can be independently scaled. Can you walk through the encryption that's needed for this application? Yeah, encryption's really important to us. We have a very unique encryption design where there's three keys and assault and two of those keys are dynamic. So every image has its own key that's stored to the storage system. What's important about that is if anybody ever got the data and brute-forced that object, then they would only get the data for that one object. They would not be able to reverse engineer the key and reuse that for other data in the cluster. They'd have to go through that brute-forcing technique for every single object. So probably pretty important for financial data, all right. So previously we were storing the stuff before, so walk through some of the issues that you found with availability performance and cost. Yep, like I mentioned, we had a window file share based technology and even though it was window file share, it was a grid architecture, it was designed for high availability, but it wasn't designed for failure. We ran into a number of situations where a single node would run into an issue where it wasn't completely down. It was just down enough to take the whole cluster down and the system would not handle it. It just didn't work for us. Okay, and then performance characteristics in terms of how we had the system set up. Yeah, and once again, on the performance side, windows file share based technology didn't give us the ability to allow a single server to communicate with every node in the cluster. A server got pinned to a node because it was relying on that SIFS SMB protocol. What would happen is over time as those servers were recycled or added or removed for capacity, we would end up with hotspots in our storage cluster because more nodes or more processing servers were being pinned to a single node. So it's just not very scalable for us. Cost. Yeah, cost, I mean obviously when you're using a vendor's solution, you don't have much flexibility in cost. You can negotiate with them, that's about it. And then being a black box is frustrating as well because I talked about that issue where the node went down and took the whole cluster down. Well, there's one of those situations where we had a stranger message and didn't really tell us a whole lot about what the problem is. We couldn't dig into the code. We had to collect a ton of logs and send it to support, and they still don't know what the problem is. Okay, all right, so we transitioned now to Swift. Okay, so what's the delta here in terms of for availability and performance, and then walk us through the configuration that you have with the multiple readings that you have now with Swift? Well do. We have two regions. We have multiple zones in each region, as you can see here. It's really important for us because it gives us that resiliency across multiple data centers. If a single DC goes down, we're still up and running. It is designed for failure, so at the latest hint of a problem, it's gonna drop a whole node down and keep the system up and running instead of just dying.  And then on the performance side, in each data center, as data's getting written to that data center, it sends an acknowledgement back to our processing servers that the data is written as soon as there's two copies that are stored. It doesn't wait for the data to be distributed across the entire cluster. And those processing servers or the, there's a different tier that reads the data from there, can read data locally in either data center. Okay, so now you're using open source, open stack. What's that mean from a flexibility perspective? Yeah, it's new to us, right? But we love the fact that we can give back to the community as we run into any challenges and dig into the code. So you're from, you guys are, where are you located up in Microsoft country, right? Yeah, well, it's not just Microsoft country. It's Seattle. Yeah, there's Microsoft there and Expedia, but we've got AWS there too. That's true, that's true, okay. But yeah, it's a little bit more close to typically of a region. So it's something that we're not used to, but we're excited about the idea of being able to give back to the community. All right, the hardware. So yeah, this is the hardware design that we used. We, for us, it worked out really well with our business case that we're trying to solve here to have a very, very dense configuration. So that we use super micro servers that are rebranded and integrated from someone else so we don't have to assemble them. Silicone mechanics? Yes, silicone mechanics. And we use four terabyte hard drives in our configuration. You can see all the specs there, but the reason why this worked out really well for us is we have a huge amount of retention that we're having to maintain here. So we needed to scale the system for that, keeping the data for a very long time and scaling out enough nodes to handle our ingestion and our processing. What happens next year? Well, next year we just add more servers and if there are six terabyte hard drives next year, we can buy servers with six terabyte hard drives and they get integrated to the same cluster. We don't have to build out a new cluster. It's easy to grow. And if we find that we need more processing at the proxy tier, we just add more proxies. And if we want to move into a different region, we just add another data center and another region into the cluster. It's awesome. Drumroll on the TCO. So walk us through the math that you did to get to this because I'm sure your CFO was all over you on figuring this out. Yeah, yeah. Anytime I'm presenting a business case to management these days, I have to convert all of my financials to what they're seeing. And they're seeing cloud prices, right? They pull open CFO magazine or CTO magazine or whatever and it talks about dollars per gig per month. So that's how I presented this and calculated it. I tried to take everything into account. Not only the power, the space, the cooling, the management costs of the people doing the work, all of our licensing with Swiftstack and Ubuntu. And the other thing that I factored in here is that we have to store four copies to protect the data. So if I did the calculation with just one copy the price would be one quarter of what you see there but I built that into the structure. One thing I didn't have to calculate in this model is any cost from downloading files out of the system since it is my cloud, I don't have to charge myself for that. Whereas you do have to do that with public ops typically. Yeah. Okay, so then what does this mean for the future? What's the future of growth plans? Where is this all going from a business and architecture perspective? Sure. I don't mean to diss on cloud systems because we'd see a need for them in the future too, right? It didn't work out financially for this specific use case but there will be situations where we leverage cloud services and that's why we thought it was so important to get the encryption story right and that design right and we wanted to leverage an API call that is going to be or already is industry standard. So in the future we're looking at expanding to other regions by leveraging cloud providers to get even more locality to our customers and also just continuing to scale out our system to handle our increase in demand. We grow at about 30% year over year and that growth has been pretty consistent and steady for the last 10 years just up and to the right. I don't see it slowing down anytime soon and as more and more of our customers switch over from using faxes or our web-based application to mobile uploads we will continue to get more and more images into our system because when you have the fax or the web-based upload model you end up getting a much higher number of receipts in a single image whereas with a mobile workload every single image is a separate or every single yeah every single receipts a separate image for us. So yeah we have to be ready for the billions. We already have three quarter of a billion images in our system but it's gonna get much bigger fast. Cool. All right, thanks Dan. So the next section we'll talk about OpenStack Swift and global application and how it works. Yeah, questions? Yeah. So the question is what's the difference between Swift and Hadoop? Well Hadoop is generally more about data processing and Swift is more about unstructured data storage. So kind of different use cases. Yeah because I don't know. I think the Facebook is image and video and text put in the Hadoop and we can search and you also put the image in the Swift. So it's, I think it's a similar case study but there's OpenStack Savana that connect both of them. Oh yeah, yeah, so good. So I want to know how to work together and where Savana linking. That's why after lunch there is Savana. Yeah, there's lots of things that plug into Swift and certainly there's a module that can connect a Hadoop cluster into a Swift cluster and so that they can interrupt similar to how Amazon has their MapReduce functionality. So certainly that exists. There's other projects like ZeroVM which pushes compute jobs into the infrastructure but everything's optimized for its ideal use case. This use case with Concur, with storing images and unstructured data serving it out to mobile devices is really what Swift is built for and so that's the specific use case that we're talking about here. Not necessarily doing about data analytics or job processing. Sorry, can you talk a little bit over? Yeah, I will at the end. So we'll talk next about the, so the way we're gonna structure this, the second part of the talk here is talking about global clusters and how we got here and then what's next from a functionality perspective with Swift. Yeah? Why is Swift and not set? Well, that's a good question. So the, right, and of course I'm gonna have a biased point of view on this but that's the thing all we think about is object storage and serving out documents, serving images and we believe that by specializing we're going to be better because that's all, we don't even concern ourselves with block storage at all and structured data storage and it really goes back to how the origins of what Swift was designed for and that was is how do we do data placement and what are we trying to do and we're trying to store and serve unstructured data assets, okay? And the way that we do that is by using an eventual consistency model and by using eventual consistency that means that I can distribute data across lots of different places in an environment and if there's ever a sever in the network on any of those locations, I'm still okay because I can go to any and one of those other locations and go grab that data or even write that data into the system. So even with, so for example, so here's three, I should have put a grid around each one because they're different but there's a single node cluster and what we would do is we would store data uniquely across different drives in the system. So if you just have one node, you start scaling up to a small node, small cluster, you might have a few different storage nodes and then data would be placed across those wholly, wholly across those different nodes and if one of those nodes was to go down, I can still receive data into the system. There's no raid rebuild that happens, there's no locking global write lock that happens, I can still pull and get data out of that because I still have enough surviving nodes. It gets even better when you start scaling up and so you can have larger clusters where you start to have storage racks or rows in the data center and there, if there's network conductivity issues, you can still very much put data in and read data out of that system and it's incredibly tolerant of failures within the data center. So that got us to thinking, well, how do we be more tolerant, if we're that tolerant within a data center, how can we expand this to multiple data centers? How can we add the concept of regionality into Swift? We had the concept of what we called zones and oftentimes there would be racks in the data center but how could we have a latent link in between two different data centers, treat that a little bit special and build on top of this eventually consistent data model that we have so we can handle the use cases like we just heard about. So this is what we had. The typical model was a three replica model and configured with multiple zones. Then what we would do, so then we're like, okay, that's great, multiple zones. Let's add this concept of regionality on top of that and so what we did was we allow in the configuration to group together different zones and then data can be placed across those different zones. If there's a network sever between those two, you can still read and write into either one of those regions and then when the connection gets reestablished, there'll be a synchronization event that happens and the model is eventual consistency which means newest file will win and because applications that are already using Swift in a way know about the eventual consistency model, the model, it works and so you don't have the global locking issues that you might have with other systems that try to maintain file consistency across a broad geographic region and you want that file consistency if you're running an operating system on there because you need to lock a file but like in this case with Concur, you don't need that because every time you're uploading a new object, it gets a unique new file name and it's very tolerant of that model. So when we can do that, we become more tolerant of failures. We can utilize more capacity instead of having a DR site which is only used for that purpose and you actually don't send traffic to it. Now what we can do is we can have multiple data centers, multiple regions and we just utilize that capacity and so that means we can get a better user response for the application instead of having a site that's kind of only used for disaster recovery purposes. We just use that whole cluster and when there's all cylinders are firing, we get great response back out to the user. If one of the cylinders, so to speak, goes down, then well, okay, we have a little bit less power but we can still be responsive to the application. So here's how it works. So this little icon here is the proxy server. A write will come in, it'll distribute all the objects in that region first for what we call an affinity write. You can turn that on and off by the way and then data gets distributed across and then those files get dropped. That's kind of how it works and we did a little, yeah, video here, put on the main stage. This kind of animates it a walk through. So there's configuration, this is a view into our product on how you get that set up. So someone dragging that file onto the application. So let's say they're in one part of the world and there's a cluster say in Portland. So there's a GeoDNS which is part of the solution so I think that you had that set up with- Acrimi. With Acrimi? Yeah. Okay, and there's a few different other global GeoDNS services that you can get. The write happens, replication kicks in and once it gets copied over, then it checks and once it's confirmed, then they get freed up in the other location. If someone else, somewhere else in the world goes to request that file, then there's a request made. They get routed to a particular data center and they get something faster than they would if they had gone back to the other side of the planet. That's more or less how it's put together. I didn't talk about that when I talked about the TCO but it made a huge difference in the TCO calc to store four copies instead of six. Granted, it's not quite as good as erasure coding. We could drive even more cost savings into the system with that. We'll talk about that later. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But I think the big difference there is the user performance or the perceived user performance and I don't know if you could talk to that, how that factored into the decision as well. Sure, with Akamai, one thing we do have, which is nice, is we can leverage Akamai's edge network to get all of our file uploads immediately. They do the same thing. They synchronously upload to the edge and then asynchronously upload from Akamai to our storage system. But you can't optimize for downloads with Akamai and that's where the regionality comes in and giving with that global DNS the ability to route requests to a local data center to pull the data down makes a big difference for our end users. Cool. So from a right perspective, how Swift works is a client request will receive the proxy node, one of the proxy nodes will receive that request and then it will stream writes into the storage environment. There's no concept of a master file. Everything is equal weighted in the system and that's part of what gives it its scale capability. And then when the write happens, there's a concept of a quorum where a majority of the objects need to be written in the system and typical with one region we'll use three replicas and so in that example, it would be two of the three writes need to be successful for the write to be acknowledged as being in the system. And so that's how that works. And then from a read perspective, what the proxy server will do is it will select one of those replicas, go to that storage location, read it and then send it back up into the user. And so that's what the, there's a proxy service in this configuration which enables a lot how all of this works. And so what it'll do in a multi-region configuration is it will, the proxy has an understanding of where it is. So it knows what region it's in, it knows what zone in the data center that it's in, it knows what storage nodes it's nearby and so it can use that information to understand where to go first to go try to get some of the data. So if it looks up that object and sees that it happens to be in the rack that it's in, it'll just go to that local rack and retrieve the data and send it out. Additionally, it'll keep track of, and this is more automatic and if you don't have multi-region setup, it'll actually keep track of the latency to each of the storage nodes. And if it happens to be a closer node, it will choose between those two. So if it's not in that say local rack, but it knows that it's in that region and there's a rack over here and there's a rack way over there and that one is slightly further apart from a latency perspective. It will choose the closest storage location and keep track of that. Yeah, good question. The question was, does the proxy become the bottleneck? And the way that it works is that there is lots of proxies in the system and there are also a shared nothing component into the system. And we talked about using Akamai as a DNS, even then below that there's a load balancing tier which routes requests across lots of different proxy nodes. So if you do have a proxy node outage or you need more capacity in the proxy node, you can just add more into those systems.  Saturating those usually is not an issue in the environment. So from what we found. So it can it be a bottleneck? Absolutely, if you under provision it. Just like you can run out of storage if you don't provision enough storage disk. So if you do it over, so if you go to read, so it will also detect failure if there's a read. We're done. Do you wanna repeat the question? Oh yeah, sorry. So the question is if you do a write and then you go read immediately, is there an issue? Is that the question? Yeah, so there is strategies for dealing with that, both at the application level, if you need a slightly stronger consistency model to be more aggressive about finding the newest object. And but there's a very much an edge case which eventual consistency handles quite well. So one more point on this slide which is about global DNS and how it routes users. So that is something that's above the system and how Dan was describing how they use that. So and then there's pools of proxy nodes that get connected to as part of the system. Separately there's a WAN configuration which gets configured and you can separately QOS that. So that can be an independent part of the system which is nice because sometimes that's a more expensive network and you wanna be able to throttle that. And what's coming up next? There's two things left. One is now that we've added regions and there's folks like Dan that are running multiple data centers. Now the ability to add another data center doesn't necessarily mean you automatically wanna replicate all the data to that particular data center. So we're introducing the concept of storage policies. And what that means is that we can create a storage policy and lasso if you will, you can pick your choose your own adventure of to Mark Schilderworth's phrase here, number of regions that you have, number of hard drives you have, what regions you're available, number of replicas that you have. And what that allows you to do is add lots of flexibility into how you have your system configured. So you can continue to add different regions and create storage policies that can cover those. The question is how do those storage policies get applied? They get applied at the container level. And what that means is a user can have different containers in their namespace if you will. And then those containers can have different storage policies assigned to them. One of the next storage policies that we're implementing is erasure codes. And so we're doing this with a box Intel and that is going to allow us to, in addition to the different regions, also create a storage policy where you can have a single region with erasure codes underneath. So that works is underway for the ice house. And that is it. I think we're coming in just at the bottom of the hour. And so if you have any questions, I think Dan and I will be here upstage afterwards. Thank you for your attending. Thank you. Thank you.