Category: Market dynamics

Gaming is driving storage innovation at WDC

Posted on by Ray in Market dynamics, Processing performance, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points

I was at SFD19 a couple of weeks ago and Western Digital supplied the afternoon sessions on their technology (see videos here). Phil Bullinger gave a great session on HDDs and the data center market. Carl Che did a session on HDD technology and discussed on how 5G was going to ramp up demand for video streaming and IoT data requirements. Of course one of the sessions was on their SSD and NAND technologies.

But the one session that was pretty new and interesting to me was their discussion on how Gaming and how it’s driving system innovation. Eric Spaneut, VP of Client Computing was the main speaker for the session but they also had Leah Schoeb, Sr. Developer Manager at AMD, to discuss the gaming market and its impact on systems technology.

There were over 100M viewers of the League of Legends World Championships, with a peak viewership of 44M viewers. To put that in perspective the 2020 Super Bowl had 102M viewers. So gaming championships today are almost as big as the Super Bowl in viewership.

Gaming demands higher performing systems

Gaming users are driving higher compute processors/core counts, better graphics cards, faster networking and better storage. Gamers are building/buying high end desktop systems that cost $30K or more, dwarfing the cost of most data center server hardware.

Their gaming rigs are typically liquid cooled, have LEDs all over and are encased in glass. I could never understand why my crypto mine graphics cards had LEDs all over them. The reason was they were intended for gaming systems not crypto mines.

Besides all the other components in these rigs, they are also buying special purpose storage. Yes storage capacity requirements are growing for games but performance and thermal/cooling have also become major considerations.

Western Digital has dedicated a storage line to gaming called WD Black. It includes both HDDs and SSDs (internal NVMe and external USB/SATA attached) at the moment. But Leah mentioned that gaming systems are quickly moving away from HDDs onto SSDs.

Thermal characteristics matter

Of the WDC’s internal NVMe SSDs (WD Black SN750s), one comes with a heat sink attached. It turns out SSD IO performance can be throttled back due to heat. The heatsink allows the SSD to operate at higher temperatures and offer more bandwidth than the one without. Presumably, it allows the electronics to stay cooler and thus stay running at peak performance.

I believe their WD Black HDDs have internal fans in them to keep them cool. And of course they all come in black with LEDs surrounding them.

Storage can play an important part in the “gaming experience” for users once you get beyond network bottlenecks for downloading. For downloading and storage perform well . however for game loading and playing/editing videos/other gaming tasks, NVMe SSDs offer a significant performance boost over SATA SDDs and HDDs.

But not all gaming is done on high-end gaming desktop systems. Today a lot of gaming is done on dedicated consoles or in the cloud. Cloud based gaming is mostly just live streaming of video to a client device, whether it be a phone, tablet, console, etc. Live game streaming is almost exactly like video on demand but with more realtime input/output and more compute cores/graphic engines to perform the gaming activity and to generate the screens in “real” time. So having capacity and performance to support multiple streams AND the performance needed to create the live, real time experience takes a lot of server compute & graphics hardware, networking AND storage.

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So wherever gamers go, storage is becoming more critical in their environment. Both WDC and AMD see this market as strategic and growing, whose requirements are unique enough to demand special purpose products. They bothy are responding with dedicated hardware and product lines tailored to gaming needs.

Photo credit(s): All graphics in this post are from WDC’s gaming session video stream

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.

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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):

Clouds an existential threat – part 2

Posted on by Ray in Cloud services, Decision making, Distributed computing, Executive leadership, Information economy, Market dynamics, Scenario planning, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategic planning, Visionary organizations

Recall that in part 1, we discussed most of the threats posed by clouds to both hardware and software IT vendors. In that post we talked about some of the more common ways that vendors are trying to head off this threat (for now).

In this post we want to talk about some uncommon ways to deal with the coming cloud apocalypse.

But first just to put the cloud threat in perspective, the IT TAM is estimated, by one major consulting firm, to be a ~$3.8T in 2019 with a growth rate of 3.7% Y/Y. The same number for public cloud spending, is ~$214B in 2019, growing by 17.5% Y/Y. If both growth rates continue (a BIG if), public cloud services spend will constitute all (~98.7%) of IT TAM in ~24 years from now. No nobody would predict those growth rates will continue but it’s pretty evident the growth trends are going the wrong way for (non-public cloud) IT vendors.

There are probably an infinite number of ways to deal with the cloud. But outside of the common ones we discussed in part 1, only a dozen or so seem feasible to me and even less are fairly viable for present IT vendors.

  • Move to the edge and IoT.
  • Make data center as easy and cheap to use as the cloud
  • Focus on low-latency, high data throughput, and high performing work and applications
  • Move 100% into services
  • Move into robotics

The edge has legs

Probably the first one we should point out would be to start selling hardware and software to support the edge. Speaking in financial terms, the IoT/Edge market is estimated to be $754B in 2019, and growing by over a 15.4% CAGR ).

So we are talking about serious money. At the moment the edge is a very diverse environment from cameras, sensors and moveable devices. And everybody seems to be in the act, big industrial firms, small startups and everyone in between. Given this diversity it’s hard to see that IT vendors could make a decent return here. But given its great diversity, one could say it’s ripe for consolidation.

And the edge could use some reference architectures where there are devices at the extreme edge, concentrators at the edge, more higher concentrators at nodes and more at the core, etc. So there’s a look and feel to it that seems like Ro/Bo – central core hub and spoke architectures, only on steroids with leaf proliferation that can’t be stopped. And all that data coming in has to be classified, acted upon and understood.

There are plenty of other big industrial suppliers in this IoT/edge field but none seem to have the IT end of the market that Hitachi Vantara can claim to. Some sort of combination of a large IT vendor and a large industrial firm could potentially do the same

However, Hitachi Vantara seems to be focusing on the software side of the edge. This may be an artifact of Hitachi family of companies dynamics. But it seems to be leaving some potential sales on the table.

Hitachi Vantara has the advantage of being into industrial technology in a big way so the products they create operate in factories, rail yards, ship yards and other industrial sites around the world already. So, adding IoT and edge capabilities to their portfolio is a natural extension of this expertise.

There are a few vendors going into the Edge/IoT in a small way, but no one vendor personifies this approach more than Hitachi Vantara. The Hitachi family of companies has a long and varied history in OT (operational technology) or industrial technology. And over the last many years, HDS and now Hitachi Vantara, have been pivoting their organization to focus more on IoT and edge solutions and seem to have made IOT, OT and the edge, a central part of their overall strategy.

So there’s plenty of money to be made with IoT/Edge hardware and software, one just has to go after it in a big way and there’s lots of competition. But all the competition seems to be on the same playing field (unlike the public cloud playing field).

Getting to “data center as a cloud”

There are a number of reasons why customers migrate work to the cloud, ease of use, ease of storage, ease of scale, access to myriad applications, access to multi-regional data centers, CAPex financial model, to name just a few.

There’s nothing that says much of this couldn’t be provided at the data center. It’s mostly just a lot of open source software and a lot of common hardware. IT vendors can do this sort of work if they put their vast resources to go after it.

From the pure software side, there are a couple of companies trying to do this namely VMware and Nutanix but (IBM) RedHat, (Dell) Pivotal, HPE Simplivity and others are also going after this approach.

Hardware wise CI and HCI, seem to be rudimentary steps towards common hardware that’s easy to deploy, operate and support. But these baby steps aren’t enough. And delivery to deployment in weeks is never going to get them there. If Amazon can deliver books, mattresses, bicycles, etc in a couple of days. IT vendors should be able to do the same with some select set of common hardware and have it automatically deployable in seconds to minutes once powered on.

And operating these systems has to be drastically simplified. On any public cloud there’s really no tuning required, almost minimal configuration, and then it’s just load your data and go. Yes there’s a market place to select, (virtual) hardware, (virtual) storage hardware, (virtual) networking hardware, (virtual server) O/S and (virtual?) open source applications.

Yes there’s a lots of software behind all that virtualization. And it’s fundamentally different than today’s virtualized systems. It’s made to operate only on commodity hardware and only with open source software.

The CAPex financial model is less of a problem. Today. I find many vendors are offering their hardware (and some software) on a CAPex, pay as you go model. More of this needs to be made available but the IT vendors see this, and are already aggressively moving in this direction.

The clouds are not standing still what with Azure Stack, AWS and GCP all starting to provideversions of their stack on prem in the enterprise. This looks to be a strategic battleground between the clouds and IT vendors.

Making everything IT can do in the cloud available in the data center, with common hardware and software and with the speed and ease of deployment, operations and support (maintenance) should be on every IT vendors to do list.

Unfortunately, this is not going to stop the public cloud completely, but it has the potential to slow the growth rate. But time is short, momentum has moved to the public cloud and I don’t (yet) see the urgency of the IT vendors to make this transition happen today.

Focus on low-latency, high data throughput and high performance work

This is somewhat unfair as all the IT vendors are already involved in these markets in a big way. But, there are some trends here, that indicate this low-latency market will be even more important over time.

For example, more and more of commercial IT is starting to take advantage of big data and AI to profit from all their data. And big science is starting to migrate to IT, where massive data flows and data analysis tools are becoming important to the data center. If anything, the emergence of IoT and the edge will increase data flows that need to be analyzed, understood, and ultimately dealt with.

DNA genomics may be relegated to big pharma/medical but 3D visualization is becoming so mainstream that I can do it on my desktop. These sorts of things were relegated to HPC/big science just a decade or so ago. What tools exist in HPC today that the IT data center of the future will deam a necessary part of their application workload.

Is this a sizable TAM, probably not today. In all honesty it’s buried somewhere in the IT TAM above. But it can be a growing niche, where IT vendors can stake a defensive position and the cloud may have a tough time dislodging.

I say the cloud “may have trouble dislodging” because nothing says that the entire data flow/work flow couldn’t migrate to the cloud, if the responsiveness was available there. But, if anything (guaranteed) responsiveness is one of the few achilles heels of the public cloud. Security may be the other one.

We see IBM, Intel, and a few others taking this space seriously. But all IT vendors need to see where they can do better here.

Focus on services

This not really out-of-box thinking. Some (old) IT vendors have been moving into services for over 50 years now others are just seeing there’s money to be made here. Just about every IT vendor has deployment & support services. most hardware have break-fix services.

But standalone IT services are more specialized and in the coming cloud apocalypse, services will revolve around implementing cloud applications and functionality or migrating work from the cloud or (rarely in the future) back to on prem.

TAM for services is buried in the total IT spend but industry analysts estimate that in 2019 total worldwide TAM for IT services will be about $1.0 in 2019 and growing by 2.6% CAGR.

So services are already a significant portion of IT spend today. And will probably not be impacted by the move to the cloud. I’d say that because implementing applications and services will still exist as long as the cloud exists. Yes it may get simpler (better frameworks, containerization, systemization), but it won’t ever go away completely.

Robots, the endgame

Ok laugh now. I understand this is a big ask to think that Robot spending could supplement and maybe someday surpass IT spending. But we all have to think long term. What is a self driving car but a robotic data center on wheels, generating TB of data every day it’s driven.

Robots over the next century will invade every space, become ever present and ever necessary to modern world functioning . They will have sophisticated onboard computing, motors, servos, sensors and on board and backend processing requirements. The real low-latency workload of the future will be in the (computing) minds of robots.

Even if the data center moves entirely to the cloud, all robotic computation will never reside there because A) it’s too real time and B) it needs to operate well even disconnected from the Internet.

Is all this going to happen in the next 10 or 20 years, maybe not but 30 to 50 years out this world will have a multitude of robots operating within it. .

Who’s going to develop, manufacture, support and sustain these mobile computing data centers on wheels, legs, slithering and flying bodies?

I would say IT vendors of today are uniquely positioned to dominate this market. Here to the industry is very fragmented today. There are a few industrial robotic companies and just about every major auto manufacturer is going after self driving cars. And there are many bit players today. So it’s ripe for disruption and consolidation. .

Yet, none of the major IT vendors seem to be going after this. Ok Amazon (hardware & software) and Microsoft (software) have done work in this arena. If anything this should tell IT vendors that they need to start working here as well.

But alas, none have taken up the mantle. In the mean time robot startups are biting the dust left and right, trying to gain market traction.

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That seems to be about it for the major viable out of the box approaches to the public cloud threat. I have a few other ideas but none seem as useful as the above.

Let me know what you think.

Picture credit(s):

New website monetization approaches

Posted on by Ray in Distributed computing, Information economy, Market dynamics, Mobile computing, Strategic Inflection Points, Uncategorized

Historically, websites have made money by selling wares, services or advertising. In the last two weeks it seems like two new business models are starting to emerge. One more publicly supported and the other less publicly supported.

Europe’s new copyright law

According to an article I read recently (This newly approved European copyright law might break the Internet), Article 11 of Europe’s new Copyright Directive (not quite law yet) will require search engines, news aggregators and other users of Internet content to pay a “link tax” to copyright holders of anything they link to. As a long time blogger, podcaster and content provider, I find this new copyright policy very intriguing.

The article proposes that this will bankrupt small publishers as larger ones will charge less for the traffic. But presently, I get nothing for links to my content. And, I’d be delighted to get any amount – in fact I’d match any large publishers link tax amount that the market demands.

But my main concern is the impact this might have on site traffic. If aggregators pay a link tax, why would they want to use content that charges any tax. Yes at some point aggregators need content. But there are many websites full of content, certainly there would be some willing to forego tax fees for more traffic.

I also happen to be a copyright user. Most of my blog posts are from articles I read on the web. I usually link to an article in the 1st one or two paragraphs (see above and below) of a post and may refer (and link) to more that go deeper into a subject. Will I have to pay a link tax to the content owner?

How much of a link tax is anyone’s guess. I’m not sure it would amount to much. But a link tax, if done judiciously might even raise the quality of the content on the web.

Browser’s of the world, lay down your blockchains

The second article was a recent research paper (Digging into browser based crypto mining). Researchers at RWTH Aachen University had developed a new method to associate mined blocks to mining pools as a way to unearth browser-based mined crypto coins. With this technique they estimated that 1.8% of all Monero coins were mined by CoinHive using participant browsers to mine the coin or ~$250K/month from browser mining.

I see this as steeling compute power. But with that much coin being generated, it might be a reasonable way for an honest website to make some cash from people browsing their web pages. The browsing party would need to be informed of the mining operation in the page’s information, sort of like “we use cookies” today.

Just think, someone creates a WP plugin to do ETH mining and when activated, a WP website pops up a message that says “We mine coins while you browse – OK?”.

In another twist perhaps the websites could share the ETH mined on their browser with the person doing the browsing, similar to airline/hotel travel awards. Today most travel is done on corporate dime, but awards go to the person doing the traveling. Similarly, employees could browse using corporate computers but they would keep a portion of the ETH that’s mined while they browse away… Sounds like a deal.

Other monetization approaches

We’ve tried Google AdSense and other advertising but it only generated pennies a month. So, it wasn’t worth it.

We also sell research and occasionally someone buys some (see SCI Research Shop). And I do sell services but not through my website.

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Not sure a link tax will fly. It would be a race to the bottom and anyone that charged a tax would suffer from less links until they decided to charge a $0 link tax.

Maybe if every link had a tax associated with it, whether the site owner wanted it or not there could be a level playing field. Recording, paying/receiving and accounting for all these link tax micro payments would be another nightmare altogether.

But a WP plugin, that announces and mines crypto coins with a user’s approval and splits the profit with them might work. Corporate wouldn’t like it but employees would just be browsing websites, where’s the harm in that.

Browse a website and share the mined crypto coin with site owner. Sounds fine to me.

Photo Credit(s): Strasburg – European Parliament|Giorgio Barlocco

Crypto News Daily – Telegram cancels ICO…

Photo of Bitcoin, Etherium and Litecoin|QuoteInspector

perspective by anomalous4 (cc) (from Flickr)

Data banks, data deposits & data withdrawals in the data economy – part 1

Posted on by Ray in Artificial Intelligence, Data, Data banks, Data deposits, Data economy, Data ownership, Data withdrawals, Initial Data Offerings (IDOs), Market dynamics, Neural network, Strategic Inflection Points, Visionary leadershp
Big data visualization, Facebook friend connections
Facebook friend carrousel by antjeverena (cc) (from flickr)

Read an interesting article this week in The Atlantic, Why Technology Favors Tyranny by Yuvai Noah Harari, about the inevitable future of technology and how the use of data will drive it.

At the end of the article Harari talks about the need to take back ownership of our data in order to gain some control over the tech giants that currently control our data.

In part 3, Harari discusses the coming AI revolution and the impact on humanity. Yes there will still be jobs, but early on less jobs for unskilled labor and over time less jobs for skilled labor.

Yet, our data continues to be valuable. AI neural net (NN) accuracy increases as a function of the amount of data used to train it. As a result, he who has the most data creates the best AI NN. This means our data has value and can be used over and over again to train other AI NNs. This all sounds like data is just another form of capital, at least for AI NN training.

Safe by cjc4454 (cc) (from flickr)
Safe by cjc4454 (cc) (from flickr)

If only we could own our data, then there would still be value from people’s (digital) exertions (labor), regardless of how much AI has taken over the reigns of production or reduced the need for human work.

What we need is data (savings) banks. These banks would hold people’s data, gathered from social media likes/dislikes,  cell phone metadata, app/web history, search history, credit history, purchase history,  photo/video streams, email streams, lab work, X-rays, wearables info, etc. Probably many more categories need to be identified but ultimately ALL the digital data we generate today would need to be owned by people and deposited in their digital bank accounts.

Data deposits?

Social media companies, telecom, search companies, financial services app companies, internet  providers, etc. anywhere you do business should supply a copy of the digital data they gather for a person back to that persons data bank account.

There are many technical problems to overcome here but it could be as simple as an object storage bucket, assigned to each person that each digital business deposits (XML versions of) our  digital data they create for everyone that uses their service. They would do this as compensation for using our data in their business activities.

How to change data ownership?

Today, we all sign user agreements which essentially gives a company the rights to our data in perpetuity. That needs to change. I see a few ways that this change could come about

  1. Countries could enact laws to insure personal data ownership resides in the person generating it and enforce periodic distribution of this data
  2. Market dynamics could impel data distribution, e.g. if some search firm supplied data to us, we would be more likely to use them.
  3. Societal changes, as AI becomes more important to profit making activities and reduces the need for human work, and as data continues to be an important factor in AI success, data ownership becomes essential to retaining the value of human labor in society.

Probably, all of the above and maybe more would be required to change the ownership structure of data.

How to profit from data?

Technical entities needing data to train AI NNs could solicit data contributions through an Initial Data Offering (IDO). IDO’s would specify types of data required and a proportion of AI NN ownership, they would cede to all  data providers. Data providers would be apportioned ownership based on the % identified and the number of IDO data subscribers.

perspective by anomalous4 (cc) (from Flickr)
perspective by anomalous4 (cc) (from Flickr)

Data banks would extract the data requested by the IDO and supply it to the IDO entity for use. For IDOs, just like ICO’s or IPO’s, some would fail and others would succeed. But the data used in them would represent an ownership share sort of like a  stock (data) certificate in the AI NN.

Data bank responsibilities

Data banks would have various responsibilities and would need to collect fees to perform them. For example, data banks would be responsible for:

  1. Protecting data deposits – to insure data deposits are never lost, are never accessed without permission, are always trackable as to how they are used..
  2. Performing data deposits – to verify that data is deposited from proper digital entities, to validate that data deposits are in a usable form and to properly store the data in a customers object storage bucket.
  3. Performing data withdrawals – upon customer request, to extract all the appropriate data requested by an IDO,  anonymize it, secure it, package it and send it to the IDO originator.
  4. Reconciling data accounts – to track data transactions, data banks would supply a monthly statement that identifies all data deposits and data withdrawals, data revenues and data expenses/fees.
  5. Enforcing data withdrawal types – to enforce data withdrawal types, as data  withdrawals can have many different characteristics, such as exclusivity, expiration, geographic bounds, etc. Data banks would need to enforce withdrawal characteristics, at least to the extent they can
  6. Auditing data transactions – to insure that data is used properly, a consortium of data banks or possibly data accountancies would need to audit AI training data sets to verify that only data that has been properly withdrawn is used in trying the NN. .

AI NN, tools and framework responsibilities

In order for personal data ownership to work well, AI NNs, tools and frameworks used today would need to change to account for data ownership.

  1. Generate, maintain and supply immutable data ownership digests – data ownership digests would be a sort of stock registry for the data used in training the AI NN. They would need to be a part of any AI NN and be viewable by proper data authorities
  2. Track data use – any and all data used in AI NN training should be traceable so that proper data ownership can be guaranteed.
  3. Identify AI NN revenues – NN revenues would need to be isolated, identified and accounted for so that data owners could be rewarded.
  4. Identify AI NN data expenses – NN data costs would need to somehow be isolated, identified and accounted for so that data expenses could be properly deducted from data owner awards. .

At some point there’s a need for almost a data profit and loss statement as well as a data balance sheet for at an AI NN level. The information supplied above should make auditing data ownership, use and rewards much more feasible. But it all starts with identifying data ownership and the data used in training the AI.

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There are a thousand more questions that come to mind. For example

  • Who owns earth sensing satellite, IoT sensors, weather sensors, car sensors etc. data? Everyone in the world (or country) being monitored is laboring to create the environment sensed by these devices. Shouldn’t this sensor data be apportioned to the people of the world or country where these sensors operate.
  • Who pays data bank fees? The generators/extractors of the data could pay in addition to providing data deposits for the privilege to use our data. I could also see the people paying.  Having the company pay would give them an incentive to make the data load be as efficient and complete as possible. Having the people pay would induce them to use their data more productively.
  • What’s a decent data expiration period? Given application time frames these days, 7-15 years would make sense. But what happens to the AI NN when data expires. Some way would need to be created to extract data from a NN, or the AI NN would need to cease being used and a new one would  need to be created with new data.
  • Can data deposits be rented/sold to data aggregators? Sort of like a AI VC partnership only using data deposits rather than money to fund AI startups.
  • What happens to data deposits when a person dies? Can one inherit a data deposits, would a data deposit inheritance be taxable as part of an estate transfer?

In the end, as data is required to train better AI, ownership of our data makes us all be capitalist (datalists) in the creation of new AI NNs and the subsequent advancement of society. And that’s a good thing.

Comments?

Marketing meet Big Data, call records, credit card purchases & demographics

Posted on by Ray in Data analytics, Data annotation, Data discovery, Data science, Market dynamics, Strategic Inflection Points

Read an article in Science Daily (Understanding urban issues through credit cards) that talked about a study published in Nature (Sequences of purchases in credit card data reveals lifestyles of urban populations) that applies big data to B2C marketing.

The researchers examined call data records (CDRs), credit card transactions records (CCRs) and demographic (age, sex, residential zip code, wage level, etc.) data and did a cross table between them to identify sequences of purchases. They then used these sequences to identify different lifestyle groups in the urban area.

Marketing 2.0

The analyzed data from Mexico City, Mexico. The CCR data was collected for 10 weeks across 150K users. The had CDR data for 1/10th of the users for 6 months surrounding the 10 weeks duration. Credit card adoption is still low in Mexico (18%), so the analysis may be biased.  When thy matched CCR expenditures against median wages in a district and they found their participants came from higher wage populations. Their data also spanned all districts within the city.

The analysis identified sequences of purchase categories as well as expenditures.  They characterized purchase sequences as “words”.

 

 

 

Using the word data and further statistical analysis they were able to split the population up into 5 distinct lifestyle groups. 

The loops of icons above represent major purchase categories derived from the CCR data merchant category codes (MCC).  Each of the rings in “a” above show the same 12 major MCC purchase categories. If you look at each ring, one can identify a central or core node that seems to have the most incoming or outgoing arks. These seem to be the central purchases made by that lifestyle group after which they branch out to other purchase categories.

There are five different lifestyle categories (they also show the city average) delineated in the data:

  • Commuter – generally they have to pay tolls, have longer travel between home and work and have a diverse sequence of purchase that occurs after purchases from the toll category.
  • Household – purchases seem to center on grocery stores/supermarkets and then branch off from there.
  • Young – purchases seem to center on the taxicab category and then go to computer-networking, restaurants, grocery stores/supermarkets.
  • Hi-Tech – purchases seem to center on computer-networking,  then go to gas stations, grocery stores/supermarkets, restaurants, and telecomm.
  • Average – seems to have two focuses grocery stores/supermarkets and restaurants and then goes out from there to gas stations, specialty food stores and department stores.
  • Dinner-out – purchases seem to center on restaurants and then branch out fro there to computer-networking, gas stations, supermarkets, fast food, etc.

In “b”  breakout above, you can see the socio-demographic characteristics of each lifestyle group as compared with the median user. And in “c” one can see some population histograms of the demographic data.

They were then able to use the CDR data to construct a map of which lifestyle called which other life style to identify call correlation data. Most calls were contacts between the same groups but the second most active call was calls to householders.

They took this same analysis to another city in Mexico and came up with six  lifestyle categories, five of the same and a different one.

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When I went to Uni (a long long time ago), I attended an urban geography class that was much more scientific and mathematical than any other geography class I had ever attended. I remember asking the professor when did geography become an exact science. As best as I can recall, he laughed and said over the last decade.

Analysis like the above could make B2C marketing, almost an exact science.

Big Data meet Marketing – Buyer beware.

Comments?

Photo Credit(s):  All charts/photos are from the Nature article Sequences of purchase in credit card data reveal lifestyles in urban populations

Infinidat’s ~90% (average read hit) solution – #SFD16

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, Disk storage, Market dynamics, SSD storage, Storage performance, System effectiveness, Visionary leadershp

We attended a SFD16 session at Infinidat‘s offices in Waltham, MA a couple of weeks ago.

The session was led off by Doc D’Errico (@docderrico) but CTO, Brian Carmody (@initzero) did most of the talking and Erik Kaulberg (@ekaulberg) discussed some of their new products. I have known Doc, Erik and Brian for years and all of them  are industry heavyweights, having worked at major and startup storage companies for decades.

Infinidat’s challenge

The challenge that Infinidat has is how to perform as well as (or better than) an all flash array when you have hybrid flash – disk storage.

The advantage of spinning disk is that it’s relatively cheap ($/GB) storage with good throughput, great reliability and reasonable volumetric density (GB/mm**3). However, its random read  access time is much, two orders of magnitude worse than flash (~10 msec vs. ~100 µsec).

Fortunately, DRAM has a random access time of ~100 nsec which is 3 orders of magnitude better than flash. A manager I had once said everyone wants their data stored on tape but accessed out of memory.

So the problem comes down to insuring that application data is sitting in DRAM (cache) when requested. This is called a read (cache) hit.  [Write hits are easier because they are typically written directly into memory and later destaged. So essentially all writes are cache hits.]

Mainframes vs. open systems

In the old days with MVS on mainframes, read hit rates of ~70%+ were considered good and doable. Over time MVS and z/OS, its followon, started providing hints about what IO’s were coming next. With mainframe hints, storage systems started hitting ~90% read hit rates.

Open systems never seemed to come close to those hit rates. A typical open system hit rate was ~50% for well behaved applications. For VMware and it’s IO mixer, a 50% read hit rate was aspirational and hardly ever achieved in reality. This has improved over time, but nothing comes close to 90% read hit rates over extended periods.

So, for a storage systems in open system environments to average an 90% DRAM read hit cache hit rate is  unheard of, and only seen for brief intervals at best, with especially well behaved applications and not under virtualization. For a customer to see an average DRAM hit rate exceeding 90%, over the course of multiple days was inconceivable,.

And yet that’s exactly what Brian’s showing in the photo above, an average over 1 week of over 95% DRAM read hit rate over a whole week, for an major retail/e-commerce/ERP customer during one of the heaviest, if not the heaviest activity weeks of the year,  The data set size was 1.5PB.

How is this possible, what does Infinidat do differently to predict which data applications need moment to moment, over the course of the heaviest retail week in the year.

Infinidat’s Neural caching algorithm

It all starts with writes. When data is written to Infinidat, it records a terrain map of all the other data that has been written recently. I suppose one could think of this as a 2 dimensional map, with spots on the map being the equivalent of data in the storage system that have recently been written.  This map changes over time so it’s more like a movie stream of frames showing, from frame to frame all the recently written data in the system at any point in time. Of course the frame rate for this stream is the IO rate.

When a IO request comes in for a specific record, Infinidat uses an index to locate the last time (frame) the record was written, and using this snapshot of all data written at the same time, it reads into cache all the other data written at that time.

This additional data could be read from disk or SSD. Read throughput is slightly better for flash over disk but not orders of magnitude.

In any case, any system could do this sort of caching algorithm, iff they had the processing power needed, had the metadata layout which made recording the IO stream frame by frame space efficient, had the metadata indexing which would enable them to locate the last frame a record was written in AND had the IO parallelism required to do a whole lot of IO all the time to keep that DRAM cache filled with hit candidates. Did I mention that Infinidat uses a three controller storage system, unlike the rest of the industry that uses a two controller system. This gives them 50% more horse power and data paths to get data into cache.

Brian goes into some depth on Neural caching implementation but there’s plenty of secret sauce behind it.

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Somewhere in his presentation, Brian stated that across their entire customer base (~3.4EB @ end of last quarter), they average a 90% read (DRAM) cache hit rate, inconceivable in the old days, nigh impossible today. Of course it only gets better from here.

If a hybrid system can continuously average a 95% read cache hit rate for a customer over weeks of IO, there’s no reason that system couldn’t outperform  an AFA, even an NVMeoF AFA storage system.

I suppose cache hit rates like these could be application dependent but they didn’t seem to say anything about specific verticals they were targeting. And at 3+ EB it doesn’t appear to be application specific.

Comments?

For more information you may want to see these other SFD16 participants write ups on Infinidat:

Infinidat, and #SFD16, Data is the new currency by Matt Leib (@MBLeib)

GPU growth and the compute changeover

Posted on by Ray in Artificial Intelligence, Distributed computing, Energy efficiency, Machine Learning, Market dynamics, Neural network, Processing performance, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness

Attended SC17 last month in Denver and Nvidia had almost as big a presence as Intel. Their VR display was very nice as compared to some of the others at the show.

GPU past

GPU’s were originally designed to support visualization and the computation to render a specific scene quickly and efficiently. In order to do this they were designed with 100s to now 1000s of arithmetically intensive (floating point) compute engines where each engine could be given an individual pixel or segment of an image and compute all the light rays and visual aspects pertinent to that scene in a very short amount of time. This created a quick and efficient multi-core engine to render textures and map polygons of an image.

Image rendering required highly parallel computations and as such more compute engines meant faster scene throughput. This led to todays GPUs that have 1000s of cores. In contrast, standard microprocessor CPUs have 10-60 compute cores today.

GPUs today 

Funny thing, there are lots of other applications for many core engines. For example, GPUs also have a place to play in the development and mining of crypto currencies because of their ability to perform many cryptographic operations a second, all in parallel

Another significant driver of GPU sales and usage today seems to be AI, especially machine learning. For instance, at SC17, visual image recognition was on display at dozens of booths besides Intel and Nvidia. Such image recognition  AI requires a lot of floating point computation to perform well.

I saw one article that said GPUs can speed up Machine Learning (ML) by a factor of 250 over standard CPUs. There’s a highly entertaining video clip at the bottom of the Nvidia post that shows how parallel compute works as compared to standard CPUs.

GPU’s play an important role in speech recognition and image recognition (through ML) as well. So we find that they are being used in self-driving cars, face recognition, and other image processing/speech recognition tasks.

The latest Apple X iPhone has a Neural Engine which my best guess is just another version of a GPU. And the iPhone 8 has a custom GPU.

Tesla is also working on a custom AI engine for its self driving cars.

So, over time, GPUs will have an increasing role to play in the future of AI and crypto currency and as always, image rendering.

 

Photo Credit(s): SC17 logo, SC17 website;

GTX1070(GP104) vs. GTX1060(GP106) by Fritzchens Fritz;

Intel 2nd Generation core microprocessor codenamed Sandy Bridge wafer by Intel Free Press