EDS' Next Big Thing Blog: Read and Respond to What the EDS Fellows Say About Technology

Halo 3 – Beckons

I was able to get my copy of Halo 3 the day after it came on the market and have only been able to spend a few hours roaming around the beginning of its world. Everyone’s heard by now that MS hit this one out of the ballpark. I need to play quite a bit, since I have to get good enough that I am not too embarrassed when my son gets back from college during his winter break.

This game is clearly a step ahead of the graphics and interaction than Halo 2, but you can read stories from experts about that.

There have been quite a number of complaints about the amount of marketing mindspace the Halo premier has taken – I must have been living under a rock, because I just didn’t see much advertisement until the week before it was released. Sure I saw the random Mountain Dew Game Fuel bottle, but that was about it.

I wonder when this technology will be used more effectively for business. Sure, people are doing interesting work on Second Life, but the security model is not up to the task today. Google is about to enter into the market and that should be interesting. We’ve clearly just hit the tip of the iceberg on how our thinking can change. Combine 3D modeling, a collaboration network and a Microsoft Surface device and we could see a whole new way of developing enterprise models and architectures.

City-wide Free Wi-Fi Trend In Trouble

Over the past few years we have seen an emerging trend where cities, like Chicago, San Francisco, New Orleans, Houston and Seattle, etc., began executing plans to set up free Municipal Wi-Fi (also called Muni-Fi) networks. For several cities the deployment of Muni-Fi has been considered a success, here are a few:

• Mountain View, California - Google WiFi
• Norwich, England - Openlink
• Winston-Salem, North Carolina
• Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Wireless Philadelphia

Muni-Fi is a popular idea because it is good for the people that live and/or work in these municipalities and it can help eliminate the widening digital divide in cities like Chicago and Houston. But while it is great for the people, it is not so great for the providers of these free services or their retail broadband and WAN competition (i.e. the local telephone and cable companies). In my view, the economic model is at the core of the problem and politics is at the periphery.

Case in point; Chicago and its ambitious plan to bring Wi-Fi to its poorest communities got so bogged down in negotiations with contractors, over build-out costs, that it has been shelved. There are similar stories in both San Francisco and Houston. Is this an indication that the free Muni-Fi cost model just doesn’t work. Perhaps the problem is with a particular prime contractor; a common thread in the Chicago, San Francisco and Houston stories. Even so, we’re at the end of the Muni-Fi trend if we have run out of providers (prime contractors). Finally, while it is true that other cities with successful free networks do exist; the question remains, how healthy are they? According to this article, Chicago, Houston and San Francisco’s woes may be the tip of the ice berg.

Will Muni-Fi ultimately end up going the way of the DoDo?

Microsoft’s Renewed Focus On Search Engines

The Internet search business is big. All you have to do is look at Google to understand that; and Google, as big as it is, still only dominates a little over half of the US market. Yahoo is number two and Microsoft is a distant third.

Two articles caught my attention today, one about improvements to Microsoft’s Live Search and the other, an interview with Microsoft’s VP of search and advertising. After reading each article I found the content and message to be similar. Microsoft doesn’t like its number three standing in the Internet Search pecking order and is going to do something about it. With current estimates for August, U.S. Web searches were distributed as follows:

• 57% Google
• 23% Yahoo
• 11% Microsoft

Microsoft’s approach to gaining search market share includes improvements to Microsoft’s Live Search, such as increasing the number of sites being searched (by a factor of 4) and overhauling the core technology that decides which results to display. Additional improvement activities will give extra attention to four particular search categories including shopping, maps, health and entertainment. On the marketing front campaigns to increase usage will be augmented via incentives directed at the current Live Search user base; estimated at 70 million. While incentives are a transitory activity the objective is increased momentum for a long term bump in market share.

Though things like 4 times the number of sites being searched along with improved result display technology and marketing should increase traffic to Microsoft’s search engine; I don’t see anything here that is really going to change the game. If Microsoft aims to seriously compete with Google, or even Yahoo, they will need to do better than that.

Soft Ownership and Smart Influence

I was reading a Irving Wladawsy-Berger blog talking about Soft Power, Smart Leadership. In the blog, he stated he was thinking about the:

style of business leadership that is most appropriate in our increasingly flat, globally integrated world, a world in which we are now able to tackle problems of an incredible complexity, in markets that are fiercely competitive and constantly changing, with organizations that reflect the complexity of the systems and markets with which we are dealing. It is pretty clear that the classic hierarchical style of management that served us well in the Industrial Age is not up to the task.”

I was thinking about the parallels to some of the current issues in the Information Technology space. People are focused on intellectual property of software, patents, copyrights and not internalizing the change that open source causes. I’ve mentioned before that open source is essentially a transfer of responsibility (legal, investment and support) from vendors to the operator. I’ll reuse some of Irving’s blog entry to describe the change in thinking that organizations that used to own software will need to go though:

This is the IT version of soft power – exercising control of the organizations position in the market.

The Long War is perhaps as much about winning the hearts and minds of people and nations as it is about defeating, or at least containing, an enemy that is often hard to find. We thus must focus on the soft aspects of the conflict, because these are the ones that over time could undermine the democratic principles, free markets and standard of living that we cherish. This is why the effective practice of soft power is so critical.”

In this case, “The Long War” is the economic viability of an organization. So, I’ve taken these great thoughts about a nation’s responsibility and the changes in the economic landscape and repurposed them to the more mundane corporate world of IT, but it just seemed to resonate with me.

Terascale Computing À La Intel

As Intel continues to increase the number of cores in computer chips its research arm eyes the idea of “terascale” computing. This interview with Andrew Chien, the director of Intel Research, is an interesting glimpse into the future of personal computing from the dominant chip maker’s perspective.

I was surprised that, according to this article, much of the focus for all of this extra computing power is about improving the end users relationship with technology. With terascale computing providing the compute power to bring together separate computing devices in a way that allows the user to interact more naturally with technology, the complexities of the diverse technologies that we must often individually struggle with can be simplified. The resulting user interface would understand both the user and the world in which that user lives. In other words, terascale computing, as defined by this article, will be a key component in the realization of the grand ubiquitous computing vision.

A Second Life For Google?

Second Life, the virtual community, has been in a league of its own since its launch in 2003. Sure there are other virtual worlds out there, but Second Life is the one with all the buzz. I’ve even made a few blog posts about Second Life and the hype that surrounds it, and I generally haven’t been particularly supportive of the whole virtual world thing. This is because I don’t find virtual worlds like Second Life useful, fun or even interesting. There is enough drudgery in the real world without adding more by going virtual. The exception is virtual gaming worlds, I have spent my fair share of time exploring and having fun in such places (like World of Warcraft).

As a fan of Google I must admit that this article, stating that Google may be testing a Second Life rival, was a bit surprising. The idea (even as a rumor) that Google would go down the Second Life road is not something that I expected; but given the technology behind Google Earth, it isn’t totally absurd either. One would hope, if there is any truth to this rumor, that somehow Google’s implementation of a virtual world will be useful, interesting or, at the very least, fun.

Impact After Life, Enabled By Computers

If you’re a science fiction reader, you’ve heard of Robert Heinlein. He is (at least in my mind) the gold standard of science fiction authors, still impacting the genera today. The foundation, his family set up, just put his entire archives on-line. These are not just a bunch of static documents, there are still books being written based on information from these archives.

Since everything you share will be out there long after you intend for it to be, and people fight about copyrights etc., this on-line approach of allowing others to see how you thought was a bold idea – probably worthy of one of his stories. It makes me think of an extension to the idea described in Nicholas Carr’s blog of “3rd life”, where your avatar can run around a virtual world and “haunt” the thinking of others. A few more years of computing capability and that should be within reach, at least to some degree.

On a somewhat related note, on that same day I saw the last lecture by Randy Pausch. It is well worth viewing. It is about 2 hours long, but is touching and inspirational.

A Test Case For Open-Source

A Test Case For Open-Source We read about license related lawsuits where Open-Source vendors are being sued violating commercial licenses and most of us understand that such suits are about protecting corporate intellectual property; a concept that is simple and straightforward. When thinking about the GNU General Pubic License and Open-Source, I have previously had a hard time understanding who would sue whom because I tend to think of an Open-Source agreement more as a philosophy than a legally binding and enforceable software license.

This article describes a lawsuit involving two Open-Source vendors that clears up my misunderstanding. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Math skill atrophy

This week my daughter moved past review and actually started to learn calculus. One night she confronted me with the first of a series of derivative equation:

and asked for some help. Since I had an EE undergrad, I had 6 or so semesters of higher math (Calculus or above) so I thought no problem. I looked at the problem and looked at the book – I could not prime the math pump no matter how hard I thought about it.

So I had to dig out a couple of my old Calculus books and look at their problems. Finally, understanding was flowing. I can tell this is going to be a long year – if not for her, definitely for me. At one point, being able to do higher math was integral to my very being, but not anymore and that’s a bit sad.

I don’t really use math in my job much anymore. I use programs the use math. It got me thinking about the use of models and how or maybe who will maintain the skills to define totally new models. As we move to model based development and eventually to model based business, just having the models and simulations may not be enough – someone will need to know how things work. Something that needs to be actively thought about as the baby boomers retire. Models are important, since they make things easier, but as the saying goes – all models are flawed but some are useful.

The Conscripted Human Workforce

A 2007 Young Innovator article in the MIT Technology Review caught my attention today, but probably not for the intended reason. The article was about Luis von Ahn, one of the innovators (along with Manuel Blum) credited with coining the term "captchas" as well as commercially introducing captchas on Yahoo back in 2000. Captchas are those twisted strings of characters that you often have to decipher to prove that you are human when interacting with a public web site. Since captchas were introduced, over six years ago, they have been popping up like mushrooms; so much so that they can now be characterized as ubiquitous.

In the article von Ahn laments about having felt bad because of the world-wide aggregate amount of time that has been wasted, by humans, solving these little 10 second brain teasers. I bought his lamentations for a minute until I got to the part where he created a new trick that likely doubles that time; he calls it a "recaptcha".

First of all, I don’t think it is a waste of time to solve a web site’s captcha because it serves a purpose directly related to both the security and quality of content for public web sites. It ultimately serves to ensure that things like spambots can’t overwhelm discussion groups with, well, spam. This is beneficial to all parties (except the spammers).

The recaptcha is a little gem of an idea that gives you a pair of captchas requiring you to solve the real one along with what I will call an outrigger. The real one gives you access to the site and the outrigger uses your human brain, as a Mechanical Turk, to make a contribution to the solution of some other problem; one that may be of no interest to you, as an end user. So, in my view, the recaptcha turns something that isn’t really wasting a user’s time (proving that you are human), into to something that probably is (solving someone else’s problem).

What I really don’t like about this idea is that it falls into that "slippery slope" category. It starts when we are all tricked into doing an extra task, to which we graciously give tacit approval, and then it quickly snowballs as it goes mainstream. My experience with the Internet is that, if someone can figure out how to make money by automating something (like accomplishing little tasks using someone else’s brain) then you can be sure it will become the next big net-nuisance - or worse!

So, although I can see the point behind captchas (they probably are necessary as a means of keeping spam bots from overtaking the world), and I accept that they are a necessary evil - I don’t necessary like them. Recaptchas, on the other hand, have the potential to become a stealthful way to conscript a human workforce; an unnecessary idea that I find just a little creepy.

I wonder how many hypervisors the IT industry needs?

Jonathan Schwartz’s blog states the MS and Sun are moving closer together and supporting each other’s efforts. Microsoft has stated that the beta of theirs (Viridian) will be available when Server 2008 is released to manufacturing, and that it will support Xen, VMWare and others. See a video here.

VMWare ESX 3i is now out and it appears to be smaller (32MB), backward compatible and simpler to use.

With Citrix purchase of Xen Source, it just seems like before long there will need to be some market consolidation. Other bloggers think there is lots of headroom. From a hardware perspective, last year was definitely the year of multi-core and this year seems to be the year of virtualization, makes me wonder what’s next.

Intel demos Nehalem 2nd generation 45nm CPU running Windows

Intel demos Nehalem 2nd generation 45nm CPU running Windows

Intel showed off its next generation 45nm Penryn processors at Intel fall IDF 2007 during CEO Paul Otellini keynote, they showed a three-week old second generation 45nm Nehalem processor running Windows XP.

Not only does this processor improve upon the execution engine in Penryn; it also includes a brand new memory architecture called QuickPath" (AKA CSI) that will vastly improve the memory subsystem to allow the chip to scale multiple-cores. Each Nehalem processor will have 4 (on initial release) and 8 cores (eventually) with two threads per core.

It will be interesting to see where these are deployed first. I’ll probably need a new home computer next year.

Edge Computing - Moving Through Everywhere to Close to Nowhere

One of the effects of taking advantage of the edge is the increase in information flow coming in through various techniques (e.g., RFID, mobile devices, sensors). There is concern that with all this information flowing in we’ll be overwhelmed, but that’s where smart devices and attention engineering come into play. We’ll need to display information in a context that can be readily consumed based upon the situation of the enterprise as well as the individual.

If done properly we can integrate devices into the environment where work takes place, instead of all the additional computing power being visible and actively maintained. A while back Donald Normal wrote a book called The Invisible Computer where he described two types of complexity that is included in every device. There is the:

• internal – the engineering of how the system works internally
• external - the engineering of how the system interfaces with the rest of the world

This second focus is where attention needs to shift. Only in this way can we take advantage of the embedded environment of devices without having to endure future shock.

We need to focus on taking advantage of the unique capabilities of the devices and not try to force them into existing models. For example: mobile devices have smaller screens and less computing power, but they also know where they are in the world. Capitalizing of that feature will provide a significantly better interface, since many times when you’re using your mobile phone, you’re mobile. Meshing that location knowledge (at a grocery store) with your schedule (on vacation), can help the enterprise route the information to the person who is mostly likely to be able to act upon it.

We need to engineer networks to be not only application aware, but also device aware. The environment needs to work with application and the available devices to deliver the optimal result within the constraints of the combination of the constraints (bandwidth for networks, flexibility for applications, and device characteristics for devices).

We’ll desire to transfer tasks from one device to another, like video streams or application entry. It will involve interruptions. It will not be seamless (rather with the capability to pause and continue) and without loss of quality (rather within the constraints of the differing systems), but the focus will be on maximizing the capabilities available and personalizing it to meet the user’s needs.

Can A Natural Language Search Really Challenge Google?

A few months ago I wrote this blog entry highlighting some natural language search technologies that were about to emerge from Parc (previously known as Xerox Parc). Anyway, this recent news article is a great follow-up because it indicates that this emerging Parc technology is about to begin its initial ascent on its journey through the hype cycle. And what better way to start the hype than with a title like “Search startup hopes to outsmart Google” along with copious references to its bonafide Xerox Parc pedigree.

The technology behind Google, all the hardware, software, processes and governance that make it possible, are what make Google the king of search. I have the feeling that, while a natural language interface would be nice, its existence in the marketplace will have negligible impact on Google’s search dominance. There is a lot more to searching than parsing a search argument and Google has a considerable head start when it comes to the rest. If Powerset’s solution really is “all that” then maybe Google will just buy the interface technology and use it on Google Search - as an optional user interface.

I’m not saying that a natural language search isn’t a good idea. It’s just that, when it comes to searching, it is a fairly small part of a very big picture.

An Energy Efficient Semiconductor FAB

Last Friday I was given the opportunity to go through TI’s Richardson Texas Semiconductor FAB. I worked in a FAB for about 8 years early in my career, so I was excited to see what they’ve done. Paul Westbrook, took us around and gave us a presentation, described all the effort they put into making the facility as energy efficient as possible. It was impressive. Usually people think that this level of efficiency will cost significant money, but in reality they were able to build it at significant savings over what their previous FAB cost. Since these buildings can run into the billions you can imagine what significant savings may mean.

He showed us a number of examples of where they were able to solve multiple problems with one energy efficient solutions. For example having the correct environment within a facility usually involves chillers and HVAC equipment. By actually focusing on what needed to happen, instead of how things have always been done, they were able to significantly reduce the use of chillers and minimize boilers. In fact, once the building is fully equipped, they joked that they would sell the boilers on ebay.

The building has been awarded numerous LEED awards and they stated that because they were measuring and working for points, it encouraged people to come up with new and unexpected ideas, just because someone was keeping score.

On the way back to work, some of the folks I was with were debating the applicability of the techniques to data center design and there were some natural approaches that could be used (e.g., white roof to reflect heat, window glazing and orientation, air conditioning), to facilitate the greening of IT. We discussed that what goes into the data centre has much more impact than how it is designed. Being able to virtualize many machines and keeping their utilization high provides more value than just having them sit there and pump out heat.

Other than the environmental activities, I was impressed with the wafer size. When I started we were moving from 2.5” wafers to 3” and by the time I left we were 4” moving to 6” (if I remember right). This plant was targeting 12” wafers and all robotic transport… They probably didn’t even need a clean room at all since all the machines are under positive pressure and the product really never enters the “room”.

The Lunar X PRIZE

Remember the Ansari X PRIZE? That was the one that Burt Rutan won for building and successfully launching an aircraft that flew 100 kilometers into space twice within two weeks. For that success, which cost its financiers a cool $100 million, a $10 million dollar prize was awarded. In other words, the prize is not so much about the money as it is about the specific goal.

Behind the X PRIZEs there is a non-profit organization called the X PRIZE Foundation. Until just a few days ago there were 2 unawarded X PRIZEs available, one for developing super-efficient vehicles and the other for demonstrating high speed genomic sequencing. The greatest thing about the X PRIZE is that it really and truly isn’t about the money. It is, simply stated, a loud and clear call for targeted innovation; something that many corporations and institutions do internally (some with more success than others) but the X PRIZE is on a much grander scale, with a much wider audience.

Introduced on September 13th, 2007, the Google Lunar X PRIZE seems likely to re-affirm the point that the Ansari X PRIZE made. Specifically; large institutions, like NASA, are not the best nurseries for innovation. I personally think that small creative and agile groups of visionaries, consumed with the challenge and lacking the baggage seem to be the best way to achieve truly innovative results; especially when such groups are competing with each other.

Google’s Lunar X PRIZE offer appears to be well thought out. The achievement of its primary goal, an autonomous lunar lander and rover (with all the bells and whistles), will not only advance the science of space exploration, it also stands to implement and springboard advancements in several important technologies needed in more earthbound endeavors like autonomous robotics, power generation, power management, propulsion, navigation and communications (it’s kind of an extreme Darpa Challenge).

Thanks Google, keep on doing the good things you do.

House Approves Comprehensive Patent Overhaul

The Washington Post had a story over the weekend on a bill to change the way patents are awarded and challenged. There was also a story in the MercuryNews.com (registration required to view the article).

The WP article states:

Under this legislation, judges can instruct juries in certain cases to award damages only for the value of the component. If a computer contains a chip that is patented, for example, the chip patent's owner would be awarded damages based on the value of the chip rather than the computer."

Some organizations want to kill the bill due to a change from "first to invent" to "first to file" patent rights, which would bring America into alignment with the patent systems of Europe and Japan. Many of the large technology payers are tired of nuisance lawsuits and would love to see the bill continue on towards becoming a law.

PatentBaristas.com posted an entry on their site with perspectives of the amendments that made in, right before the vote. They call the bill "an overhaul of patent laws designed to trim excessive litigation and improve patent quality, giving high-tech firms what they’ve been clamoring for: a weaker patent system."

This will definitely be something to watch.

Virtualization As A Hardware Layer

In a move to solidify their position, that of sitting between the server hardware and the operating system, virtualization companies like VMware are looking to make their solutions part of the server hardware, thus closing the gap. While hardware companies like IBM, Dell and others are expected to support this concept with flash based products from VMware, both Microsoft and Linux will likely continue to push for OS based virtualization.

This CNET News article sheds some light on the movement and digs a little deeper into the reasoning behind both positions. The article gave me some insight into what the fuss is all about; that the real money in virtualization is on the management side (the ecosystem), not the basic virtualization machinery (the hypervisor). Virtualization management tools (the ecosystem) are what give virtual solutions their real value because it is through such tools that we will ultimately enable the best grid and utility computing solutions. With this in mind, it seems to me that hardware based virtualization is the better answer.

The Expanding Cell Phone Landscape

This is turning out to be an interesting year for cell phones, especially in the US. While the iPhone has helped to keep cell phones top of mind since Steve Job’s January announcement, it continues to garner its share of the technology press, even today; but Google may well be what keeps cell phones in the news as we finish out the year and move into the future.

As an iPhone early adopter (I got mine on the first day) I never expected to see the price drop by $200 in a mere couple of months. I expected that to take more like six months to a year but I knew it would come. The price drop didn’t upset me at all – it’s the early adopter’s burden and I accept that. Still, I am also happy to accept the $100 store credit offered by Apple for early adopters like me. It will almost cover the cost of my upcoming upgrade to Leopard, in October.

To fully appreciate the continuing impact of the iPhone one need only look to recent Apple events. Apple’s announcement of a new range of iPods should have been the big story out of Wednesday’s iPod announcement, while the iPhone price reduction should have been nothing more than a sideshow. Well guess what, the big Apple story today isn’t about the newly announced iPods, it’s about the announced iPhone price reduction followed by the evolution of that reduction into an early adopter rebate. It looks like iMacs, iPods and MacBooks will be second fiddle to iPhone until Leopard shows up; and I’m guessing that somehow Leopard will end up making big iPhone news too.

If the iPhone were the whole cell phone story for 2007, it would be enough for one year, but it appears there may be more. Google has something up its sleeve and it looks a lot like a phone, or a phone operating system, or both! The nagging question isn’t if but when will the illusive gPhone appear. While Apple targets the high-end market, it seems fitting that Google will likely target the low end. While Apple’s slick marketing, flashy ad campaigns and orchestrated launch events help to move high priced products rapidly into the market, Google’s more subtle word of mouth approach will impact the market in different, perhaps less obvious ways.

At a time when most search engine companies were trying to figure out how to charge end users for their searches Google popped up, did a better job of searching and did it for free. It won’t happen overnight but one day, could the cell phone industry find itself in the same fix as Google’s early search competitors? Somebody at Google must think so.

Microsoft’s OOXML Still Seeks ISO Adoption

Last year I posted a couple of blog entries, this and this, about Mircosoft’s Open XML (OOXML). In one of the articles I pointed out that Open XML had been approved as an open international standard and that this approval had been rendered by Ecma International. But without ISO approval, does standardization by Ecma International carry enough weight? Apparently not.

In a recent vote by the Geneva based International Organization for Standardization (ISO); Microsoft’s Office Open XML (also known as Open XML and OOXML)failed to win designation as an approved standard. With more than 90% of the world’s digital text documents in Microsoft formats it seems there should be little controversy. In the 90’s we would have argued that, with so much dominance already achieved, shouldn’t we call it a de-facto standard, get ISO to agree and then just move on? In the 21st century it isn’t so easy. While we have always been reluctant to put too much trust in one company, in these days of globalization we tend to be even more leery of single-company or, even more importantly, single-country solutions. OOXML is clearly a one-company solution but, to many in the global community, it is a one-country solution as well.

While OOXML is a Microsoft standard that is already widely used by numerous other vendors, it is opposed by supporters of the OpenDocument Format (ODF and OASIS) - which is already a published ISO and IEC International Standard. Primary corporate opposition to OOXML is from I.B.M. and there is international opposition from enough ISO member countries to withhold OOXML’s adoption - for now.

Though Microsoft feels confident that its OOXML standard will ultimately be adopted by ISO, I have some lingering doubts. Not that I doubt the efficacy of OOXML, it has proven itself. Nor do I believe that ODF is better (or worse). What I do believe is that the debate has left the technical domain and entered into the political arena; a place where logic means little and outcomes often become unpredictable.

Then there’s that other nagging concern; why do we need more than one standard way to do the same thing? Isn’t that how we got into this mess to begin with?

Red Shift Computing is it For Everyone?

I was looking at the Red Shift article in InformationWeek where they interviewed Sun’s CTO about looking at computing differently and talked with Scott Radeztsky of Sun about taking it down a little further. The concept of having organizations over-served by Moore’s law and those underserved by Moore’s law can be taken into a finer grain. Sure there are companies that are over-served (like Google) but as we move to greater use of edge computing and the use of simulation to optimize the enterprise, more and more organizations will need to think about this issue.

Functions within an organization that are over-served by Moore’s law can be virtualized so that you can get higher utilization (e.g., the accounting system) out of the same hardware. Those that are under-served by Moore’s law require parallelization (e.g., simulation).

As organizations think about their services in SOA, these services can also be broken down along these lines so that the right computing resources are available at the right time, and can be consumed. This is all part of an organizations application and infrastructure portfolio assessment that can start today, so that you’re ready when the technology catches up.

Now that all the chips are going to be multi-core and huge increases in capabilities are available like the UltraSPARC T2 are out running 64 threads on a chip, being able to take advantage of parallel computing is in the grasp of everyone.