ModelBlog: Innovation in Simulation

The 3D Cellphone

2008-09-08T10:07:00.000-07:00

Big computer companies like IBM and HP are developing software that allows you do view highly detailed 3D worlds on modest client machines (see DCV and RGS links below). This is accomplished by doing the rendering on the server side and sending the screen to a number of smaller clients.

Companies like Vollee and OTOY are doing something similar, but targeted at the cellphone. Imagine that you are running a 3D world like Second Life on your cellphone. But, since your phone does not have the compute or storage resources to really do this, all of the rendering is being done on a server and the results streamed to your phone in the form of a digital movie (MP3, Flash video, etc.). Your inputs on the phone are commands to move through the virtual world and interact with the objects there. These commands are carried to a server where the simulation and graphic rendering are done and the finished video frames are streamed back to your phone for you to see. Clearly there will be some video lag between the command and the visual results as the key entries travel to the server, are simulated and rendered, and the results travel back to your phone. if you are old enough you will remember that this is how text entry and order execution worked with the old terminal windows back when "the Internet" meant textual applications on a command line and there was no such thing as "the Web". You may also have seen the gradual evolution of that primitive interface into rudimentary graphic menues as clever people showed that the text could acrually drive a menu system rather than just showing up on a command line.

High-def rendering on all devices will become a reality. A few years ago we thought it would happen through the miniaturization of the GPU so that all phones had an Nvidia or ATI chip in them. But faster networks are making this possible while the GPU remains on the server machine. The connection between the client and server is fast enough that the two seem to share the visualization capability. There may be several technical hurdles to work through, but the community have solved bigger problems than those to get where we are now. Keep looking for great things on small devices.

IBM: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/visualization/
HP: http://h20331.www2.hp.com/hpsub/cache/286504-0-0-225-121.html
Vollee: http://www.vollee.com/secondlife
OTOY: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/20/the-truth-behind-liveplaces-photo-realistic-3d-world-and-otoys-rendering-engine/

Virtual tea parties on the ceiling

2008-08-31T13:21:00.001-07:00

Why do we have chairs in our offices, classrooms, and public spaces? Are they a real necessity? Somewhere in the distant past people recognized the advantage of doing certain types of work mounted on a platform up off of the ground. They also found the need to keep nice clothes off of the ground and out of the dirt. Then there is the comfort factor for sitting down rather than standing up. In the physical world, chairs have become a staple of our existence.

When we enter the virtual world, what is a chair good for? There is no dirt, there is no physical fatigue, and characters can often float anywhere? So what use is there for chairs?

But if you navigate through Second Life you will find chairs, desks, lamps, and all of the typical artifacts of the the real world. All of them useless. We are so excited about the possibilities that can be achieved in the virtual world. But once inside it appears that most people cannot imagine anything different from what they have in the physical world. In fact, it looks like the virtual world is just a place where we can possess something that resembles what we cannot get in the physical world. If, in the physical world, you have a small office or cubicle, the first thing you might build in the VW is a bigger office. One bigger than the boss'.

Where is the imagination? It appears that most VW residents have little and most large organizations that enter the VW have absolutely none. Even though people complain that sitting in conference rooms and classrooms all day long is the most boring part of their lives, that is the first thing we offer them when they enter the virtual world.

Given an empty virtual canvas we create images directly from the physical world. We create load-bearing columns for buildings that weigh nothing. We hang light fixtures from virtual chains even though there is no gravity to pull them down. We put all of the furniture on the "floor" and leave the walls and ceiling of buildings empty. Where are the tea parties on the ceiling?

Second Life has many very clever and imaginative residents. But for some reason the islands of large organizations are just as sterile, standard, and unimaginative as the real offices. The "rules of the office" carry into the virtual world, even the rules that call for chairs that serve no purpose.

Pancake People

2008-07-30T11:14:00.000-07:00

Historically each individual has had the opportunity to become very deep in a very narrow part of existence. The farmer on an isolated piece of land in the Great Plains spent his entire life learning the fine details about the weather, soil, wildlife, growing patterns, and planting strategies that worked at a particular point of latitude and longitude. His education began as a boy between the ages of 5 and 8 years-old. If he chose to stay on the farm and carry on the family business, his experience and understanding of that point in time and space would continue until he was between 55 and 65 years-old. This type of life allowed him to become an expert with fifty or sixty years of expertise in a very specific domain of industry, geography, and time. He had the opportunity to socialize with other farmers around him and to learn from their experience as well. Like a scientist who spends all of his time in personal experimentation and works only with a tight-knit group of kindred souls, this farmer was able to master one specific domain through hard work and endurance.

Similar pockets of focused expertise existed all across the country and the world. They were characteristic of the “up by your own bootstraps” determination that was required to survive and succeed in such isolated conditions and with so little access to outside information. But as mediums for communication spread and became more accessible, the farmer was able to learn about the ideas of others around the state, the country, and the world. He began to rely on the expertise and discoveries of people far from his point in space, people he had never seen, met, nor imagined. He did not have to understand how their ideas worked. He just had to know enough to implement them effectively. Knowledge came to him embedded in new kinds of seeds, new equipment, and new farming practices that he had not created himself. He began to explore beyond his own experience of nature, work, and society. He was once an intellectual pillar standing on a particular point in space and time. He was tall, certain of his knowledge, and master to his place in the world. But the distribution of new products and the communication of new information allowed him to expand out and become more knowledgeable of the world. He was able to learn about and experiment with ideas beyond those tied to survival. He could take on hobbies and indulge his interest in machinery beyond farming. The farmer was becoming more broad and well-rounded. He was flattening out to cover more area and to rely on the expertise of others to perform his core function.

This picture of the lone farmer working to survive is similar to what has happened in all parts of society. The television and the Internet have played an important and unstoppable role in the flattening and broadening process. Since the 1950’s, society has broadened its exposure to information and thinned its specialization on one specific topic - especially concerning topics that are directly aligned with their professional and economic survival. We have created pancake people who know a little bit about everything in the world, but not a great deal about any one thing. Some individuals and groups remained dedicated to mastering their specialty. Professionals in law, medicine, engineering, philosophy, history, literature, and similar disciplines still prided themselves on their depth of thinking and their understanding of the great writings in their fields. However, the recent explosion of the World Wide Web has begun to link, summarize, critique, and repeat all knowledge. Even the islands of experts have found themselves seduced by the easy assess to vast stores of information. Even they have become information surfers. Though they may have criticized the masses of television channel surfers, they have succumbed to the same fate. The seduction of surfing across all information in any field, the ability to quickly locate and scan anything that has been written, these opportunities are too tempting to resist. But as we navigate these vast tracts of information we are just beginning to notice that the depth of our absorption, understanding, and incorporation of that information into our own ideas is becoming shallow. The intellectual classes of society are being broadened and flattened by the Internet in the same way that the television flattened the general public. Pancake intellectuals are joining the ranks of the pancake society.

From an intellectual perspective, the ability to think deeply about a subject may be attributed to the creation of the book. This abstract representation of knowledge could be patiently and painstakingly created by an author. It could be shared with millions of readers, who could spend their time working through it. Prior to its invention there was no means to collect, record, and disseminate large volumes of thought. The Internet is changing the era of the book into the era of the page. It is returning society to a time when all knowledge was limited to the size of a single piece of paper. It appears that we are not veering into a new type of information exchange, but are returning to a previous pattern.

Are we better off as pancake people?

Certainly exposing someone to a broad set of information in their early years is an advantage. It allows them to consider many options for directing their life. It opens doors that were previously closed or unimagined. But, is the shallow surfing of information the best way to conduct one’s life indefinitely? It is an effective means of discovering a new field, but not of mastering it. Sergey Brin argues that people are better off if they have access to all of the world’s information. That is certainly true. But it does not speak to the question of how a person should use that access. Being able to read the entire encyclopedia of human knowledge is a way to see the surface of a very large world. But it is not an effective method for becoming a master of any one part of that world. The expert must focus his attention on one small area for a significant amount of time. But, Nicholas Carr wonders whether it is possible to develop a mind which can both surf broadly and penetrate deeply into information. His own experience has been that broad surfing has weakened his ability to penetrate deeply. It appears to be a choice that each person must make – the wide flat pancake of familiarity, or the deep-rooted pillar of expertise.

It is encouraging that authors like Carr have the ability to see the transformation that is happening and to express it in a compelling manner that draws attention. Carr says, “I am not thinking the way I used to think.” But it is excellent that he is able to recognize that the change is happening. It is important that we in society recognize that we must choose between the pancake and the pillar of knowledge.

Ref: Carr, N. (July/August 2008). Is Google making us stupid? The Atlantic.com. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

Wired Danger Room - Virtual Worlds for Military Training

2008-07-29T14:01:00.001-07:00

Today the Wired Danger Room Blog carried a summary of some ideas that I have been promoting on the use of virtual worlds for military training. The idea of a game on a soldier's desktop is old hat. The idea of a military virtual world that soldiers can access is relatively current. But the idea of the military creating a training service that allows any soldier or unit anywhere to access hundreds of different types of training systems and content - now that is a very big new idea. The Wired blog just begins to introduce that idea.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

2008-07-29T13:56:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Carr created a firestorm around the value of IT in 2003 when he wrote the article “IT Doesn’t Matter” for the Harvard Business Review. He has a new article in The Atlantic entitled “Is Google Making us Stupid?” Google and similar tools allow us access to a lot more information than any other generation has ever had. However, the style of the information and the mental behaviors that we use to access and absorb it are very different from the way previous generations absorbed books and detailed articles. Carr suggests that are becoming accustomed to all information being delivered as small bites that can be consumed in a few minutes. As a result we are losing the mental habit and facility to sit with a long treatise on a subject and work through it over many hours or many days. He reaches back to historical examples that have had similar effects on people’s behaviors. In summary he proposes that the tools that we use to create and deliver information shape the way our brains work and that the Web fails to create the mental muscles required to deeply investigate a subject.

Web 2.0 and Mashups for Military Information

2008-07-29T13:55:00.000-07:00

There is a very interested research paper from MITRE on the use of Web 2.0 tools and mashups for military applications. Web 2.0 usually refers to tools that allow you to collaborate with others online. Mashups are the combinations of services provided by different providers. There are a number of Google Map mashups in which people use Google’s map as the background reference for their own databases. The paper from MITRE describes tools from Yahoo, Kapow, and Google that can be used to process information. It contains an example of hunting through Flickr photos for a picture of a white van that was at a specific location at a specific time. This application ties together Yahoo Pipes with the Flickr photos database. The author goes on to describe the importance of ad hoc information processing to get inside your opponent’s OODA loop.

Ref: “Mashup the OODA Loop”, Jeffery Heier, MITRE C2C Center, New Jersey

Military Compute Cloud

2008-07-29T13:53:00.000-07:00

Amazon Web Services offers computing, storage, and network resources for sale by compute-hour or MB of storage. There are a number of new dot.com companies built on top of these services. The companies do not buy their own hardware, but instead rent only as much as is needed from Amazon, adding or subtracting every week as necessary. DISA has picked up this idea and created a similar service for use by military organizations. For example, STRI could host our applications on their machines and test them (hopefully across the “.mil” domain) – or leave them active as permanent services. The cost of the service is $500/month for unlimited resources. Long-term, DISA sees this as a means of becoming the permanent hosting service for many applications.

NextGov article

Web 2.0 for Simulation

2008-06-26T07:46:00.000-07:00

Web 2.0 is a term often invoked to describe social networks, blogs, wikis, and similar tools that allow ad hoc groups to form around topics of interest. These tools are just beginning to be considered as business IT applications. In a military simulation domain, they could become the tools with which exercises are planned and the data from simulations is collected.I believe some of these will emerge at the next IT tool equivalent to email and the web browser. I cannot be certain which application is will be but I would put my money on the Wiki for real business and military operations.

Business Week Article

Web 2.0 for Warfigher Training

Virtual Surgery

2008-06-02T14:02:00.000-07:00

Dr. Richard Satava, US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, believes that a realistic future improvement in surgery is “virtual surgery”. His definition of this term is a surgical process that involves the following steps:

Patient is scanned with MRI to create an accurate digital model of their body and internal organs.
The surgeon operates on this virtual model until he/she arrives at a perfect procedure that is best for this patient. The surgery procedures can be edited just as you would edit a Word document until you remove all errors.
Upload the surgery to a robot that can follow the surgery file exactly. This is similar to a manufacturing robot which can cut metal parts more accurately than a human.
Let the robot perform the surgery under the observation of a surgeon who can override if necessary.

Future of the Internet

2008-05-30T20:48:00.000-07:00

Many people see the Internet and the applications that leverage it maturing into a system and a service similar to electricity, television, or the telephone network. They present this as a good and natural change which will make the system more ubiquitous, reliable, and predictable. However, Jonathan Zittrain at Harvard University is worried about this change. He points out that the power of the Internet has come from its openness and the ability of any person or company to create a product or service that takes it in a new direction. He argues that really innovative, valuable, and powerful products come from strange and unpredictable corners. What centralized approval board would have given the green light to projects like Facebook, Flickr, Second life, and Digg? These are the 21st century equivalents of the Web Browser, VRML, and Google search of the 20th century. Most established users of the network do not see real value in these new applications. But their value comes from the fact that they appeal to people who are not interested in what the Internet did for their parents, but are looking for something entirely different – preferably something that their parents “don’t get” or better yet, something their parents “don’t approve of”. A standardized, stable, commodity product stops growing and changing. There was very little innovation in the telephone network while AT&T held a monopoly on it. In fact, AT&T litigated against a number of innovators who dared to create a product that connected to their telephone system. Zittrain fears that the era of innovation, anarchy, and reinvention on the Internet is coming to a close. He is in favor of a “generative system” that is unruly and always changing itself rather than a platform that must maintain its reliability so that “the big boys” can reliably run their businesses on it.

The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Johnathan Zittrain.

Lead User Innovation

2008-05-23T06:29:00.000-07:00

In most industries, R&D is done by a specific in-house department. However, for many products there is a leading edge group of users who buy the product and immediately make modifications to meet their very unique needs. Eric von Hippel (2005) of the MIT Sloan School of Management has studied the impact of "lead users" on the development of new features for products. He describes this effect in windsurfing, mountain biking, and open source software. These customers are effectively an external R&D lab for the company’s products. von Hippel argues that they need to be enrolled by the company as partners in identifying and developing features for the next generation of products. Three criteria must exist for this to be effective: (1) the users must have an incentive to innovate, (2) they must have an incentive to reveal their innovations and share them, and (3) their work must be at a competitive level with innovations created internally and by competing companies.

von Hippel’s book Democratizing Innovation is available as a free download on his web site: http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books.htm

Free Computers with Every Electricity Contract

2008-04-25T09:33:00.001-07:00

Johnathan Swartz, CEO of Sun, was just speaking at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. He reiterated the fact that electric power costs more than computer hardware. Electricity is second only to staffing in many business costs.

A power company could offer a free data center to a company that would sign a multi-year contract to buy power. Note also that Chris Anderson's next big idea is offering free products (his last big idea was The Long Tail).

Self-destructing Email and Instant Messages.

2008-04-25T09:33:00.000-07:00

A small company at Web 2.0 offers a product that allows people to send email and instant messages that disappear over time. Initially this seemed like a very tricky feat. But after getting into the details, I learned that their system just sends an email or IM which contains a link to the content on their web server. When you read the message it is really loading from the server. At the specified time-out they just delete the message from the server and the link that exists in your email or IM client can no longer access the content of the message. This simple idea could be very useful and could be implemented by any web-based email service (e.g. Yahoo, Gmail). Though it is a good idea it is not a likely business success because it is too easily copied by any company.

Four Approaches to Simulation as an IT Service

2008-04-10T13:48:00.000-07:00

Previously I have described an idea to deliver simulations as an IT service in the same way that people are able to use the Web, email, and other online services. Further investigation and discussions with companies pursuing similar projects suggest that there are four methods of achieving this. Each has their own advantages and drawbacks.

Basic HTML. If a simulation can be delivered as basic HTML, then the infrastructure and desktop software is already in place to deliver this. Currently, Google Maps is an example of how far this can be taken with user interactivity.
Plug-in. We could develop a browser plug-in so that the main interface to simulation tools and content is still through the browser, but it would allow us to create more advanced content. The most popular plug-in of this type is Flash. Garage Games has developed a plug-in that uses DirectX and the power of the graphics card on the machine. This service is currently in Beta test at InstantAction.com.
Simulation Framework or Driver. A framework driver is a program that is approved to reside on a standard Army desktop and contains generalized rendering, AI, a GUI, and other tools that can be installed to support specific simulation content modules. The specific content (flight ops, team tactics, etc.) would be downloaded by the driver according to the needs of the soldier that was using a specific machine. The content modules would not be installed as unique programs but would be libraries to an already installed and approved driver.
Full Simulation. Finally, each computer user would have to download and install a full application that is specific to their needs. This is the most problematic in terms of server support, bandwidth, and user permissions.

20th vs. 21st Century Simulation

2008-03-26T18:33:00.000-07:00

We have reached the 21st century. How are military or interactive simulations different in this century than in previous centuries? Are we just going to run them faster than we have in the past? Or are we going to leverage 3D graphics, global networking, gigantic compute and storage servers, ad hoc social networks, the remote sensing explosion, and other technologies to create a fundamentally new product and service? Given the huge changes in computing and communications that have occurred, it would seem criminal to continue creating simulations in the same forms that we have been using for decades.

3D Browser - looks like Google Earth

2008-03-26T18:32:00.000-07:00

HTML and browsers like IE have come to define what the Internet and the Web are, how data is organized, and how it is presented and navigated by the user. But this understanding of he Web is just a snapshot in its continual evolution. There have been a number of attempts to provide a 3D experience on the web (like early VRML). But most of these occurred before the technology could really support them and they emerged as a single point in the vast digital universe - a hobby shop demo of capabilities rather than a really useful tool. But in the last few years products like Google Earth and Worldwind have emerged as tools for viewing data geographically. It allows us to see the world as it has been in the form of maps, satellite images, and multiple layers of cultural information – including 3D features. Google Earth is a billboard announcing that it is time to try a 3D version of the Web again. But this time the widely available technology can support it and Google Earth begins with an integrated framework of data that already has value and can grow into a much richer space. There is a great deal of information on the web that can be organized geographically and presented via a 3D web browser like Google Earth. For people who need to understand their neighborhoods, vacation locations, combat zones, or other areas of interest it is highly inefficient to have to collect data from many disparate sources in the current web. Instead they should be able to access it geographically. It should be organized and offered up by its location. This would be a great addition, but it does not mean that all information can be organized this way. All of the entries in Wikipedia cannot be plotted on a map – e.g. Chevy Chase may mean a comedy actor, a city in Maryland, a financial corporation, or a large group of neighborhood branch banks. Half of these do not fit well on a 3D map. It seems that Google Earth or something like it needs to merge with the current browser to create a tool that allows people to see data in more forms than just flat HTML pages. Adding a 3D application to the desktop is not a good idea because it splits the data into different silos that have to be navigated independently. Instead the two views need to be interlaced together so that a web surfer sees data in the form that is most natural for it.

Microsoft Open XNA

2008-03-04T08:14:00.001-08:00

In 2004, the game Full Spectrum Warrior for the Xbox was published. It was a long and difficult collaboration between the Army, game developers, and Microsoft. With the exception of this game, consoles have been off-limits to serious game developers. The expensive development platforms and licensing agreements focused on games with broad appeal that would be sold in the millions of copies. However, Microsoft has made significant changes to its development model. It is now possible to develop for the Xbox360 without a specialized computer. Microsoft has also just opened up its Xbox Live service so that any independent developer can create a game and get it distributed as a software download through this online service. Potentially, this may open up the console for serious games in military training. These downloadable games will be reviewed by a committee to determine whether they violate any IP or contain objectionable content. If cleared, then they will be posted on Xbox Live for customer purchase and download. This could become an avenue for serious games distribution as well.

Server-side 3D Rendering

2008-02-13T13:29:00.000-08:00

The idea that it is more efficient to render 3D images on a server and then deliver these to clients in real time runs counter to the way distributed systems have been developed for decades. We have always lived in a world in which network bandwidth was so scarce and so slow that it was the bottleneck for distributed systems. IBM, Sun, and HP all see a future in which bandwidth is much more abundant and the delivery speeds are many times faster. They are beginning to create distributed visualization systems that allow all of the heavy visualization work to be done on a server and distributed to clients in a manner similar to MP3 movies (e.g. try watching streaming movies on your PC from Netflix). But they also believe that delivery speeds will be fast enough to allow two-way interaction so that the customer on the client end can navigate through the world and make changes to it while it is being rendered on the server side. Currently it appears that they are able to do this with 3D spaces where the client is primarily interested in moving around objects like machine parts and 3D molecules. The client may occasionally make a change and see the effect reflected back by the server in near real time. This is a necessary first step toward server-side rendering for virtual simulation and gaming environments. I do not think we are at a point where we can support real time interactive play yet and are probably very limited in the number of independent players that can be supported. But the financial benefits of this technology are so compelling that I expect many companies to push on this technology until they make it happen. Even Amazon web Services could be a provider in this space if there is enough demand It essentially turns every electronic device into the equivalent of a rendering machine. Imagine playing the hottest new computer game on your iPod, PDA, or cellphone – and not the high-end version, but a very mediocre piece of hardware. Also, imagine that you do not have to upgrade your computer when a new high-powered game comes out because all of the hardware upgrade is done on the servers. The number of potential customers for such a service is certainly in the tens of millions and perhaps handreds of millions. It seems to be on the scale of the cell phone market in size.

Serious Games Hype Cycle

2008-02-13T13:23:00.000-08:00

In 1995 the Gartner Group created and promoted a graph that they called the Hype Cycle. It describes the boom-and-bust cycle of media coverage and popular attention to a new technology. Once the seeds of a new technology become available, companies begin working on new products that exploit it. If the technology is sexy enough, the media covers it so aggressively that expectations far exceed what can be delivered in the near-term. At some point the real products fail to meet the expectations that were generated by the media, the media and the mass audiences tag it as a failure or disappointment, and wander off to pump up some other technology. However, industry continues to work with the technology and turn it into a product. A few years later the technology delivers successful products that everyone is interested in and customers wonder why it took so long. This Hype Cycle curve has been applied to many technologies and you can see some of these in the links below.

Over the last 2 years the media and our own community have gotten very excited about the promise of serious games. During 2007, the media was particularly enamored with Second Life. There was a point at which Second Life was appearing in the mainstream business press every single week (competing for attention with Facebook). Perhaps, we have gone over the peak of attention and expectation in serious games. We may be entering a period in which many people lose interest in the subject and it is no longer seen as the next revolution in simulation. But even as the media attention wanders away, there will be developers who continue to work in this area. If the hype cycle idea holds true for serious games, then in a couple of years we should see some successful products emerge and the media recognize that the industry is finally catching up with the hype that was generated in 2005-2007.

I have discussed this idea with reps from 2 different companies that develop tools for both the gaming and the military communities. One vendor believes there is no near-term growth opportunity in serious games and are ignoring it, the other vendor believes there is a good growth curve here but the market has to get past the fractured fiefdoms and love of legacy products before it can take off (beginning in 2008 or 2009 in her opinion).

Gartner Hype Cycle Web Site: http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=130115
Wikipedia Hype Cycle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype

Project Darkstar

2008-02-10T12:53:00.000-08:00

Project Darkstar is a research project at Sun Labs aimed at making massively scalable game
server system easy for traditional game programmers to construct. As such, it presents
an event driven, apparently mono-threaded programming model to the game developer while
exploiting the inherently parallel nature of games in an underlying multi-threaded/multi-process
execution environment.

Immortality for 30 cents

2007-12-27T18:39:00.001-08:00

If a gigabyte of hard disk storage costs $100, then you have to manage what you save and what you decide to record in digital form. Now if this cost keeps falling every year, what does it mean if a gigabyte of storage costs nothing? On the Internet a gigabyte of storage is free, I can get it free from Google or Yahoo! just by signing up for an account. If I insist on having that disk drive in my own home, then I can get a gigabyte for about 30 cents.

Would you pay 30 cents to be able to keep your worst digital photos forever?
Would you pay 30 cents to eliminate the job of cleaning up your hard drive?
Would you pay 30 cents so that your email and your voice mail never hit their max capacity?
Would you pay 30 cents to store the medical records of 1,000 people in Africa who do not have 30 cents to store their own medical data?
Would you pay 30 cents to store your most valuable memories in a Digital Library of Congress forever?
Would you pay 30 cents to store a survey of your home for insurance claims?
Is there anything so trivial that you would refuse to pay 30 cents to save it?
How would you answer these questions when 30 cents drops to 1 cent?

Have you stopped to think about what all of this means to the future of information, commerce, personal memories, ... everything?

Santa meets the Warcrafter ....

2007-12-25T18:58:00.000-08:00

10 Kinds of People in the World (The Techie Version)

2007-12-24T13:01:00.000-08:00

There are 10 kinds of people in the world:

01 - Those who understand binary, and

10 - Those who don't.

If you don't understand this joke, then you are in category 10.

New Ideas from Next Door

2007-12-16T15:44:00.000-08:00

Where do new ideas come from? There are the researchers who look for the next big thing in any industry, including simulation. They seek to improve the state of tools or science based on limitations that customers have right now. The simulation community has been clamoring for better interoperability, shared and rapid terrain generation, and more powerful AI for decades. There are entire conferences and committees that explore and discuss each of these.

But who is looking at how multi-core PCs might fundamentally change the simulation industry? Who can see how to apply business IT tools to simulation? What about supercomputers and Web 2.0 tools? Adjacent to simulation are a number of fields that are thriving on different, but related customer problems - as well as lots of money to solve them. Digging deeper in the same hole is not always the best way to solve the problems that are in the hole with you. Sometimes you need to get out of the hole and see what your neighbors are doing in their holes. Your technology neighbors are just as smart as the people in your hole, perhaps smarter. And often by looking at a similar problem from a different angle they come up with a solution that really makes the problem look a lot easier.

Another advantage of the neighbors hole is that you are not required to be consistent with all of the historical work that have been done in your own area. You are allowed to think and explore at tangents that are just not quite proper in the official hole. Gian Zaccai at the Design Continuum says that, "moving among many different industries frees you from the dogma of any one industry and their firm belief in the links between problems and solutions." Andrew Hargadon at UC Davis believes that "bridging multiple worlds, in essence, makes you less susceptible to the pressures of conforming in any one because you have somewhere else to go."

So where some promising places to look for technologies that are valuable in teh simulation world? I like:

High Performance Computing, including multicore and GPU.
Business IT, including the Service Oriented Architecture.
Computer Games, with emphasis on their tools for creating simulations.
Web 2.0 because they are all about collaboration, networking, and authoring unique information.

When I look at what these communities are doing I see so many great ideas that can be used directly in our community. The struggle is always in bringing new ideas from the neighbors next door and convincing my own family that they are valuable. Imagine how the two Marines who created Marine Doom felt back in the 1990's when they introduced their ideas. Back then it was, "that's nice how made a toy look more real". Today the toys are overturning big parts of the industry. All of the industries listed above offer similarly powerful tools.

Get out of your hole and go visit the neighbors.

CPU vs. GPU

2007-12-06T05:52:00.000-08:00

What is the primary and overridding difference between the CPU and the GPU is a nice consumer computer? It is NOT the speeds at which vectors can be processed, it is NOT the ability or lack of ability to processes double precision numbers.

The most important factor is who makes the most money from that PC you bought. Under the current configuration a nice graphics card can account for 50% of the cost of a computer and the GPU often costs more than the CPU.

This situation does not set well with Intel and AMD. The latter has made a move to change this by purchasing ATI and working on a new computer design that combines the capabilities of the CPU and the GPU and brings more computer revenues to the compined company (AMD+ATI).

Intel, on the other hand, is changing the paradigm from inside the company and inside the CPU. Their Larrabee project is looking to perovide a multi-core chip that includes cores that can handle the graphics that have traditionally been owned by the GPU.

So what is Nvidia doing to defend their very profitable turf? It appears that they are pursuing high-applications with their Tesla product that uses multiple GPUs to handle high-compute problems. Given that the consumer desktop is where all of the money is, you would expect them to be doing their own innovation in the consumer space. That may include multi-core GPU, multi-chip cards, combined CPU/GPU architectures ... Or something entirely different.

THe situation where the GPU pulls in a significant share or the PC price is equivalent to a serious threat to Microsoft's ownership of the O/S and Office productivity tools. The power of Intel HAS to rise up to reclaim these revenues. There will be a new architecture for consumer grade computers in CPU/GPU specifically because of the current revenue share ... Intel will make it happen. The real question is why has it taken so long?