It is difficult for me to imagine the daily challenges faced by people with visual impairments or dyslexia in a world predominantly designed for those without these difficulties. Today in the UK, Intel’s Digital Health Group has announced the launch of the Intel® Reader, a device designed to help transform the printed word into speech.

This mobile and handheld device is about the size of a paperback book and is designed to increase independence for people who have trouble reading standard print. In the UK alone, there are an estimated six million people with dyslexia and two million people with visual impairments such as partial sightedness or blindness, for whom reading printed words is difficult or impossible.

The Intel® Reader works by pointing it at a page of text, for example a book or a news paper, and taking a picture of it. The image is then converted into digital text and is read back aloud to the user. On its own, this is pretty cool but the device is a lot more flexible than that. It can also work in social settings – reading restaurant menus, grocery prices or the sports results, bringing independence and confidence to the user. If you had a lot of text to capture, a portable capture station is also available.

For the techies out there, some of the latest Intel technology is under the hood including an Intel® Atom™ processor, an Intel® Solid-State Drive and software developed on the Moblin Linux platform.

Both the British Dyslexia Association and the Royal National Institute of Blind People have announced their support of the Intel® Reader as an important advance in assistive technology.

More information on the Intel® and information on where to buy it are available at www.intel.co.uk/reader

Please enjoy this rather humorous video made by a YouTuber call 'ServerWhistleblower'. We don't know who you are but keep them coming!

'Nehalem' Effect Devastates Data Centers

Your IT Galaxy Team.

In this morning’s opening keynote at the Partners Connected Health Symposium, Dr Jason Hwang, co-author with Clayton Christensen of the Innovator’s Prescription spoke about the application of disruptive innovation on the healthcare industry.

Disruptive innovation describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors. This disruption allows new consumers to begin to use the technology whereas in the past it was inaccessible to them. This can be seen in the computing industry where the technology has moved from mainframes to mini-computers to PCs and to smart-phones, which has also moved the location of the technology from a central location to being accessible anywhere it is required. This decentralization through disruption leads to increased accessibility but it is important to note that companies often add functionality through innovation faster than consumer wants or needs the technology

In healthcare this same move to centralize everything, can be seen with the co-location of multiple services and technologies all under the same roof in a big hospital. The emerging trend however is to move this care provision from a central location out into the community and into the home. This also means that different people will be able to deliver the care such as nurses and empowered patients themselves, supported by new technologies.

This in-turn requires us to look at the dominant business model in healthcare where everything is centralized on the general hospital. This implies that many different types of technology and specialities in one location. The business model then has to support all of these resources but with the number of hand-offs that result, it can be prone to error and forces increased costs to maintain profitability.

Hwang asserted that hospitals are expensive conflations of three specific types of business models:

1)      Solution shops – typically very dependent on people offering diagnostic and intuitive activities on a fee for service basis

2)      Value-added process businesses – typically process dependent where a certain task is repeated enough times to where it becomes possible to accurately predict the outcome, for a fee.

3)      Facilitated Networks – where users, both providers and patients, transact and interact with one another on a fee for membership basis.

As disruption occurs in the healthcare industry, Hwang believes that a number of changes will occur to these business models

-          Specialist hospitals will emerge to address the solution shops model, bringing together a number of different specialties to reach a diagnosis sooner

-          Treatment centers focused on a particular procedure, e.g. heart by-pass, where technicians can be involved in delivering the treatment, rather than doctors, as they have been specifically trained on parts of the procedure and repeat it on a daily basis

-          Social networking through sites such as PatientsLikeMe, empowering individuals to do more for their own care delivery

Dr. Hwang concluded however, that each of these new propositions will require new value networks to gain traction in the market and for this to happen, having the right partners will be key to success.

The second keynote this morning was from James Mongan, MD, CEO of Partners Healthcare.

Within a few months there will likely be a bill signed on healthcare reform but Mongan believes that it will not have realised everything that was set out to be achieved. He asserts that the work on reform will continue for a number of years afterwards.

Despite the fact that there are huge numbers of uninsured, most still receive the treatment they need. What doesn’t happen though is that treatment for chronic conditions is not delivered in a preventative manner.

One proposal in the reform legislation is to introduce an Individual Mandate but Mongan asserts that this appears to be a new tax with another name. There may be restrictions on who actually pays this mandate but it doesn’t address the core need for insurance reform.

But what about the issue of controlling healthcare costs? Barriers to cost include the way costs are reimbursed and the lack of integration of the provider systems. With most items that you buy, you benefit immediately, but with healthcare payments you benefit later

It is likely that any new legislation will blend taxes, employer payments and individual payments but the key issue is the fairness of financing – who pays and how much? In Mongan's opinion, it needs to be a balance between individual liberty and justice for all.

I'm currently on a plane to Munich for our annual training event for the team where we will no doubt have some powerpoint fest (personally I prefer October fest!).  I shouldn't knock it as the training is excellent, very interactive and well received by the team.  However, I think we'll have a sweepstake about the total number of slides.  I'm guessing 8 sessions a day * 30 slides each for 4 days is approx 960 slides.    Personally, I'd really like to see 10 slides max in a 45 minutes presentation and have  people talk to the slides rather than repeat verbatim what's on them.  What are people thinking when they do that?  That I can't actually read. 

Now I'm on my soapbox - well actually I'm still on the plane which is delayed because of the storms - my 2nd gripe is that people cram as much on to the slides as possible.  In fact, I've done some analysis of this in the last 30 seconds.  The higher up the company structure one goes, the less cluttered the slides are.  When you get to CxO level, there's normally some nice pictures and graphics, only 3 bullet points consisting of 3 words and the message is articulated really well - the slides tell a story rather than being a story to read.  Others try and get as many words in 8 point font onto the slide as possible.  Don't get me wrong - I'm a fan when it's used correctly - it's almost a victim of it's own success.

I don't think Intel is alone in this, and judging by some of  the presentations I saw at VM'09 I know it isn't.  Perhaps the industry should adopt a 10 slide rule.  If it can't be explained in 10 slides, then either it's far too technical for my brain or the audience will fall asleep.  Any tips out there on how to make presentations more fun, stimulating, interesting etc.  or got any interesting death by powerpoint stories.  Any takers for the largest number of slides in a deck? 

I mentioned that I went to VM'09 last week at Earls Court.  It was good to get out of the office and talk to some customers as well as hear and see what other industry players are doing.  One thing that did catch my eye (and not just mine) was the Microsoft Surface demonstration.  This looked like one of those table top pub games from yester-year (ok - I'm showing my age here).  Totally interactive - no keyboard/mouse  - you can resize photos just by making your thumb and index finger closer together.    I'm sure it won't be long until this is in a form factor that can hang on the wall. [Caption competition anyone?]

Last week Adam Bosworth, one of the founders of Google Health and previously involved in many other successful ventures, launched his new company – keas. This is quite an interesting development as the goal of keas is to help you understand what your health data means and how you can use it to be as healthy as possible.

Keas works by getting you to complete a basic health questionnaire and to answer some questions about your family history and your wellness goals. It then assigns certain care plans to you, which, in theory, enable you to either manage your condition better or assist you in achieving your wellness goals. These care plans are designed by experts but do not constitute medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

What makes this proposition interesting is that you can upload your medical data to the system from other services, such as Google Health, or enter details of clinical tests that you may have undergone. Keas will then attempt to provide an interpretation for you and assist you in dealing with possible next steps. This is one of the first sites to pull all of these different elements together to offer you comprehensive advice and guidance.

It sounds simple but in fact this can be a challenging area from a regulatory and a privacy perspective. Many clinicians are reluctant for data to be stored outside their country (and sometimes even outside their offices!) despite the fact that many countries have implemented stringent data privacy regulations. Additionally, providing care plans that are useful, while not crossing the line of delivering medical advice could be quite a challenge.

Keas is backed by a strong management and advisory team, and it will be interesting to see how it delivers over the coming months.

VM 09 @ Earls Court this week brings together many of the key elements driving Cloud Computing with the software and hardwrae vendors discussing their offerings to enable IT to deploy and utilise Cloud based infrastructure.

One of the major tenets of Cloud architectures is the ability to seamlessly deploy workload anywhere within the cloud and to scale available compute resources based on workload demand. Virtualisation is the key element that enables cloud providers to deliver these capabilities to their customers and it is the availability of server hardware with in-built virtualisation support that is the underpinning of these developments.

One of the key considerations when developing virtualisation software ( the hypervisor ) is how to ensure that the guest ( i.e. virtualised ) workloads do not see that they have been virtualised, to do this it is essential that the impact of the hypervisor is minimised.

For some years now Intel has been working with the hypervisor vendors to implement hardware support for virtualisation within their processors. This support is aimed at making it easier for the hypervisor vendors to implement their code and to ensure that they are able to transparently virtualize the guest or hosted workloads.

Intel’s virtualisation technology has focused on 3 key areas – the processor, the I/O subsystem and the network interfaces.

·         Processor enhancements – new instructions and protection model that enables the hypervisor to co-exist with unmodified guest operating systems and to host multiple operating systems on the same hardware. With successive generations of Intel processors new features have been added to the processor to help the hypervisor operate and to reduce its overhead.

·         I/O subsystem – one of the limiters in early virtualisation implementations was the ability to ensure adequate I/O throughput and isolation between various workloads sharing the same physical I/O devices.  Many new Intel Xeon processor based servers now have virtualisation support built into the chipsets.

·         Network interfaces – another challenge with running multiple guest environments on the same server has been the need for them to share the same physical network interfaces and for the hypervisor to manage the separation and distribution of network traffic between the various guest virtual machines. This has been addressed with the latest network interface chips that provide hardware support to manage movement of network data directly between the LAN and virtual machines

It’s also worth noting that raw CPU performance plays a significant part in determining the number of workloads a virtualised server can host. For example if the hypervisor consumes ~10% of the available compute resource, reducing the hypervisor overhead by 10% would result in ~1% more CPU resource being available to the guest workloads, whereas increasing the CPU performance by 10% provides 10% more compute resource to the guest environments – which could equate to 1 or more addition virtual machines being hosted.

When all this is hardware support is put together with the software developments that the hypervisor vendors have been making in terms of tools to dynamically provision and move workload between various physical servers we can start to see how the underpinnings of cloud computing are being put in place.

For further reading there’s lots of good stuff in the Cloud Computing and Virtualisation tracks at the recent IDF, all the materials are here.

Much of what we read on the web today around cloud computing focus’s on the big US providers with their massive data centre capacity, most of which is centred around providing ‘services’ to consumers – IM, email, on-line photo galleries, backup etc. A lot of what’s written would also lead us to believe that many IT departments are going to ditch all their internal IT equipment, servers, storage etc and move wholeheartedly into the cloud.

I suspect in reality the situation is somewhat different.

For many IT organisations the first step in the direction of cloud computing will be to virtualise their existing infrastructure and workloads to provide ‘cloud-like ‘ services internally to their organisation.  Once this model has been established it then becomes viable to consider moving some non-business critical workloads out onto computer resources operated by third parties, i.e. external or public cloud services, whilst still retaining high degree of control over the application stack and data.

For smaller organisations without a comprehensive internal IT infrastructure the situation may be somewhat different as cloud services provides them with the option of accessing software functionality form the cloud without having to setup up and maintain themselves; these could vary from email systems, office productivity applications and all the way to complete ERP solutions.

So, are you planning your first cloud deployment and what will it be – an internal cloud or will you go the whole way and into the great unknown of the public cloud ??

If you want to find out more about your options for deploying cloud computing the IT Expo in London ( 7-8 Oct @ Earls Court ) is a good place to start, there’s also the opportunity to hear Intel experts talking about virtualisation and future compute models.

post-vPro Live Chat.

Hello Members,

The vPro Live Chat held on 30th September and was a huge success. Altogether, we had 4 countries participating, over 10 experts sharing their plentiful knowledge, and vast amounts of queries being posed.

The experts....

Throughout the 2 hour session the vPro experts were asked many a question, for example; how to measure the financial benefits of vPro without implementing (TCO tool), what the usages of vPro are for SMBs and very small fleets of employees, and what they thought the future of vPro looked like.

For a full transcript of the Live Chat - click here.

We would like to thank all of you that participated and hope that your questions were answered. If not, please post a discussion and await a response.

A sneak peak of what's to come...

Xeon Live Chat in November. Further details to be published soon.

Your IT Galaxy Team

Clarksfield Mobile Nehalem Intel® Core™i7 mobile: a proper piece of Kitt.

Mobility is one of things that Intel does best. It’s shameless self-congratulation for me to say it but it is a revolution that Intel has really had a large hand in delivering. I am so insanely grateful that I have a work laptop that is less than an inch thick, weighs very little (even with an extra battery) and is packed with good connectivity and other features such as vPro for manageability. It’s cool and I love it – when I’m given cause to think about it.

When I’m not made to think about it, I do what most of us do: take it for granted. No real shame in that at all, but it presents a problem of sorts when it comes to events like IDF where people come with expectations of the next big thing in mobile computing. Improvement is taken for granted, and the weight of expectation now hangs in the auditorium – what will Intel bring to the mobility party this year?

Well hopefully we did not disappoint with the announcement of a new mobile CPU and platform, even if in the space of a few slides it seemed to be referred to by three different monikers: mobile Nehalem, Clarksfield and Core i7 mobile. All three are correct of course, and whoever wrote those slides please take note: Core i7 mobile would have been fine and consistent. But let that not detract from a great proc, and one that packs a punch: 8 threads and turbo boost capability of 9 clock speed bins: over 1GHz - yes, 1GHz - to you and me.

But how to use such computing power? Well, the keynote that followed the mobility session was software and one of the first demonstrations of the power of threaded software was a demo of Cakewalk, an application that will take all the threads you can give it. And then some. Intel has been talking up its rock stars recently in case you missed it, but Cakewalk was able to boast actual rock stars. Can’t argue with that. My description here will not do the demo, the software, or the end product justice, but to think that on a notebook (or desktop for that matter) you can layer 140 different tracks for one song, and do it all real time on a Core i7-based machine. That is rock and roll; end of.

So Core™i7 mobile is here and I can’t wait to get my hands on one. A laptop with a quad-core processor that has over a gigahertz of turbo clock speed is compelling stuff and its 32nm cousins promise even more goodness when they take their bow next year. But for now, I’m happy that this thing is finally here – this is the downside of knowing these thin s in advance, you get to wanting one way before it’s possible. When the time comes I’ll be using it for photography rather than playing at being Brian Eno, but that’s the beauty of personal computing: choose what you want to go and do, go and do it. On a laptop.

The current issue of Business Week contains a feature (link) that looks at the Intel® Health Guide, a comprehensive personal health system that combines an in-home patient device with an online interface that allows clinicians to monitor patients and manage their care remotely.

The article gives a valuable insight into the life of a patient suffering with congestive heart failure, who used the solution to take daily blood-pressure and weight readings, as well as having regular video consultations with his nurse. His nurse in-turn was able to review the daily measurements from this and other patients, making any necessary interventions by getting them to see a doctor quickly.

A similar pilot was recently run in the UK at NHS Lothian (link), focusing on patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a condition that affects more than 3 million people and is the second largest cause of emergency hospital admissions in the UK.

In Great Britain, the Department of Health estimates that 17.5 million people are living with chronic disease (source) and the burden of chronic illness falls principally on the elderly, so as the population ages the incidence and prevalence of chronic diseases will increase. Recent research states that conditions such as these can be challenging for patients because they often have to make significant changes in their social and family relationships while dealing with physical pain, prolonged medical treatment, psychological distress and growing restrictions on their daily activities, and as a result, their quality of life is significantly reduced. (Stanton et al. Health psychology: psychological adjustment to chronic disease)

There is a growing impetus to make better use of information and communications technology to meet the very considerable challenges that are facing the health system, and in helping to improve the lives of patients.

What are the challenges that you see?

Green has been a buzz word in the IT industry for some time now, and there are many groups and companies focusing on helping IT understand their data centre energy consumption and methods by which this an be reduced.

We are now starting to see government take more interest in this as part of their policies to reduce CO2 emissions and carbon footprints. The UK government is one of the first to put in place regulation that requires companies to monitor, report and reduce their energy consumption. The Carbon Reduction Commitment requires companies to report their energy consumption and to buy allowances to offset their CO2 footprint. This scheme starts in April 2010, but takes energy consumed in 2008 as its baseline - so its too late now for a business to affect the first years reporting and they need to focus instead on how to reduce energy consumption over the coming years so as to limit the amount they need to spend on allowances.

Many large data centre operators and IT departments consume significant amounts of energy, both in the IT equipment and the facilities infrastructure to support the IT equipment. One of the biggest challenges today is that many IT managers do not see the electricity bills for their data centers - this usually goes to the facilities department and so they may have little or no idea of the energy costs of their infrastructure. Another factor to consider here is that many data centers are running older generation IT equipment, much of which was not designed with energy efficiency in mind and the facilities themselves were often not designed to optimize the air handling and cooling within the building or to minimize the costs of running this equipment.

There are a number of tools available today that can help an IT manager get a better understanding of how efficient their DC is in terms of energy usage and can help in understanding the effect of various changes on the overall energy efficiency of the data centre. One of these is the Power Utilisation Effectiveness ( PUE ) metric developed by The Green Grid which looks at the ratio of the IT load to the total facilities load within data centre. The Green Grid also publishes various white-papers and guidelines that can be used to better manage the PUE value for a data centre. There are also some good white papers produced by Intel's IT group on how to improve data centre layout and design.

It is also important to consider the actual IT equipment that is deployed within the data centre. Over recent years there have been many advances in server power management technology that when combined with the performance increases delivered by the latest generation CPUs can help IT reduce their overall energy consumption. With Intel Xeon 5500 based servers its possible to achieve significant levels of server consolidation, which when combined with the fact these servers typically consume less power than those they will replace can lead to significant reduction in power bills. In many cases it is cheaper to buy new servers and operate  than it is to continue running the existing installed base of servers. Intel has a simple tool, here, that can help IT make this assessment and determine how fast a payback they can achieve by refreshing their installed base of servers.

Using these tools and latest generation server technology can help an IT department make a significant contribution to lowering energy consumption and contributing to a businesses Carbon Reduction Commitment.

I can across the following US blog by Sean Koehl and thought it would be a very interesting read.....

The Science of Fashion?http://blogs.intel.com/research/2009/08/3d-fashion.php

I wanted to share one of the latest developments in our efforts to accelerate the development of the 3D Internet. Researchers at Intel Labs have begun to collaborate with the Fashion Research Institute (FRI) to help bring the benefits of immersive environments such as virtual worlds (VWs) to a broader range of business and consumer applications.

#

FRI is interested in virtual worlds because the fashion industry, which creates soft consumer goods, does not typically use the 3D computer aided design (CAD) tools used in the durable goods industry. However, since clothing and accessories are 3D objects with complex shapes, traditional 2D sketches cannot fully convey the exact shapes and sizes that the designer intends for the product. So, when a clothing manufacturer attempts to turn a set of 2D drawings into a 3D object, errors often occur, and it usually takes several attempts before the correct design is produced. Each attempt results in unusable physical samples which cannot be sold (and which are destroyed to prevent poor quality goods from making it into the marketplace).

3D virtual worlds offer a platform for designing apparel with a level of accuracy that is far better than traditional methods, without the cost or complexity of 3D CAD tools. Using VWs for fashion design can significantly reduce waste by eliminating the cost and materials needed to create and re-create prototypes until they are correct. They also allow the designer and manufacturer to review designs together in a virtual space over great distances. Given that many manufacturers are in countries where significant virtual world investment has already occurred (such as China), much of the basic capabilities are already in place.

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Through this new collaboration FRI is providing visually compelling, highly detailed content (shown in this video) to aid in Intel’s 3D Internet research. The new 3D content derives from FRI’s “Shengri-La” project and will include highly visual landscapes, structures, and a series of interactive art and fashion exhibits.

To explore these technical challenges, this content is being added to Supercomputing 2009’s ScienceSim, a virtual world created for education and scientific collaboration. Intel is collaborating with SC’09 to develop the hardware and simulation infrastructure behind this world. Based on the OpenSim VW simulator, ScienceSim also seeks to foster open-source innovation as a means to accelerate the proliferation of VW technology. The complex models provided by FRI will allow us to find new ways to push the state of the art for VWs such as ScienceSim in terms of 3D content creation, sharing, and quality.

So what does fashion have to do with science? Well, in addition to researching ways to make the underlying VW simulators capable of rendering more visually appealing content, we also plan to use these experimental regions as a forum to educate people on topics such as the material science behind fashion and the relationship of these complex materials to design and development. How do you make so many kinds of leather with such different properties? How do you develop synthetic fabrics? In fact, there are many aspects to the science of fashion, and virtual design is just one of the latest developments.

Ever find yourself in a new location staring hopelessly at a map, wondering where you are?  Then to make matters worse, you call someone on your cell phone and can’t describe where you are so they can help? I think we’ve all been there more than once…

Since the Intel Xeon® 5500 processors launched back in March, I’ve been getting a bunch of questions about DDR3 memory and how best to configure your server platforms to optimize performance.  Many times, folks are having a hard time just getting the conversation started, so here are a couple of tips to get you going.  The good thing is that DDR3 memory picks up where DDR2 memory leaves off in terms of speed, so you know you’ll be moving forward!

1. Figure out how much memory you need.  With multi-core CPUs now mainstream in servers, you need enough memory to keep these compute engines fed.  One metric you might look at is “GB per CPU core” or “GB per socket” for your existing servers, and then project your memory requirements from there.

2. Start with DDR3 1066 memory, as that will deliver a good balance of memory performance and capacity. 

ð        If you need more bandwidth (and willing to give up some capacity), use DDR3 1333

ð        If you need maximum capacity (and willing to give up some bandwidth), use DDR3 800

3. Match your CPU to your memory speed because the faster memory does require a faster processor.  Check out page 11 of the product brief for the quick reference table.

4. Wherever possible, fill up as many memory channels as possible, and populate all channels evenly (same type, size and number of DIMMs). 

ð        Most two-socket Xeon® 5500 platforms will have a total of 6 memory channels, so aligning your memory requirements to a multiple of 6 GB will optimize memory performance for most application environments.  

ð        However, you can mix/match memory types if your requirements call for something that is not a multiple of 6.

5. For Server application environments, always go with ECC supported memory.  Decide between Registered (RDIMM) and Unbuffered DIMMs with ECC (UDIMM ECC).

ð        RDIMM provide greatest flexibility across DIMM sizes and availability

ð        UDIMM ECC provide a lower cost alternative if you are using 1 GB or 2 GB DIMMs

There are many, many memory configurations possible for the Xeon 5500 platforms, each offering tradeoffs for performance, power, cost, bandwidth, and RAS.  You will still want to check with your system vendor on the specifics, such as memory configurations and DIMM types and options supported for a given server, but hopefully this helps you pointed in the right direction.

If you still need some more help, ask me a question on this blog!