Cutting Edge

Desktop virtualization is saving St. Vincent's both electric and staff energy.

(Credit: Pano Logic)

It's no secret that the installed base of technology at large medical facilities needs refreshing, especially as hospitals work toward digitizing medical records.

At St. Vincent's Catholic Medical Center in New York, a nonprofit with 42 facilities across five boroughs, the constant accessing and updating of patient records through the hospital's shared-bandwidth MPLS network resulted in unacceptable lag time pretty much all day, every day.

So Kane Edupuganti, director of IT Operations & Communications, convinced the higher-ups to retire the hospitals' hundreds of five-plus-year-old desktops and buy more than 600 zero client cubes from Pano Logic.

"About six months ago we did the proof of concept and rolled out our first batch in three weeks," Edupuganti says. "That's how easy it was. Right now we are at 300 and change, and we'll be at 640 by the end of the year."

By opting for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), St. Vincent's went from being bogged down on the MPLS network to running applications and the desktop in the data center, with screen scrapes done to an endpoint device.

The Pano Device uses less than 3 percent the energy of even EnergyStar desktop PCs.

(Credit: Pano Logic)

The CTO has placed his faith in Pano Logic because the stateless, tiny Pano Device (3 inches by 3 inches by 2 inches) "simply serves to connect peripheral devices--a keyboard, mouse, VGA display, and audio output--along with other USB peripherals, to a virtualized Microsoft Windows desktop operating system running on a server in the data center."

No OS, no CPU, no memory, no fan, no moving parts at all. As Edupuganti puts it, the devices are essentially just screensharing, using VMware ESX in the background to spin up the hospitals' virtual desktops. If a nurse was in the middle of updating a record and is interrupted (not uncommon in a hospital setting), the nurse could finish updating via an entirely different cube in a distant unit.

Beyond the obvious savings in staff time, from the perspective of not only medical personnel but the center's eight engineers who serve 7,000 people, Edupuganti is already seeing enormous energy savings, with each cube using less than 3 percent of even EnergyStar PCs: "Regular fat PCs suck up 140 to 160 watts; Pano Logic uses 5. Multiply that times 500 units. It's huge."

And it needs to be. In its existence BP (Before Pano), St. Vincent's was purportedly one of New York State's top five power hogs. The significant reduction in energy costs is not only good for the environment, but a key factor in justifying the cost of the Pano devices.

Of course, the cubes are only as good as the network, whose occasional blips result in blank screens on the user's end that a simple restart does not fix, and can be a nuisance when the entire IT department is sleeping soundly at home. But that's a small price to pay, compared to the fat client problems that came before.

Google software luminaries such as Unix co-creator Ken Thompson believe that they can help boost both computing power and programmers' abilities with an experimental programming language project called Go.

And on Tuesday, they're taking the veil of secrecy off Go, releasing what they've built so far and inviting others to join the newly open-source project.

The computing industry is in constant tension between making a fresh start and evolving the current technology. The limits of today's hardware designs and programming technology led the Go team to take the former approach.

Gordon, the Go gopher mascot, drawn by Rob Pike's wife and illustrator Renee French.

(Credit: Google)

"We found some of those problems to be frustrating and decided that the only way to address them was linguistically," said Rob Pike, a principal software engineer working on Go. "We're systems software people ourselves. We wanted a language to make our lives better."

So far, Google's Go project consists of the programming language, compilers to convert what programmers write into software that computers can run, and a runtime package that endows Go programs with a number of built-in features. It's most similar to C and C++, but, Pike said, it employs modern features and has enough versatility that it could even be used within Web browsers.

Go's assets
There's a huge step between creating a new programming language and building into a major force in the industry. Sun Microsystems, which succeeded with Java, has had less success with a would-be Fortran successor called Fortress.

But Go has some assets most languages don't.

First, the project is at Google, which has a powerful incentive to make something useful in order to get more out of its hundreds of thousands of servers and its countless in-house programmers. An experiment at Google could have more commercial relevance than many other company's actual products, and Go is already graduated from a 20 percent time project to one with formal support.

"We don't intend it to be experimental forever," Pike said. "We really want to build stuff for real with this."

Second, there's the Go team's pedigree. Among them:

• Thompson, the winner of the 1983 Turing Award and 1998 National Medal of Technology, who, along with Dennis Ritchie, was an original creator of Unix. Thompson also came up with the B programming language that led to the widely used C from Ritchie.

• Pike, a principal software engineer who was a member of Bell Labs' Unix team and a later operating-system project called Plan 9. He's worked with Thompson for years and with him created the widely used UTF-8 character-encoding scheme.

• Robert Griesemer, who helped write Java's HotSpot compiler and V8, the Chrome browser's JavaScript engine; Russ Cox, a Plan 9 developer; and Ian Taylor, who has worked on improving the widely used open-source GCC compiler.

The name Go itself stems from the challenging board game, a reference to Google itself and, of course, the idea of going somewhere, Pike said.

What's Go for?
Google has high hopes for Go.

It's designed to address some issues in getting software to take advantage of multicore processors that can perform multiple tasks in parallel. It has an approach to ease some of the pains of object-oriented programming. It has modern language features such as "garbage collection," which helps programmers deal with mundane but important memory management issues. And it's designed to be fast--nearly as fast as programs written in C or C++--and enable fast creation of programs in the first place.

"It seems it's getting much harder to build software than it used to be," even though computers are vastly faster than in the past, Pike said. "The process of software development doesn't feel any better than it did a generation ago. We deliberately tried to make a language that focused in part on rapid development, that compiles really efficiently, and that expresses dependencies efficiently and precisely so the compilation process can be controlled well. I find it much more productive to work in."

When it comes to the speed programs at which programs run, "Our target was to get as close as we could to C or C++," Pike said. They're reasonably close--programs run about 20 percent to 30 percent slower right now, he said.

The Go Web site itself is built with Go, but Google has broader ambitions. The software is designed to build server software--Google's Gmail is one example of what it's suited for. Google thinks that it could be good for other cases, including running software in a Web browser, a task JavaScript handles today.

"It's at least an order of magnitude better than JavaScript," Pike said. Note that Google built its own browser, Chrome, in part to speed JavaScript and Web performance, and that Google already is incorporating its technology such as Native Client and Gears.

Another nice Web-related feature in Go: tasks can be shared by servers and client devices such as PCs or mobile phones that use those services. That makes a service more easily adapted to different amounts of processing power for those clients, Pike said.

Making the most of multicore
Go also is designed to tackle one of today's big challenges, multicore processors. Programs often work sequentially, moving through a task one step at a time, but multicore processors are better at handling many tasks in parallel.

Go is no magic bullet for the problem, but Pike is optimistic that it will help. "We think we have support sufficient to take a crack at it," he said.

Specifically, Go uses a technology dating back to the 1960s called CSP, or communicating sequential processes, that handles interactions among a set of cooperating programs, Pike said. The technology made an appearance in programming languages such as Occom and Erlang, but it generally hasn't been applied in systems programming.

"We don't believe we've solved the multicore-programming problem," Pike said. "But we think we've built an environment in which a certain class of problems can take advantage of the multicore architecture."

The design also can apply, to some extent, to spreading tasks among multiple servers connected over a network, he added.

Lending a hand
The Go team is looking for help. One big area is in improving the runtime library from which Go programs can draw.

Such libraries speed up programming by providing many tools and functions so programmers don't have to create those ingredients on their own, and Go's library includes many elements crucial to Go's design. Go's libraries supply resources for handling concurrency, garbage collection, and other "low-level gunk you don't want to expose to programmers," Pike said.

The Go team also is looking for compiler help. Thompson has written some compiler support for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 processors, and for ARM processors, and Taylor has written a Go front end for the GCC compiler.

ARM processors are dominant in the mobile-phone market that Google is trying to spur into greater activity with the Android operating system, and Go software will be able to run on mobile phones, he said. "We're looking at interesting applications on things like Android phones. We're not sure where that's going to lead, but it's too intriguing to let it go," Pike said.

Google has released many products as open-source software over the years, in part to give something back to the pool from which it's drawn and in part because it stands to gain from the collective-development philosophy. Go fits with those motives.

"We did this to help Google first, but we decided (that) we need to open-source it," Pike said. "It's interesting, but it needs help from the community."

For all Google's ambitions for Go, the company doesn't expect it to erase today's technology.

"I don't think we'll replace anything," Pike said. "We're just putting another player into the arena."

A space race lifted off Friday in Southern California, only this one involved elevators.

Powering their laser-controlled robot to climb a 900-meter-long cable, the team from Seattle-based LaserMotive was crowned the winner in NASA's Space Elevator Power-Beaming Challenge game on Friday.

Held at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base in Lancaster, Calif., the challenge pits teams against each other to see whose robotic space elevator can inch up the cable the quickest in under 7.5 minutes. A helicopter holds the steel cable in place as each robotic elevator races to the top. The LaserMotive crew crossed the finish line four times, the fastest time being 3 minutes and 48 seconds.

The goal behind the games is to build a robotic climber that could someday be turned into a space elevator that would carry supplies into orbit without need of a ship. The elevator would rise up a tether that rotates with the Earth and be capable of carrying about 10 tons of payload.

As the winner, LaserMotive will take home a check of $900,000 from the sponsor, Spaceward Foundation. If the team had been able to climb the entire tether in three minutes or less at a speed of at least 5 meters per second, it could have won the top prize of $2 million.

The other two teams, the Kansas City Space Pirates and the University of Saskatchewan Space Design Team (USST), both ran into technical troubles, preventing them from reaching the top of the cable in any of their attempts.

NASA's Space Elevator race has seen its ups and downs for the past few years, with contestants coming close but not quite attaining the grand prize.

An additional $1.1 million in prize money is still available, according to the Spaceward Foundation, so another challenge will be held in the future to see if any team can win the race at 5 meters per second.

My dad used to say technology is advancing so quickly that, by the time a product reaches market, it is already obsolete. Moreover, if you wait just a little longer, you can pay a lot less. The sequencing of the human genome takes the advancement of technology, and its fast reduction in cost, to an entirely new level.

Whole-genome sequencing could be affordable and accurate enough to perform on every newborn with a simple heel-prick blood test in a matter of years.

(Credit: Elizabeth Armstrong Moore/CNET)

The Human Genome Project, which officially completed the mind-boggling achievement of sequencing Jim Watson's genome in 2006, carried the equally mind-boggling price tag of $3 billion. If I may be so bold as to use that word thrice in one paragraph, even more mind-boggling is that a company called Complete Genomics has just sequenced three human genomes for $4,400 in materials, with an error rate of less than one base in 100,000.

DNA sequencing technology, which could help us detect genetic predispositions to illnesses, customize treatments accordingly, lead to the development of new energy sources, etc., is currently being used to either do long reads of hundreds of bases on genomes that have yet to be sequenced (see the news this week on the full sequencing of the domestic horse genome), or shorter reads that only align with a genome we have already sequenced (ours, for example).

In a paper published in the journal Science on Thursday, Complete Genomics shares the methods it used, which John Timmer at Ars Technica describes as "clever variants of well known molecular biology techniques to read massive amounts of DNA fragments that are, in total, about 65 bases long."

Moreover, Complete Genomics used more common--read more affordable--materials. For a detailed explanation of how this was done, check out the paper in Science, or Timmer's illustrated translation for Ars Technica.

Complete Genomics is not the lone warrior in this field. As CNET's Stephen Shankland reported in October, IBM Research has jumped into the game, and hopes to reduce the cost of genetic testing to as little as $100 per person. And then there's genomic technology manufacturer Illumina, and 454 Life Sciences. The list grows.

At this rate of advancement, it has been widely reported that the technology for whole-genome sequencing could be affordable and accurate enough to perform on every newborn with a simple heel-prick blood test in a matter of years. This makes a lot of people uneasy for several reasons, not the least of which is privacy.

"Bad things can be done with the genome," Dr. Jay Flatley of Illumina tells Times Online. "It could predict something about someone--and you could potentially hand information to their employer or their insurance company. People have to recognize that this horse is out of the barn, and that your genome probably can't be protected, because everywhere you go you leave your genome behind."

I have to wonder which is more unnerving to most people--that others will be able to access our genomic fingerprints, or that our bodies are able to be so accurately read at all. The secrets currently locked within us carry a certain mystique, and once unlocked could be put to uses that are possibly beyond our control. Whether this makes the human body more or less magical is debatable, but this much is not: The horse is out of the barn.

Ongoing analysis of the trajectory of a piece of space junk that was believed to pose a possible threat to the International Space Station showed the debris would not pass close enough to the lab complex to force the crew to seek refuge in their Soyuz lifeboats, a NASA official said late Friday.

An agency spokesman said the station's six-member crew would be awakened early, at 10 p.m. EST as planned, but the astronauts would be told to go back to bed and not to press ahead with a tentative plan to shelter in place aboard the station's Soyuz ferry craft.

A graphic representation of debris in low-Earth orbit, defined as "the region of space within 2,000 km of the Earth's surface."

(Credit: NASA)

Earlier Friday, NASA flight controllers predicted the debris, of unknown origin, could pass within about six-tenths of a mile of the space station at 10:48 p.m., toward the end of the crew's normal sleep period. During the evening planning conference Friday afternoon, the astronauts were told to plan on getting up early so they could make their way to the Soyuz lifeboats by around 10:30 p.m. if necessary.

"The ballistics are saying they are looking at conjunction with space debris," Russian mission control radioed. "As you know, this is something we are prepared for. In the past, we have performed avoidance maneuvers, but this time maneuvering away from the path of the debris is not an option.

"Because we cannot perform avoidance maneuver, you will have to ingress Soyuz vehicles. Both Soyuz crews should be in their vehicles. This is what we have. We are going to work on the ballistics data to get greater precision, but right now we are in the red box. The probability of collision is non zero."

NASA flight controllers told the astronauts the tracking data was uncertain and that engineers did not yet have confidence in the trajectory projections. Pending additional analysis later in the afternoon, the crew was told to play it safe and plan on boarding the Soyuz lifeboats after shutting internal hatches in the U.S. segment of the lab complex.

After additional analysis, however, flight controllers concluded the unidentified debris would not pose a threat to the station, according to a NASA spokesman.

Last March, the station's three-man crew - Mike Fincke, Yury Lonchakov and Sandra Magnus - faced a similar situation and briefly took refuge in the lab's single Soyuz ferry craft when another piece of debris from an old rocket motor made a close approach.

There are more than 18,000 pieces of space junk in low-Earth orbit the size of a baseball and larger. U.S. Strategic Command prioritizes radar tracking to protect manned spacecraft first, followed by high-priority military and civilian payloads.

NASA monitors an imaginary volume around the space station roughly the shape of a pizza box measuring 0.466 miles thick and 15.5 miles square.

"Initially, we have a screening box, which is .75 kilometers radial miss, which would be up or down, by 25 kilometers in cross track, which would be left or right, by 25 kilometers down track, which is either in front or behind us," space station Flight Director Ron Spencer said in September.

"Space Command will alert us of any debris objects out there that are going to get that close to us. Then they increase tasking on those objects to try to get a better solution and decrease the uncertainty. Then we calculate a probability of collision based on the data Space Command gives us."

Spencer said NASA has two levels of concern.

"We have two thresholds, yellow and red," he wrote in an email exchange. "The yellow is 1-in-100,000 and the red is 1-in-10,000. We will not take any action if it is below the yellow threshold. If it between the yellow and red, we will only take action if it is easy to do so without impacting the mission. For a red threshold violation we will take action in most cases."

Updated at 6:45 p.m. EST: NASA officials say analysis shows the space debris in question poses no serious threat to the International Space Station.

You've probably heard of or even owned a computer that automatically turns off its hard drive when it senses shock or heavy vibrations. That is an example of sensitive human-machine intimacy. Another example I like is tilting the iPhone to use it as the driving bar for my racing games. Well, that nifty human-to-computer interaction is about to go to whole new level.

HP announced Thursday a new inertial-sensing technology that enables the development of digital micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) accelerometers that are up to 1,000 times more sensitive than those in high-volume products currently available.

A MEMS accelerometer is a sensor that can be used to measure vibration, shock, or change in velocity. When implemented, this allows the device to "feel" the environment it is in.

According to HP, the new sensing technology--the result of HP's 25 years of nano-sensing research--includes multiple detectors as part of a complete sensor network and therefore is capable of real-time data collection, management evaluation, and analysis. This information enables users to make better, faster decisions, and take subsequent action to improve safety, security, and sustainability.

(Credit: Video screenshot by Tim Hornyak/CNET)

Say salam wa aleikum to an Arabic-speaking android developed at United Arab Emirates University and billed as the first of its kind in the world. It could enter mass production to help people at shopping malls.

The Ibn Sina robot, named after an 11th century philosopher, can recognize faces, converse with people by speaking in classical Arabic, connect to the Internet, and retrieve information. As seen in the video below, it can also exchange kisses with people.

Software for Ibn Sina was developed by a team led by computer science assistant professor Nikolaos Mavridis, with the mechanics by Hanson Robotics. Mavridis says some companies have approached his lab and asked about using the turban-wearing, bearded bot in shopping malls or as a receptionist.

Doubtless Ibn Sina, known as Avicenna in English, would have been pleased.

(Credit: NASA)

The International Space Station isn't just an orbiting laboratory, spaceship testing ground, and multinational geek fest--it's also the world's highest (250 miles) and fastest (17,500 mph) computer network. We burrow under its metal skin and siphon out its most interesting specifications, like some kind of star-hopping alien data vampires (but without the plutonium-coated fangs).

Read more of "Space Station IT: High technology" at Crave UK.

Manning security checkpoints is hazardous duty, but vehicles still must be checked. So the U.S. Army is helping develop products that will allow soldiers to do their job, preferably from a distance.

Researchers and scientists at the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (aka TARDEC) have focused on semi-autonomous robotic systems capable of remotely inspecting a vehicle's undercarriage for explosives or roam the line looking for suspicious activity.

TARDEC will showcase a couple of its favorite autonomous robotic systems this week at the Michigan Security Network Market Leadership Conference. Both units were developed for military and homeland security applications, such as airport and seaport inspections and hazardous substance detection. But nothing says you can't deploy them at your next block party.

Here's a sneak peek.

The ODIS performs under-vehicle inspections to detect explosives, contraband, and radiological, chemical, and biological threats. It was developed in partnership with the DOD Joint Robotics Office, Utah State University, and Kuchera Defense Systems.

(Credit: Kuchera Defense Systems)

The SpectorRobotic System, developed by TARDEC in conjunction with Autonomous Solutions, is an omnidirectional platform designed to perform under-vehicle visual inspections for weapons, explosives, or other contraband, while keeping inspectors out of harm's way. It's currently being manufactured for use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

(Credit: Autonomous Solutions)

The ODIS system was used to screen vehicles for bombs and other threats by the U.S. Secret Service at President Barack Obama's inauguration last January.

(Credit: TARDEC photo by John Vala)

"Autonomous robotic systems like the Spector and ODIS offer military and civilian personnel a modular, mobile, low-cost, safe alternative to conventional inspection and patrol operations," said David J. Thomas, TARDEC Associate Director of Intelligent Ground Systems. "These devices can and do save lives while providing security representatives with the most advanced detection and inspection technologies available in the ground systems arena."