OpenPOWER Consortium

Did you hear the big announcement last week? Google, IBM and three other companies announced their plans to form the OpenPOWER Consortium‚ an open development alliance based on IBM's POWER microprocessor architecture. The Consortium intends to build advanced server, networking, storage and GPU-acceleration technology."

Perhaps some of you had the same reaction to this news that we did. After Googling to find out what on earth "GPU-acceleration technology" is (and we're still a bit fuzzy about that), we began to wonder - "What's in it for us?" or more specifically - what does this mean for i?  

We're software people. Who really cares about hardware? Well, we care only to the extent that the hardware that supports IBM i continues to exist and advance. The expected benefit of the consortium is to grow the base of POWER, which should, in turn, ensure the continued growth of the platform - to the Cloud and beyond.

The announcement - and particularly Google's participation in it - seems to be oriented toward Cloud servers. We believe IBM i is a particularly good platform for many types of Cloud applications, with its legendary reliability and integrated security features. We hope that IBM will also recognize that connection and maybe IBM i will have a role in their Cloud plans.

The last really big POWER news story was Watson - the “Jeopardy!”-winning system, which has since been busy in many more practical applications of that fascinating technology. We have followed the whole Watson story with great interest. It is one of the most innovative applications of software and database imaginable. But it's only specific relevance to those of us interested in IBM i is the fact that it runs on POWER. So much like the #OpenPOWER Consortium announcement, the impact on us is the resulting advancement of the POWER platform.

We're going to be following this story as it unfolds over the coming months. After all, the future of POWER is the future of #IBMi.

Bienvenue à Paris (or Welcome to Paris)

That's not Paris as in Jon. It is, as you may have guessed from the title, Paris as in France. That is where this week's missive is coming from. We are here on the first leg of a two-city trip to meet European members of the IBM i community. Our first event starts tomorrow (Wednesday), when we begin a two-day version of the RPG & DB2 Summit here in Paris, organized with a lot of help from our friends at Arcad Software. That’s nice for us because it means we can focus on speaking and leave the organizational aspects to someone else.

Following the Paris Summit, we head for Stockholm, Sweden, where we’ll be providing RPG, DB2 and PHP content for a three-day Data3 event. For those of you unfamiliar with Data3, think of it as Sweden's version of COMMON. Not sure how many we’re expecting in Paris, but the latest news from the folks at Data3 was that more than 130 were expected in Stockholm. That's good to hear. It promises to be an interesting week.

While we're over here this time, we're going to be taking some notes on differences and commonalities between the European IBM i community and the North American one. We'll let you know if anything pops up during those discussions.

As we write this, we're about to head out of our hotel and check out the journey to the Summit venue, which is some distance away. We're doing this now because the Summit starts at 8:30 a.m. and we don't do mornings, so our goal this evening is to determine just how disgustingly early we have to leave the hotel to make it to the Summit on time.

Before we go though a quick shout-out to our lunch companion Michelle Cummings. Michelle and Jon have known each other for some years when Michelle worked on the RPG compiler team. She's been living in Paris for the last two years since her husband's company transferred him here. She decided it would be fun to live here for a while. From what she told us over lunch, and the pictures we've seen on her Facebook page that have recounted her time in Europe, she has most certainly enjoyed herself and had some unforgettable experiences along the way. Her most recent adventure was running in the Medoc Marathon (Le Marathon Du Medoc). A most unusual event in many, many, ways. Looking at Michelle's
photo, you might be tempted to think that running the race in costume was the unusual part. But you'd be forgetting that we are talking about France and where would any French event be without wine? The entire marathon takes place in Bordeaux wine country and wanders though the grounds of chateaus and vineyards as well as the local villages. As Michelle tells it, there was a wine or cheese station every 2 kilometers or so (about 1.2 miles) where all the runners stopped and imbibed for a while before setting off for the next station. Needless to say a few didn't make the distance, but one can't help feeling that they still had a much better time than the average marathoner! This site is in French - but you don't need to understand French to enjoy the photos of some of the crazy costumes folks wear. Check them out here.

Almost made us think that we'd like to try a marathon like that ourselves some day, but then common sense prevailed and we decided that there just has to be a less painful way of sampling the joys of the French countryside!  

Before we close, a quick reminder that the Watson “Jeopardy!” TV show (#IBMWatson) is being rebroadcast this week for those who missed it the first time--or just want to see it again. And yes he will still be giving those of us who live in Toronto a good laugh by placing our airport in the U.S. Check your local listings for show times.

The Rodney Dangerfield of Computer Systems

This week, we're doing three of our favorite things. First, we are in Montreal, which is a city that we both love. It is also home to one of our favorite restaurants - Les 3 Brasseurs -- check out the website and you'll quickly understand why Jon loves it so much. Second, we are teaching RDP's Remote Systems Explorer -- one of our favorite topics. And third, we got to travel here by train -- which as we've said before has become our favorite mode of transportation. What more could we ask?

But let's talk about the Rodney Dangerfield of computer systems. Yes, we mean our beloved IBM i.

Today marks IBM's 100th birthday and there's been a lot of publicity about it over the course of this year -- including, of course, Watson's spectacular "Jeopardy!" win. IBM has been putting out a lot of material including videos of the history of the company and lists of its top achievements etc.

All good stuff -- until you realize that the System/38 (the IBM i's ancestor), a truly revolutionary computer architecture, is inexplicably not even on the list. It gets a small mention in at least one of the movies, but that seems to be about it. The IBM PC gets a lot of attention -- as indeed it should -- but it was hardly revolutionary. The IBM PC's story was a classic demonstration that it took the power of an IBM to bring standardization to an industry that was descending into incompatible chaos.

Not surprisingly the mainframe also gets a lot of attention -- but again, it was hardly revolutionary in the way that the System/38 was. It was more of an evolution of the systems that preceded it. Even the notion that the System/360's VM heralded a revolutionary change in operating systems would be hotly disputed by those who worked on the ICL George operating systems at the time.

Surely a solid argument can be made that the S/38 hardware and software architecture was not only revolutionary, but that the hardware abstraction concepts that it embodied (and which we still enjoy today) were the forerunner of the whole army of hardware independent virtual machines that we see now in the form of Java and .NET among others. 

Rodney would understand how we're feeling today.

 

Watson Rules and a Bum-Biting RPG III Incident

Watson Triumphant--on "Jeopardy!" and in the News!

We can't believe the amount of buzz there's been following Watson's "Jeopardy!" appearances last week. It seems like every radio or TV show we watch references it, from "Sunday Morning" to "The Daily Show." There's been major newspaper and magazine coverage too, not to mention the number of blogs, posts and assorted articles all around the Web. There have certainly been comments, including here, about issues with buzzer timing (i.e., no human being can react as quickly as a computer once the "answer now" light goes on). While that fact may have given Watson an edge in the final tally, we think the winning was actually incidental; it was the fact Watson could even come up with the answers that was truly remarkable.

We were pleasantly surprised to see more people seem to "get it" than we expected. We were kind of expecting at least a few luddites to come out of the woodwork to bemoan the end of life as we know it. We're sure there have been a few, but we haven't seen them. If history is anything to go by, some of our regular readers will no doubt come up with a few examples for us.

The potential for this technology in areas such as medicine and the law is exciting. Here's a suggestion IBM research may not have considered. How about feeding Watson all of the IRS regulations, publications, judgments, etc. and see if he can work out how to complete a legal tax return! Given our experiences with single-page forms that come with 18 pages of explanation that contradicts the instructions on the form itself, perhaps this is too daunting a task even for Watson. But we'd love to see him try.

#ibmwatson

RDP V8 Hates RPG III  

This past weekend Jon was working with RDP V8 and found it was frequently going into a permanent wait state (the central progress bar kept rolling, but nothing happened) that required a good-old Ctrl-Alt-Del to kill the application. He finished up seeking help on midrange.com and was quickly supplied with a workaround--one that he would never have come up with by himself. It turns out there's a bug in version 8's syntax checker for RPG/400 that causes the problem. Jon has all but erased RPG III from his memory banks and was only using it on this occasion in an attempt to track a possible behavioral difference between RPG III and RPG IV. As a result, when searching for possible solutions the thought that RPG/400 would be involved never entered his head. Luckily the workaround is simple: use the preferences to turn off syntax checking in RPG III and all is well. IBM is due to deliver a fix in the next fix pack. In the meantime for us it's just one more reason to convert RPG III programs ... as if we needed any!

The Answer is: Nova Science Now's "How Does The Brain Work?"

And the question is?

What do IBM Watson and Magicians Have in Common?

We have to admit that the big attraction for us to watch this episode was the appearance of three of our favorite magicians on the show (Mac King and Penn & Teller.) Still it was interesting to hear from some of the researchers who helped create IBM Watson. If you have somehow missed hearing about how IBM Watson – the cluster of IBM Power 750 servers that will compete on Jeopardy! next week – take a look at our earlier post here and the IBM Watson site here.

You can view last week’s episode of Nova Science Now here. Well, at least you can if you’re in the U.S. When we tried to view it online, we were told (only after watching the commercial for the Nova iPad app!) that the video isn’t available due to rights restrictions. Bummer. 

Several videos about IBM Watson are available that we could watch, however, and so we entertained ourselves for awhile that way. There are some fun videos of some of Watson’s earlier Jeopardy! trial runs. It’s refreshing to see IBM making available videos that show some of Watson’s far-from-perfect earlier attempts, such as the occasions where Watson answered “Who is Richard Nixon?” in response to “This first lady was born Thelma Catherine Ryan …” Close, but no cigar. The correct response, of course, was, “Who is Pat Nixon?” You can also find a video of a practice round where Watson took on Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. We got a kick out of the fact that Watson got an even bigger laugh than Ken Jennings when selecting the category “Chicks Dig Me.” You can find links to many videos on the Watson page we referenced earlier or just go to YouTube and search for IBM Watson. You might even convince your boss that it qualifies as work!

We’ve had fun anticipating next week’s games where Watson will take on Jennings and Rutter for real. But is it all just for fun? Is it just a publicity stunt?  Or does Watson have more to offer the world than competing on a game show? What if Watson loses next week? Will it all have been a colossal waste of time and money?

As you can probably guess, we think Watson and its Deep QA software (after all, we’re far more interested in the software than the hardware) will have a significant impact on the future of applications--anything from helping doctors diagnose and treat patients to diagnosing problems with a car, even to helping a programmer locate bugs in code! Hmmm – let’s hope “he” doesn’t get good enough to do it without us! The possibilities for applications of this kind of technology are endless. The fact Watson is running on “ordinary” processors –- not special purpose-built processors like Deep Blue’s chess-playing system--means that this has potential in the real world.

What if Watson loses to Jennings or Rutter next week?  We don't think it matters. The fact that anyone even attempted this kind of competition using “off the shelf” computer processors is astounding. It’s like your mother always told you: it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. In the case of IBM Research and Watson, perhaps it’s better stated, it’s that you play the game. 

#ibmwatson

Not So Elementary, My Dear Watson

If that is the answer, what is the question? Perhaps "How difficult is it for a computer to compete in the game of 'Jeopardy!'?"

That's exactly what IBM's coolest yet Power Systems application will do. In the contest (Feb. 14-16, 2011), which uses the most advanced Question Answering (QA) application (called DeepQA) yet devised, IBM's Watson will compete head-to-head against two of the "Jeopardy!" show's most famous champions--Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Watson will answer the questions by voice and will even press its own button to buzz in. How cool is that? Watson will receive the questions via text interface (i.e., it will not be interpreting vocal questions) but other than that, the computer competes exactly like Ken and Brad. It will not be connected to the internet to research answers. All the knowledge used during the show must already be in the system's database.

In developing the Watson software, the IBM team confronted head-on what has to be the biggest challenge in the world of software development--building software capable of correctly interpreting natural language. The questions (or should we say answers) in "Jeopardy!" contain many examples of the kinds of ambiguity found in everyday language that have challenged computer scientists for years. If Watson can indeed win at "Jeopardy!" against two of the best players to ever participate in the game, it will represent a huge step forward in the science of natural-language processing.

Why should we as an IBM i community be interested in this, other than the fact that it is just plain cool? Well, Watson runs on a cluster of Power 750 systems--the very same Power 750 processors some of you may be using to run your business applications. It does have the advantage of some very sophisticated QA software that you won't have, however. Developed over many years, Watson is one of the more visible results coming out of some of IBM's research and development teams.

Of course, what would be even cooler is if we could tell you that Watson was running IBM i and written in RPG using DB2 for i. Sorry, can't do that. Watson runs Linux. But then, when's the last time you had a business need for your computer system to compete in a game show? If only a game show about producing payroll checks or processing invoices existed. ...

Even so, we'll have Tivo set up to record Watson's "Jeopardy!" games, for sure (we never watch anything live--that's just so pre-Tivo). It should be tons of fun to think "that's a Power Systems server doing that."

IBM has a website that provides more information. If like us you have problems with the Flash videos on the site you can find them in the IBM channel at YouTube. Start with this one and you'll see the links to the other videos.

One last "Jeopardy!" clue for you: "IBM's founder." The question is "Who is Watson named after?"  Nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes--neither the original nor the new one.

#ibmwatson