Hi all,

Intel has been working with various companies on implementing the concept of Dynamic Virtual Clients. As innovators among Harvard University’s IT community, the School of Engineering and Applies Sciences (SEAS) is an ideal environment for implementation of Application Streaming technology. Within SEAS, the office of Computing and Information Technology’s (CIT) CyberInfrastructure Labs (CI Labs) supports faculty, researchers, students, and staff by deploying and maintaining up-to-date, effective computing technologies.

With application streaming, applications are streamed on demand from the data center to the client, where they are executed locally. The goal of the scientific application streaming project, as outlined in the attached white paper, is to simplify the deployment of large, complex engineering and scientific applications to a highly diverse user population of around 1,000 students and faculty.

Initial results show install times decreasing from hours to minutes, as well as fewer problems caused by human error during complex installation and licensing procedures. As innovators among Harvard’s IT community, the CI Labs anticipates wider implementation of application streaming, both within its user base and across Harvard.

Check out the details in the attached case study.

Like many others, I have downloaded Google's Chrome Browser (using it to write this blog), and gave it a try. Of course, the first thing people are focused on is the UI and visible features... After reading the comic book explanation (the team did an awesome job at describing the architecture via a comic book - very unique idea), I think people need to look at what this browser really is - it’s not just a browser, it’s a web execution client.

First, they went away from launching a bunch of threads and went to processes, they are extending a well know operating system fundamental, making the browser similar to a sub OS of your OS (one that does not have to care about drivers and such). They went for the overhead of the process model to focus on scalability and stability. Both of these have to be fundamentals if Google Gears is to provide content to this web execution client, as who wants to run a cloud application and have your browser crash, run out of memory, or suffer from many of the other common limitations of browser-based applications (very few truly rich applications run purely in a browser).

Other features that seem to be radically different for this web execution client are the virtual machine manager used to execute Java script, the garbage collection method, the scalable user interface, and the way they are doing the developer testing. They have really taken a different approach here, an approach more focused on how things execute over being an web page rendering engine. The developer testing concept is very neat, they are leveraging the core of Google to test their builds against the most commonly viewed sites, this gives instant feedback about real world usages (but no testing is ever enough, right?).

Now how does a new browser release get into blog on compute models? The way I look at it, this is really a prime time client for executing cloud programs, Google Gears or others. The way they made the browser to not be limited in its processing capabilities and coupled that with common computer science stability models, the browser (even if not launched as a browser) is a prime candidate to become our interface to the rich application capability to cloud computing.

However, my biggest worry with this model is how the application verifies that the virtual machine manager and the other core services of the browser integrity have not been compromised. Is their a TXT style measurement of this browser? If cloud is going where people think it is, I am going to want my client execution engine to be trustworthy as possible.

From my first look, great job Google team. What are your thoughts?

-Jason A. Davidson

If you are like me, when you travel, computers break at home - and being a computer person, you are the tech support...your house is most likely your personal lab, in a constant state of flux. If not, I salute you. To make matters worse, I am often the one who messed things up before I leave - luckily, my wife patiently waits for me to get into my hotel and work with her to fix it remotely. She already does a great job at tolerating the wires, keyboards, mice, monitors, and various other computer parts in every corner of our house - so having to wait for me to fix these, is a hassle for her I would like to reduce.

I have a real life scenario from my current trip that is worth sharing with this community. First let me explain a bit about the way I have my house setup. Network wise, I have a standard DSL connection to the house which plugs into a slim & quite desktop that I has 2 network cards on it and runs the http://ipcop.org/ firewall solution, which I have added http://openvpn.net/ onto and use the OpenVPN GUI application on my mobile computer. From the 2^nd network connection I serve up my wireless and wired infrastructures and have gigabyte connections to all rooms in the house as well as a great wireless solution, even the printers and TV are networked. I have more than one vPro clients in the house that I have enabled in small business mode. I also have a RAID solution on one of my computers that handles all the file shares - including running various emerging solutions that we talk about on this site (I mentioned I view my home network as a lab, right?).

Now the scenario - while on this trip one of the PC's who is up to date with virus protection and patches developed a virus, and as much as I would like to spend the time looking into how the virus got there - doing this over the phone would not be feasible. Therefore, I did what any modern day geek would do - I VPN'd into my home from my hotel, I took control of the computer over a remote desktop session and started fixing. I found the virus engrained into the system, and to keep my home running until I return, I set the machine to boot to the network instead of the local hard disk using IDE-R (a feature in vPro). Then I rebooted the machine and it booted Ubuntu Linux over my network, and the files that my family uses are accessible over the file shares.

Problem patched - until I return home. Keeping my fingers crossed...

-Jason

p.s. If you have any questions on how to configure your house this way - fire away.

Intel partnered with ArsTechnica to create an ongoing web based conference / symposium with Intel as the presenting sponsor - and this week the topic is all about emerging compute models!

Please take a few minutes and go check out the conversations on their site and join in the discussion.

-Jason

The application & desktop virtualization forums for Atlanta (March 20) and Washington DC (April 3) went off well. Here is my recap.

Atlanta:

When we arrived in Atlanta, the town had just survived a tornado on March 14^th and was in repair mode (the hotel that many of us were staying at had extensive damage and was doing everything it could to get back in working order). We had a few interesting times as passage to & from the hotel was often stopped due to the amount of falling glass (we passed the time in the nearby malls and downtown businesses). One person checked into their room to find that moments later a crack in the window gave way to a breezy view. The round the clock crews that were repairing the hotel made for some less than desired sleep patterns (3 am hammering in the room next to you is bound to wake the heaviest of sleeper). The people in Atlanta were as hospitable as ever, confirming that Atlanta is big city with small-town hospitality - even in the aftermath of a tornado!

We held the event at the 755 club at Turner Field (the Atlanta Braves stadium); the venue was awesome! The day of the event, started at 8:30 for attendees with a very enjoyable southern breakfast. At 9 am, Ketan Sampat of Intel gave the opening address, followed by presentations from Citrix, #, and Microsoft. During the lunch time, there were demos and deep dives with experts from Intel, AppStream, Citrix, Dell, Microsoft, and Symantec. As the attendees left the event, they received a USB thumb drive with all the presentations and collateral here:

• Principled Technology Report

• Intel Opening remarks

• Microsoft Softgrid Flash Tour

• Alternative Computer Models Brief

• Citrix Presentation

• #

• Microsoft Presentation

• http://communities.intel.com/servlet/JiveServlet/previewBody/1487-102-1-1702/IT@Intel%20Benchmarking%20Study%20Results%20%20Summary.pdf[IT@Intel]

I personally had several great discussions with the Atlanta attendees, and found that the attendees are definitely looking at various compute models to deliver the needs of their business and are eager to see which ones will emerge as the best complete solution - great perspectives and insight received from these talks. In addition, the team was happy to see the city recover quickly, and as we all left, we look forward to a return visit to a restored Atlanta, and the continued contact with the attendees from the event as they move forward exploring these topics.

Washington DC:

We arrived in Washington DC during cherry blossom season, a fantastic time of year. The venue for the event was the Marriott Hotel in Bethesda Maryland. The hotel staff was very helpful, the hotel was enjoyable, and the event went off without any major issues. The agenda was very similar to Atlanta with breakfast/registration time at 8:30 am, and at 9 am Chuck Brown of Intel giving the opening address. This was followed by presentations from Citrix, #, and Microsoft. During the lunch time, there were demos and deep dives with experts from Intel, AppStream, Citrix, Dell, Microsoft, and Symantec. As the attendees left the event, they received a USB thumb drive with all the presentations and collateral here:

• Principled Technology Report

• Intel Opening remarks

• Microsoft Softgrid Flash Tour

• Alternative Computer Models Brief

• Citrix Presentation

• #

• Microsoft Presentation

• IT@Intel%20Benchmarking%20Study[IT@Intel]

Many great talks with the attendees in DC as well, confirming a similar message that was received in Atlanta. We are definitely on the edge of something big in this space - as can be seen by the various acquisitions that have occurred in the past year. A fantastic first two events for 2008, if you have not been able to attend either of these, see if one of these matches your location.

Hope to see you at one (or more) of these events in the near future.

-Jason Davidson

PodTech recently conducted a video interview about the Emerging Compute Model Forum with Chuck Brown, Jason Davidson, and Mike Ferron-Jones from Intel. Here is the video, please give us any feedback you may have.

PodTech wrote:

There are now possibilities in enterprise computing that have the potential to solve mainstream problems and become widely adopted. These "Emerging Compute Models" are creating a lot of buzz, but also a lot of confusion in the IT community. That's why this video podcast focuses on Intel's Emerging Compute Model Forum. Jason Davidson, technical evangelist for the forum, says IT shops are experimenting with new ways to deliver applications and operating systems, but there's no consensus on the best model, or models, to use.

In this podcast, Davidson and his colleagues Mike Ferron-Jones, marketing manager for Intel's Emerging Compute Models program, and Chuck Brown, who directs the program, lay out the basic questions IT managers need to ask before choosing new compute models, discuss some of the pros and cons of different models, and preview some Intel and industry developments in the ECM space.

On February 12, I was at a Intel team event in Hillsboro, Oregon. I was able to snag a few minutes with Ketan Sampat, Marianne Jackson, and Arjun Batra to do video interviews about the Intel streamed computing initiative.

Here is my video interview with Ketan Sampat. He gives an overview of the recent events in the industry that have been contributing to Intel forming the streamed computing initiative, and in turn form the Emerging Compute Model Forum community. It runs just over 1 minute.

Next, I was able get Arjun Batra behind the camera to invite you to attend one of our upcoming application & desktop virtualization forums. Follow this link if you would like to register for one of these events. It runs around 3 minutes.

Also, I was able to sit down with Marianne Jackson, who talked about some of the various events, activities, and products that Intel has planned for 2008. It runs around a minute and a half.

Catherine Spencewrote an IT@Intel blog on a recent lab experiment on the impact of various emerging compute models on both the server and network. You can find the blog at: http://communities.intel.com/openport/blogs/client/2008/01/25/streaming-impact-on-the-server-and-network

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Several Intel IT folks (and others!) have expressed concern over the back-end implications of hosting a streamed computing solution. How many clients can be supported by a server? How will streaming affect the network? Well, we had the same questions so we constructed a lab experiment to find out.

Streaming was more efficient than we expected. We demonstrated that server utilization remained low and network utilization improved over time. We successfully executed a variety of applications including audio and video. We also encountered a few challenges.

Want to know more? Read our full report: Streaming and Virtual Hosted Desktop Study