Category: Networking

Anti-Gresham’s Law: Good information drives out bad

Posted on by Ray in Decision making, Information economy, Internet of Things, Market dynamics, Networking
(Good information is in blue, bad information is in Red)

Read an article the other day in ScienceDaily (Faster way to replace bad info in networks) which discusses research published in a recent IEEE/ACM Transactions on Network journal (behind paywall). Luckily there was a pre-print available (Modeling and analysis of conflicting information propagation in a finite time horizon).

The article discusses information epidemics using the analogy of a virus and its antidote. This is where bad information (the virus) and good information (the antidote) circulate within a network of individuals (systems, friend networks, IOT networks, etc). Such bad information could be malware and its good information counterpart could be a system patch to fix the vulnerability. Another example would be an outright lie about some event and it’s counterpart could be the truth about the event.

The analysis in the paper makes some simplifying assumptions. That in a any single individual (network node), both the virus and the antidote cannot co-exist. That is either an individual (node) is infected by the virus or is cured by the antidote or is yet to be infected or cured.

The network is fully connected and complex. That is once an individual in a network is infected, unless an antidote is developed the infection proceeds to infect all individuals in the network. And once an antidote is created it will cure all individuals in a network over time. Some individuals in the network have more connections to other nodes in the network while different individuals have less connections to other nodes in the network.

The network functions in a bi-directional manner. That is any node, lets say RAY, can infect/cure any node it is connected to and conversely any node it is connected to can infect/cure the RAY node.

Gresham’s law, (see Wikipedia article) is a monetary principle which states bad money in circulation drives out good. Where bad money is money that is worth less than the commodity it is backed with and good money is money that’s worth more than the commodity it is backed with. In essence, good money is hoarded and people will preferentially use bad money.

My anti-Gresham’s law is that good information drives out bad. Where good information is the truth about an event, security patches, antidotes to infections, etc. and bad infrormation is falsehoods, malware, biological viruses., etc

The Susceptible Infected-Cured (SIC) model

The paper describes a SIC model that simulates the (virus and antidote) epidemic propagation process or the process whereby virus and its antidote propagates throughout a network. This assumes that once a network node is infected (at time0), during the next interval (time0+1) it infects it’s nearest neighbors (nodes that are directly connected to it) and they in turn infect their nearest neighbors during the following interval (time0+2), etc, until all nodes are infected. Similarly, once a network node is cured it will cure all it’s neighbor nodes during the next interval and these nodes will cure all of their neighbor nodes during the following interval, etc, until all nodes are cured.

What can the SIC model tell us

The model provides calculations to generate a number of statistics, such as half-life time of bad information and extinction time of bad-information. The paper discusses the SIC model across complex (irregular) network topologies as well as completely connected and star topologies and derives formulas for each type of network

In the discussion portion of the paper, the authors indicate that if you are interested in curing a population with bad information it’s best to map out the networks’ topology and focus your curation efforts on those node(s) that lie along the (most) shortest path(s) within a network.

I wrongly thought that the best way to cure a population of nodes would be to cure the nodes with the highest connectivity. While this may work and such nodes, are no doubt along at least one if not all, shortest paths, it may not be the optimum solution to reduce extinction time, especially If there are other nodes on more shortest paths in a network, target these nodes with a cure.

Applying the SIC model to COVID-19

It seems to me that if we were to model the physical social connectivity of individuals in a population (city, town, state, etc.). And we wanted to infect the highest portion of people in the shortest time we would target shortest path individuals to be infected first.

Conversely, if we wanted to slow down the infection rate of COVID-19, it would be extremely important to reduce the physical connectivity of indivduals on the shortest path in a population. Which is why social distancing, at least when broadly applied, works. It’s also why, when infected, self quarantining is the best policy. But if you wished to not apply social distancing in a broad way, perhaps targeting those individuals on the shortest path to practice social distancing could suffice.

However, there are at least two other approaches to using the SIC model to eradicate (extinguish the disease) the fastest:

  1. Now if we were able to produce an antidote, say a vaccine but one which had the property of being infectious (say a less potent strain of the COVID-19 virus). Then targeting this vaccine to those people on the shortest paths in a network would extinguish the pandemic in the shortest time. Please note, that to my knowledge, any vaccine (course), if successful, will eliminate a disease and provide antibodies for any future infections of that disease. So the time when a person is infected with a vaccine strain, is limited and would likely be much shorter than the time soemone is infected with the original disease. And most vaccines are likely to be a weakened version of an original disease may not be as infectious. So in the wild the vaccine and the original disease would compete to infect people.
  2. Another approach to using the SIC model and is to produce a normal (non-transmissible) vaccine and target vaccination to individuals on the shortest paths in a population network. As once vaccinated, these people would no longer be able to infect others and would block any infections to other individuals down network from them. One problem with this approach is if everyone is already infected. Vaccinating anyone will not slow down future infection rates.

There may be other approaches to using SIC to combat COVID-19 than the above but these seem most reasonable to me.

So, health organizations of the world, figure out your populations physical-social connectivity network (perhaps using mobile phone GPS information) and target any cure/vaccination to those individuals on the highest number of shortest paths through your network.

Comments?

Photo Credit(s):

  1. Figure 2 from the Modeling and analysis of conflicting information propagation in a finite time horizon article pre-print
  2. Figure 3 from the Modeling and analysis of conflicting information propagation in a finite time horizon article pre-print
  3. COVID-19 virus micrograph, from USA CDC.

Using jell-o (hydrogel) for new form of photonics computing

Posted on by Ray in Optical networking, Photonic computing, Strategic Inflection Points

Read an article the other day which blew me away, Researchers Create ” Intelligent interaction between light and meterial – New form of computing, which discussed the use of a hydrogel (like raspberry jell-o) that could be used both as a photonics switch for optical communications and as modifiable material to create photonics circuits. The research paper on the topic is also available on PNAS, Opto-chemical-mechanical transduction in photeresponsive gel elicits switchable self trapped beams with remote interactions.

Apparently researchers have created this gel (see B in the graphic above)which when exposed to laser light interacts to a) trap the beam within a narrow cylinder and or b) when exposed to parallel beams interact such that it boosts the intensity of one of the beams. They still have some work to show more interactions on laser beam(s) but the trapping of the laser beams is well documented in the PNAS paper.

Jell-o optical fibres

Most laser beams broaden as they travel through space, but when a laser beam ise sent through the new gel it becomes trapped in a narrow volume almost as if sent through a pipe.

The beam trading experiment using a hydrogel cube of ~4mm per side. They sent a focused laser beam with a ~20um diameter through an 4mm empty volume and measured the beam’s disbursement to be ~130um diameter. Then the did the same experiment only this time shining the laser beam through the hydrogel cube and over time (>50 seconds) the beam diameter narrows to becomes ~22um. In effect, the gel over time constructs (drills) a self-made optical fibre or cylindrical microscopic waveguide for the laser beam.

A similar process works with multiple laser beam going through the gel. More below on what happens with 2 parallel laser beams.

The PNAS article has a couple of movies showing the effect from the side of the hydrogel. with a single and multiple laser beams.

Apparently as the beam propagates through the hydrogel, it alters the optical-mechanical properties of the material such that the refractive index within the beam diameter is better than outside the beam diameter. Over time, as this material change takes place, the beam diameter narrows back down to almost the size of the incoming beam. They call any material like this that changes its refractive index as chromophores.

It appears that the self-trapping effectiveness is a function of the beam intensity. That is higher intensity incoming laser beams (6.0W in C above) cause the exit beam to narrow while lower (0.37W) intensity incoming laser beams don’t narrow as much.

This self-created optical wave-guide (fibre) through the gel can be reset or reversed (> 45 times) by turning off the laser and leaving the gel in darkness for a time (200 seconds or so). This allows the material to be re-used multiple times to create other optical channels or to create the same one over and over again.

Jell-o optical circuits

It turns out that by illuminating two laser beams in parallel their distances apart can change their interaction even though they don’t cross.

When the two beams are around 200um apart, the two beams self channel to about the size of ~40um (incoming beams at ~20um). But the intensity of the two beams are not the same at the exit as they were at the entrance to the gel. One beam intensity is boosted by a factor of 12 or so and the other is boosted by a factor of 9 providing an asymmetric intensity boost. Unclear how the higher intensity beam is selected but if I read the charts right the more intensely boosted beam is turned on after the the less intensely boosted beam (so 2nd one in gets the higher boost.

When one of the beams is disabled (turned off/blocked), the intensity of the remaining beam is boosted on the order of 20X. This boosting effect can be reversed by illuminating (turning back on/unblocking) the blocked laser. But, oddly the asymmetric boosting, is no longer present after this point. The process seemingly can revert back to the 20X intensity boost, just by disabling the other laser beam again. .

When the two beam are within 25 um of each other, the two beams emerge with the same (or close to similar) intensity (symmetric boosting), and as you block one beam the other increases in intensity but not as much as the farther apart beams (only 9X).

How to use this effect to create an optical circuit is beyond me but they haven’t documented any experiments where the beams collide or are close together but at 90-180 degrees from one another. And what happens when a 3rd beam is introduced? So there’s much room for more discovery.

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Just in case you want to try this at home. Here is the description of how to make the gel from the PNAS article: “The polymerizable hydrogel matrix was prepared by dissolving acrylamide:acrylic acid or acrylamide:2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate (HEMA) in a mixture of dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO):deionized water before addition of the cross-linker. Acrylated SP (for tethered samples) or hydroxyl-substituted SP was then added to the unpolymerized hydrogel matrix followed by an addition of a catalyst. Hydrogel samples were cured in a circular plastic mold (d = 10 mm, h = 4 mm thick).“

How long it will take to get the gel from the lab to your computer is anyones guess. It seems to me they have quite a ways to go to be able to simulate “nor” or “nand” universal logic gates widely used in to create electronic circuits today.

On the other hand, using the gel in optical communications may come earlier. Having a self trapping optical channel seems useful for a number of applications. And the intensity boosting effect would seem to provide an all optical amplifier.

I see two problems:

  1. The time it takes to get to a self trapping channel, 50sec is long and it will probably take longer as you increase the size of the material.
  2. The size of the material seems large for optical (or electronic) circuitry. 4mm may not be much but it’s astronomical compared to the nm used in electronic circuitry

The size may not be a real concern as the movies don’t seem to show that the beam once trapped changes across the material, so maybe it could be a 1mm, or 1um cube of material that’s used instead. The time is a more significant problem. But then again there may be another gel recipe that acts quicker. But from 50sec down to something like 50nsec is nine orders of magnitude. So there’s a lot of work here.

Comments?

Photo Credit(s): all charts are from the PNAS article, Opto-chemo-mechanical transduction in photo responsive gel…

Earth globe within a locked cage

Breaking IoT security

Posted on by Ray in Data security, Distributed computing, Internet of Things, System effectiveness, System quality

Read an article the other day (Researchers exploit low entropy of IoT devices to break RSA certificates) about researchers cracking IoT device security and breaking their public key encryption keys. The report focused on PKI and RSA certificates and IoT devices. The article mentioned the research paper describing the attack in more detail.

safe 'n green by Robert S. Donovan (cc) (from flickr)
safe ‘n green by Robert S. Donovan (cc) (from flickr)

RSA certificates publish a public key and the digital signature of the certificate and identify the device that owns the certificate.

What the researchers were able to show was that ~250K keys in IoT device RSA certificates were insecure. They were able to compromise the 250K RSA certificates using a single Microsoft Azure VM and about $3K of computer time.

It turns out that if two RSA certificate public keys share the same factor, it’s much easier to determine the greatest common devisor GCD) of the two public keys than it is to factor any one of them. And once you have the GCD of the two keys, it’s relatively trivial to determine the other factor in a public key. And that’s just what they did.

Public key infrastructure (PKI) encryption depends on asymmetric cryptography using a “public” key to encrypt messages (or to encrypt a one time key to be used in later encryption of messages) and the use of a “private” key to decrypt the message (or keys) and sign digital certificates. There are certificate authorities and a number of other elements used in PKI but the asymmetric cryptography at its heart, rests on the foundation of the difficulty in factoring large numbers but those large numbers need to be random and prime.

True randomness is hard

Just some of the recently donated seeds that are being added to the Reading Food Growing Network seed swap boxes, including some Polish gherkin seeds.

The problem starts with generating truly random numbers in a digital computer. Digital algorithms typically depend on a computer to perform the some set of instructions, in the same way and sequence so as to get the same answer every time we run the algorithm.

But if you want random numbers this predictability of always coming up with the same answer each time results in non-random numbers (or rather random numbers that are the same each time you run the algorithm). So to get around this, most random number generators can make use of a (random) seed which is used as an input to the algorithm to generate random numbers.

However, this seed needs to be a random number. But to create a random number it needs to be generated not with instructions but using something outside the digital computer. One approach noted above is to use a human typing keys to generate a random number to be used as a seed.

The researchers exploited the fact that most IoT devices don’t use a random (enough) seed for their PKI key generation. And they were able to use the GCD trick to figure out the factors to the PKI.

But the lack of true randomness (or entropy) is the real problem. Somehow, these devices need to have a cheap and effective way to generate a random seed. Until this can be found, they will be subject to these sorts of attacks.

… but not impossible to obtain

I remember in times past when tasked to create a public key-private key pair I had to type some random characters. The Public key encryption algorithm used the inter-character time interval of my typing to generate a random seed that was then used to generate the key pair used in the public key. I believe the two keys also need to be prime numbers.

Earth globe within a locked cage

Perhaps a better approach would be to assign them keys from a centralized key distributor. That way the randomness could be controlled by the (key) distributor.

There are other approaches that depend on the sensors available to an IoT device. If the device has a camera or mic, taking raw data from the camera or sound sensor and doing a numerical transform on them may suffice. Strain gauges, liquid levels, temperature, humidity, wind speed, etc. all of these devices have something which senses the world around them and many of these are, at their base, analog sensors. Reading and converting some portion of these analog signals from raw analog to a digital random seed could be very effective way to generate true(r) randomness.

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The paper has much more information about the attack and their results if your interested. They said that ~50% of the compromised devices were from a large network supplier. Such suppliers probably also have a vast majority of devices deployed. Still it’s troubling, nonetheless.

Until changes are made to IoT devices, they will continue to be insecure. Not as much of a problem when they are read only sensors but when the information they sense is used by robots or other automation to make decisions about actions, then having insecure IoT becomes a safety issue.

This is not the first time such an attack was attempted and each time, it’s been very successful. That alone should be cause for alarm. But IoT and similar devices are hard to patch in the field and their continuing insecurity may be more of a result of the difficulty of updating a large install base than anything else.

Photo Credit(s):

Internet of Tires

Posted on by Ray in 5G cellular networks, Cloud services, data services, Executive leadership, Information economy, Market dynamics, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness, System quality, Visionary leadershp

Read an article a couple of weeks back (An internet of tires?… IEEE Spectrum) and can’t seem to get it out of my head. Pirelli, a European tire manufacturer was demonstrating a smart tire or as they call it, their new Cyber Tyre.

The Cyber Tyre includes accelerometer(s) in its rubber, that can be used to sense the pavement/road surface conditions. Cyber Tyre can communicate surface conditions to the car and using the car’s 5G, to other cars (of same make) to tell them of problems with surface adhesion (hydroplaning, ice, other traction issues).

Presumably the accelerometers in the Cyber Tyre measure acceleration changes of individual tires as they rotate. Any rapid acceleration change, could potentially be used to determine whether the car has lost traction due and why.

They tested the new tires out at a (1/3rd mile) test track on top of a Fiat factory, using Audi A8 automobiles and 5G. Unclear why this had to wait for 5G but it’s possible that using 5G, the Cyber Tyre and the car could possibly log and transmit such information back to the manufacturer of the car or tire.

Accelerometers have become dirt cheap over the last decade as smart phones have taken off. So, it was only a matter of time before they found use in new and interesting applications and the Cyber Tyre is just the latest.

Internet of Vehicles

Presumably the car, with Cyber Tyres on it, communicates road hazard information to other cars using 5G and vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication protocols or perhaps to municipal or state authorities. This way highway signage could display hazardous conditions ahead.

Audi has a website devoted to Car to X communications which has embedded certain Audi vehicles (A4, A5 & Q7), with cellular communications, cameras and other sensors used to identify (recognize) signage, hazards, and other information and communicate this data to other Audi vehicles. This way owning an Audi, would plug you into this information flow.

Pirelli’s Cyber Car Concept

Prior to the Cyber Tyre, Pirelli introduced a Cyber Car concept that is supposedly rolling out this year. This version has tyres with real time pressure, temperature, (static) vertical load and a Tyre ID. Pirelli has been working with car manufacturers to roll out Cyber Car functionality.

The Tyre ID seems to be a file that can include anything that the tyre or automobile manufacturer wants. It sort of reminds me of a blockchain data blocks that could be used to validate tyre manufacturing provenance.

The vertical load sensor seems more important to car and tire manufacturers than consumers. But for electrical car owners, knowing car weight could help determine current battery load and thereby more precisely know how much charge is left in a battery.

Pirelli uses a proprietary algorithm to determine tread wear. This makes use of the other tyre sensors to predict wear and perhaps uses an AI DL algorithm to do this.

~~~

ABS has been around for decades now and tire pressure sensors for over 10 years or so. My latest car has enough sensors to pretty much drive itself on the highway but not quite park itself as of yet. So it was only a matter of time before something like smart tires would show up.

But given their integration with car electronics systems, it would seem that this would only make sense for new cars that included a full set of Cyber Tyres. That is until all tire AND car manufacturers agreed to come up with a standard protocol to communicate such information. When that happens, consumers could chose any tire manufacturer and obtain have similar if not the same functionality from them.

I suppose someone had to be first to identify just what could be done with the electronics available today. Pirelli just happens to be it for now in the tire industry.

I just don’t want to have to upgrade tires every 24 months. And, if I have to wait a long time for my car to boot up and establish communications with my tires, I may just take a (dumb) bike.

Photo Credit(s):

Made in space

Posted on by Ray in Optical networking, System effectiveness, Visionary leadershp

Read an article in IEEE Spectrum recently titled, 4 Products it makes sense to manufacture in space. The 4 products identified in the article include:

1) Metal alloys – because of micro-gravity, the mixture of metals that go into metal alloys should be much more even and as a result, should create a purer mixture of the metal alloy at the end of the process.

2) Fibre optical cables – the article says, ZBLAN, which is a heavy-metal fluoride glass fibre could have 1/10th the signal loss of current cable but is hard to manufacture on earth due to micro-crystal formation. Apparently, when manufactured (mixed-drawn) in micro-gravity, there’s less of this defect in the glass.

3) Printed human organs – the problem with printing biological organs, hearts, lungs, livers, etc. is they require scaffolding for the cells to adhere to that needs to be bio-degradeable and in the form of whatever organ is needed. However, in micro-gravity there should be less of a need for any scaffolding.

4) Artificial meat – similar to human organs above, by being able to build (3D print) biological products, one could create a steak or other cuts of meat that biological #D printing.

Problems with space manufacture

One problem with manufacturing metal alloys and fibre optic cable in space, is the immense heat required. Glass melts at 1400C, metals anywhere from 650C to 3400C. Getting rid of all that heat in space could present a significant problem. Not to mention the vessels required to hold molten materials weigh a lot.

And metal and glass manufacturing processes can also create waste, such as hot metal/glass particulates that settle on the floor on earth, but who knows where in space. To manufacture metal or glass on ISS would require a very heat tolerant, protected environment or capsule, lots of power to provide heat and radiator surfaces to release said heat.

And of course, delivering raw materials for metals and glass to space (LEO) would cost a lot (SpaceX $2.7K/kg , Atlas V $13.2K/kg). As such, the business case for metal alloy manufacturing in space doesn’t appear positive.

But given the reduced product weight and potentially higher prices one can charge for the product, fibre pptical glass may make business sense. Especially, if you could get by with 1/10th the glass because it has 1/10th the signal loss.

And if you don’t have to ship raw materials from earth (using the moon or asteroids instead), it would improvesboth business cases. That is, assuming raw material discovery and shipping costs are 1/6th or less as much as shipping from earth.

As for organs, as they can’t be manufactured on earth (yet), it could be the “killer app’ for made in space. But it’s sort of a race against time. Doing this in space may be a lot easier today but more research is going on to create organs on earth than in space. But eventually, manufacturing these on earth could be a lot cheaper and just as effective.

But I don’t see a business case for meat in space unless it’s to support making food for astronauts on ISS. Even then, it might be cheaper to just ship them some steak.

Products hard to make in space

I would think anything that doesn’t require gravity to work, should be easier to produce in space.

But that eliminates distillation, e.g., fossil fuel refining, fermentation, and many other chemical distillation processes (see Wikipedia article on Distillation).

But gravity is also used in depositing and holding multiple layers onto one another. So manufacturing paper, magnetic/optical disk platters, magnetic tapes, or any other product built up layer by layer, may not be suitable for space manufacture.

Not sure about semiconductors, as deposition steps can make use of chemical vapors. And that seems to require gravity. But it’s conceivable that in the absence of gravity, chemicals may still adhere to the wafer surface, as it’s an easier location to combine with than other surfaces in the chamber. On the other hand, they may just as likely retain their mixture in the vapor.

Growing extremely pure silicon ingots may be something better done in space. However, it may suffer from the same problems as metal alloy manufacturing. Given the need for extreme purity and the price paid for pure silicon, I would think this would be something to research ahead of metal alloys.

For further research

But in the end, if and when we become a space fairing people, we will need to manufacture everything in space. As well as grow or find raw materials easier than shipping them from the earth.

So, some research ought to be directed on how to perform distillation and multi-layer product manufacturing in space/micro-gravity. Such processes could potentially be done in a centrifuge, if they truly can’t be gone without gravity.

It’s also unclear how to boil any liquid in 0g or micro-g without convection (see Bizarre Boiling NASA Science article). According to the article, it creates one big bubble that stays where it is formed. Providing some way to extract this bubble in place would seem difficult. Boiling liquids in a centrifuge may work.

In any case, I’m sure the ISS crew would be more than happy to do any research necessary to figure out how to brew beer, let alone, distill vodka in space.

Picture Credit(s):

Where should IoT data be processed – part 1

Posted on by Ray in Data analytics, Data compression, Data efficiency, Data growth, Data transmission, Decision making, Deep Learning, Distributed computing, Internet of Things, Mobile computing, Networking, Neural network, Robots, Storage, System effectiveness

I was at FlashMemorySummit 2019 (FMS2019) this week and there was a lot of talk about computational storage (see our GBoS podcast with Scott Shadley, NGD Systems). There was also a lot of discussion about IoT and the need for data processing done at the edge (or in near-edge computing centers/edge clouds).

At the show, I was talking with Tom Leyden of Excelero and he mentioned there was a real need for some insight on how to determine where IoT data should be processed.

For our discussion let’s assume a multi-layered IoT architecture, with 1000s of sensors at the edge, 100s of near-edge processing/multiplexing stations, and 1 to 3 core data center or cloud regions. Data comes in from the sensors, is sent to near-edge processing/multiplexing and then to the core data center/cloud.

Data size

Dans la nuit des images (Grand Palais) by dalbera (cc) (from flickr)
Dans la nuit des images (Grand Palais) by dalbera (cc) (from flickr)

When deciding where to process data one key aspect is the size of the data. Tin GB or TB but given today’s world, can be PB as well. This lone parameter has multiple impacts and can affect many other considerations, such as the cost and time to transfer the data, cost of data storage, amount of time to process the data, etc. All of these sub-factors include the size of the data to be processed.

Data size can be the largest single determinant of where to process the data. If we are talking about GB of data, it could probably be processed anywhere from the sensor edge, to near-edge station, to core. But if we are talking about TB the processing requirements and time go up substantially and are unlikely to be available at the sensor edge, and may not be available at the near-edge station. And PB take this up to a whole other level and may require processing only at the core due to the infrastructure requirements.

Processing criticality

Human or machine safety may depend on quick processing of sensor data, e. g. in a self-driving car or a factory floor, flood guages, etc.. In these cases, some amount of data (sufficient to insure human/machinge safety) needs to be done at the lowest point in the hierarchy, with the processing power to perform this activity.

This could be in the self-driving car or factory automation that controls a mechanism. Similar situations would probably apply for any robots and auto pilots. Anywhere some IoT sensor array was used to control an entity, that could jeopardize the life of human(s) or the safety of machines would need to do safety level processing at the lowest level in the hierarchy.

If processing doesn’t involve safety, then it could potentially be done at the near-edge stations or at the core. .

Processing time and infrastructure requirements

Although we talked about this in data size above, infrastructure requirements must also play a part in where data is processed. Yes sensors are getting more intelligent and the same goes for near-edge stations. But if you’re processing the data multiple times, say for deep learning, it’s probably better to do this where there’s a bunch of GPUs and some way of keeping the data pipeline running efficiently. The same applies to any data analytics that distributes workloads and data across a gaggle of CPU cores, storage devices, network nodes, etc.

There’s also an efficiency component to this. Computational storage is all about how some workloads can better be accomplished at the storage layer. But the concept applies throughout the hierarchy. Given the infrastructure requirements to process the data, there’s probably one place where it makes the most sense to do this. If it takes a 100 CPU cores to process the data in a timely fashion, it’s probably not going to be done at the sensor level.

Data information funnel

We make the assumption that raw data comes in through sensors, and more processed data is sent to higher layers. This would mean at a minimum, some sort of data compression/compaction would need to be done at each layer below the core.

We were at a conference a while back where they talked about updating deep learning neural networks. It’s possible that each near-edge station could perform a mini-deep learning training cycle and share their learning with the core periodicals, which could then send this information back down to the lowest level to be used, (see our Swarm Intelligence @ #HPEDiscover post).

All this means that there’s a minimal level of processing of the data that needs to go on throughout the hierarchy between access point connections.

Pipe availability

binary data flow

The availability of a networking access point may also have some bearing on where data is processed. For example, a self driving car could generate TB of data a day, but access to a high speed, inexpensive data pipe to send that data may be limited to a service bay and/or a garage connection.

So some processing may need to be done between access point connections. This will need to take place at lower levels. That way, there would be no need to send the data while the car is out on the road but rather it could be sent whenever it’s attached to an access point.

Compliance/archive requirements

Any sensor data probably needs to be stored for a long time and as such will need access to a long term archive. Depending on the extent of this data, it may help dictate where processing is done. That is, if all the raw data needs to be held, then maybe the processing of that data can be deferred until it’s already at the core and on it’s way to archive.

However, any safety oriented data processing needs to be done at the lowest level and may need to be reprocessed higher up in the hierachy. This would be done to insure proper safety decisions were made. And needless the say all this data would need to be held.

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I started this post with 40 or more factors but that was overkill. In the above, I tried to summarize the 6 critical factors which I would use to determine where IoT data should be processed.

My intent is in a part 2 to this post to work through some examples. If there’s anyone example that you feel may be instructive, please let me know.

Also, if there’s other factors that you would use to determine where to process IoT data let me know.

Polarized laser light speeds up data center networks

Posted on by Ray in Energy efficiency, LAN, Networking, Optical networking, Strategic Inflection Points
binary data flow

Read an article the other day, Polarizing the data center from IEEE Spectrum, on new optical technology that has the potential to boost data center networking speeds by ~7x beyond what it is today. The research was released in a Nature article, Ultrafast spin lasers (paywall) but a previous version of the paper was released on PLOS (Ultrafast spin lasers) was freely available

It’s still in lab demonstration at this point, but if it does make into the data center, it has the potential to remove local networking as a bottleneck for application workloads, at least for the foreseeable future.

The new technology is based on polarizing (right or left circular) laser light and using plolarization to encode ones and zeros. Today’s optical transceivers seem to use on-off or brightness level to encode data signals, which requires a lot of power (and by definition cooling) to work. On the other hand, polarizing laser light takes ~7% of the power (and cooling), then the old style of on and off laser light. 

How it works

Not sure I understand all the physics but it appears that if you are able to control the carrier spin within a semiconductor, Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser (VCSEL), it transmutes carrier spin into photon polarization, and by doing so, emits polarized laser light. And with appropriate sensors, this laser light polarization can be detected and decoded. 

In addition, due to some physical constraints, modulating (encoding) laser intensity will never be faster than modulating (encoding) carrier spin. This has something to do with cycling the laser on and off vs, the polarization process. As such, one should be able to can transmit more information by polarized laser light than by intensified laser light.

Moreover, polarization can be done at room temperature. Apparently, VCSELs operating today typically hit 70C in normal high speed operations, vs. ~21C for VCSELs using polarization.

Lab results

In the lab they are using (I believe) mechanical bending in combination with a pulsed laser to create the spin carriers in the VCSEL’s that polarize the laser light. This is just used for demonstrating purposes. Unclear whether this approach will be useable in a data center application of the technology.

In their lab experiments they were able to demonstrate VCSEL polarization cycles (how quickly they could change polarization) in the 5 ps (pico-second, trillionths of a second) range. This resulted in transmitting something on the order of 214Ghz of polarized light cycles. Somewhere in the PLoS article they mentioned transmitting a random bit string using the technology and not just cycling through 1s and 0s over and over again.

The researchers believe that by moving from mechanical bending, to the use of a photonic crystal or strained quantum well-based VCSELs will allow them to move from signaling at 214Ghz to 1Thz, or ~28X what can be done with laser intensity signaling today. 

I don’t know whether the technology will get out of the lab anytime soon but 1Thz  (~1Tbps) seems something most IT organizations would want, especially if the price is right is similar to today’s technology.

The research mentioned this would be more suitable for data center networking rather than long range data transfers. Not sure why but it could be because 1) it’s still relatively experimental and 2) they have yet to determine distance degradation parameters.

Of course normal (on-off) signaling technology using VCSELs is not standing still. There’s always a potential for moving beyond any current physical constraints to boost some technologies capabilities. Just witness the superparamagnetic barrier in magnetic disk over the years. That physical barrier has moved multiple times during my career.

However, a nearly order of magnitude of speed and more than an order of magnitude of power/cooling improvements are hard to come by with mature technology. I see a polarized optical fiber networking in data centers of the future.

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Comments?

Photo Credit(s):

IT in space

Posted on by Ray in Cloud storage, Data availability, Data security, Disaster Recovery, Information economy, Optical networking, Scenario planning, Storage, Storage availability, Storage resiliency, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness, Visionary organizations

Read an article last week about all the startup activity that’s taking place in space systems and infrastructure (see: As rocket companies proliferate … new tech emerges leading to a new space race). This is a consequence of cheap(er) launch systems from SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab and others.

SpaceBelt, storage in space

One startup that caught my eye was SpaceBelt from Cloud Constellation Corporation, that’s planning to put PB (4X library of congress) of data storage in a constellation of LEO satellites.

The LEO storage pool will be populated by multiple nodes (satellites) with a set of geo-synchronous access points to the LEO storage pool. Customers use ground based secure terminals to talk with geosynchronous access satellites which communicate to the LEO storage nodes to access data.

Their main selling points appear to be data security and availability. The only way to access the data is through secured satellite downlinks/uplinks and then you only get to the geo-synchronous satellites. From there, those satellites access the LEO storage cloud directly. Customers can’t access the storage cloud without going through the geo-synchronous layer first and the secured terminals.

The problem with terrestrial data is that it is prone to security threats as well as natural disasters which take out a data center or a region. But with all your data residing in a space cloud, such concerns shouldn’t be a problem. (However, gaining access to your ground stations is a whole different story.

AWS and Lockheed-Martin supply new ground station service

The other company of interest is not a startup but a link up between Amazon and Lockheed Martin (see: Amazon-Lockheed Martin …) that supplies a new cloud based, satellite ground station as a service offering. The new service will use Lockheed Martin ground stations.

Currently, the service is limited to S-Band and attennas located in Denver, but plans are to expand to X-Band and locations throughout the world. The plan is to have ground stations located close to AWS data centers, so data center customers can have high speed, access to satellite data.

There are other startups in the ground station as a service space, but none with the resources of Amazon-Lockheed. All of this competition is just getting off the ground, but a few have been leasing idle ground station resources to customers. The AWS service already has a few big customers, like DigitalGlobe.

One thing we have learned, is that the appeal of cloud services is as much about the ecosystem that surrounds it, as the service offering itself. So having satellite ground stations as a service is good, but having these services, tied directly into other public cloud computing infrastructure, is much much better. Google, Microsoft, IBM are you listening?

Data centers in space

Why stop at storage? Wouldn’t it be better to support both storage and computation in space. That way access latencies wouldn’t be a concern. When terrestrial disasters occur, it’s not just data at risk. Ditto, for security threats.

Having whole data centers, would represent a whole new stratum of cloud computing. Also, now IT could implement space native applications.

If Microsoft can run a data center under the oceans, I see no reason they couldn’t do so in orbit. Especially when human flight returns to NASA/SpaceX. Just imagine admins and service techs as astronauts.

And yet, security and availability aren’t the only threats one has to deal with. What happens to the space cloud when war breaks out and satellite killers are set loose.

Yes, space infrastructure is not subject to terrestrial disasters or internet based security risks, but there are other problems besides those and war that exist such as solar storms and space debris clouds. .

In the end, it’s important to have multiple, non-overlapping risk profiles for your IT infrastructure. That is each IT deployment, may be subject to one set of risks but those sets are disjoint with another IT deployment option. IT in space, that is subject to solar storms, space debris, and satellite killers is a nice complement to terrestrial cloud data centers, subject to natural disasters, internet security risks, and other earth-based, man made disasters.

On the other hand, a large, solar storm like the 1859 one, could knock every data system on the world or in orbit, out. As for under the sea, it probably depends on how deep it was submerged!!

Photo Credit(s): Screen shots from SpaceBelt youtube video (c) SpaceBelt

Screens shot from AWS Ground Station as a Service sign up page (c) Amazon-Lockheed

Screen shots from Microsoft’s Under the sea news feature (c) Microsoft