Other Nuerons

I spend a lot of time with a keyboard. Most of my time is spent on the ephemeral form of email. Most of the hard work is in the longer form of white paper, data sheet and sales kit.

Today, I did something I've never done before. I wrote a 100 word story - and I used dialogue. I've never written anything with dialogue before. Because I knew it had to be short and precise, I tried something new. It was wonderful to do. I even like the result.

Innovation within constraints is both creative and problem solving. It fires different neurons.

Pick a narrowly defined project and do it differently.   

10 minutes a day

I was given a good harmonica for my last birthday. I have no idea why Traci decided that's what I needed, but that's what I have - and it is good.

Eventually, I grew tired of it staring at me across the desk. Inside the box is a lesson plan with simple instructions. Perhaps the most important one is this: "practice 10 minutes every day."

10 minutes may feel long to my family, but I can now play a tune.

Just 10 minutes a day...

More than reducing dissatisfaction

I am re-starting this blog for what I think is the 4th time.

I started this blog to live blog industry events. Now, I tweet them.

 I continued this blog to keep myself 'out there' as I transitioned. Now, I contribute to several others.[1]

I'm working for a start-up that is going very well, which means busy as all hell. I am still squeezing in time with family, friends and a semi-regular work out. I have friends posts of FB. Professional commentary on Linke-In. Short conversations on Twitter. And a handful of close friends with whom a SMS regularly. Why the hell would I type here when I should be finishing a white paper?

I need something that isn't work. Something that isn't driven by the kids, the meetings, or the calendar. This blog will provide me a few minutes of (semi) public space to record my thoughts.

So what made me log on? My January knocked my out a comfortable state of denial.

Clayton Christenson put it very well, "we work to reduce our level of dissatisfaction" I _like_ my work, my company, my colleagues, but I _love_ my family, my friends and my experiences. So, this blog is now going to be about experiences.

 This morning, I spent 30 minutes reading poetry, mostly ee cummings, and I feel better prepared for the day. I recommend you do the same. Seek out his love poems and read them aloud - even better read them to someone. Maybe they will read one back to you.

 [1] http://Open-pnfs.org http://sniaesfblog.org http://ww.tonian.com (and probably a few I missed)

Marketing Stealth

I have a lot of responsibilities at our little, stealthy company called Tonian. I am responsible for products, marketing and assisting on business development/technology meetings. It is the kind of project I like best - wide ranging with huge potential. The hard part is finding enough time to do the important, but not time critical things. Highest on that list is general marketing. I've launched out a Tonian Blog and we're working on building out a set of resources and positioning around our leadership in pNFS, but I am lucky to spend 1 day a week on it. We don't have a product to sell (yet), but we know what we want to stand for. We are going to define what Software Defined Storage really should mean. And it isn't the Storage Hypervisor. This isn't a trivial task and it will take time. So here I sit in Ben Gurion Airport for the 3rd time in 4 months. No customers here. I owe engineering a note on a feature. The board presentation for next week is in my CEO's hands. Time to think about marketing in stealth mode as I cross the Atlantic.

From little bits to big bits

An update from my world. I left the publicly traded mid-sized company to jump back into the small pond. I'm still thinking about data. Not the little bits that need to be correctly ordered and available in CPUS, but the bigger data that needs to be available in milliseconds over the network. I'm on the road more, but enjoying the adventure at Tonian. Blogs to come will include musing on Open Compute/Storage, the development of big "S" Standards, how virtualization changes the organization and the conflicts of being a company in stealth mode. Stay tuned...

Conflicted about HSAs....

I am having a very mixed reaction to the recent public announcements of AMD's Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) roadmaps. As anyone who stumbles across this blog should know, I did a lot of work in that area. I really do (or is it "did"?) think it represents a real future of computing silicon. It should reduce overall power and is the roadmap to create truly powerful single-chip computers that do everything. Building hotter FPUs or more cache or more generic cores is a race of diminishing returns.

We already have significant sections of modern x86 CPUs dedicated to special purpose functions. Vector instructions with SSE started us down the path, but now we have instruction sets and silicon that speed encryption and other low level functions. The advantages of this model is a single instruction set and, most importantly, a flat memory space.

It is the overhead of memory copy that actually eats up most of the advantage of dedicated silicon. The problem has to be large enough to be worth shipping around the data. Phil Rogers, Mark Hummel & others at AMD know this well. But so do the teams at NVidia, Intel and every other silicon company in the world.

Unfortunately, the silicon industry has also shown stamping out small power-efficient general purpose cores is easy. The difference in power consumption between on-load dedicated cores as NIC and purpose built silicon is shrinking. However, the design overhead of developing that silicon has not. There are only a handful of compute problems worth solving in silicon, but there should be 1000s of compute functions to which it is worth dedicating a core.

AMD has an approach to coherent memory across the different silicon environments. I know enough of the people involved to be confident the solution is elegant and functional. I have deep confidence that it can be game changing in the HPC space where uber-FLOPS still matter and adoption is a matter of compiling in the libraries.

Unfortunately, I don't think it is industry changing. Current software trends are not toward getting more from a single program, but dividing up the problem into smaller, general purpose compute elements. Software architects realized it was too hard to copy the data, so they moved the compute to the data. Yes, I'm talking about Map/Reduce.

AMD's HSA and Map/Reduce represent two directions for software's use of silicon. In my opinion, the need to speed up specific algorithms has been circumvented already by software architecture. AMD is shooting where the duck was, not where it is going. That is the problem with silicon engineering in the current age. It doesn't move fast enough.

That's why Dan Reed, Burton Smith and others are working for MSFT these days and Peter Ungaro is giving the keynote at a Big Data conference. They are trying to shoot ahead of the duck.

If AMD can improve memory efficiency (e.g. garbage collection) and/or messaging primitives (e.g. collectives) they may not change the industry, but you certainly have a competitive advantage in the modern age of distributed software architectures.

http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-02-09/amd_opens_up_heterogeneous_computing.html

Thinking about Start-ups?

Navin Thandani recently left Red Hat and decided to talk about the StartUp experience.

It's a classic tale of failure, woe & iteration, but with a happy ending. A couple of particularly nice points about the ease of getting someone to care about you.

http://nthadani.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/a-retrospective-analysis-on-the-road-to-red-hat/