The supercomputers being lauded at middle month of November 2009, at the SC09 high-performance computing conference in Portland, Ore., can perform tasks in hours that would take a powerful desktop computer thousands of years. But when it comes to pattern recognition, perception and other seemingly simple tasks, their computing powers pale in comparison to a three-pound computer that fills less space than a two-liter bottle and uses less power than a light bulb: your brain.
Scientists can’t understand, let alone replicate, many of the brain’s abilities. But if a supercomputer still can’t mimic an organic central nervous system, IBM hopes it can at least model one.
The tech giant plans to announce at the SC09 conference a joint project with researchers from five universities and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory that it calls “Blue Matter,” a software platform for neuroscience modeling. Pulling together archived magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan data and assembling it on a Blue Gene P Supercomputer, IBM has simulated a brain with 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses–about the equivalent of a cat’s cortex, or 4.5% of a human brain.
“This is a tool of unprecedented scale,” says Dharmendra Modha, IBM’s research lead on the project. “It allows us to probe deeper into how the brain works and how we could build something like it, and it could lead to new dynamics for computing that we’ve been pursuing for more than 60 years.”
The project, partly funded by $20 million from the Department of Defense’s research arm, aims to mine the brain for tricks that could be used to mimic its cognitive abilities and its ultra-low energy use in future chips and software. The brain’s network of neurons and their connections known as synapses, Modha points out, manages many tasks that computers still struggle with, including dealing with ambiguous data, recognizing patterns and sifting through an overwhelming load of real-world sensory information to find and focus on relevant aspects. Hence, humans’ ability to perform tasks like driving in low-visibility conditions or reading unfamiliar fonts are tricks that still elude even the world’s most advanced computers.
That ability to parse enormous streams of data in real time also aligns with IBM’s so-called “smarter planet” initiative, a method of integrating sensors into infrastructure and analyzing the data they produce to optimize systems like the electrical grid, water systems and traffic. The brain is proof that this kind of computer can be built.
IBM’s Blue Matter model will run on a Blue Gene supercomputer that uses more than 144 terabytes of memory and a cluster of around 150,000 processors, capable of about half a petaflop of processing power, or 500 trillion floating point operations a second. At that rate, it could perform in about eight hours the same work that would take a typical Intel powered laptop around 500 years.
Even with that kind of hardware, IBM’s brain-like computer is still years, if not decades, away from reality. Jim Olds, the director of George Mason University’s Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, points out that even limiting itself to a cat brain, IBM’s simulation still only captures about 10% to 20% of the relevant information in the neurons it simulates. That could be a major hurdle, given that neuroscientists don’t yet know which parts of the brain’s physiology may turn out to be key to its function. “There are unknown unknowns,” says Olds. “We collect so much data, but this could provide the overarching theory we need to make sense of it,” he says. “We don’t have our Einstein yet.
On Nov. 11, a power failure blacked out much of Brazil and Paraguay, affecting as many as 60 million people. It’s still unclear how the blackout happened, but it occurred just two days after CBS’ 60 Minutes reported that several previous Brazilian power failures were caused by computer hackers.
For several years there have been underground rumors of organized criminals attempting to extort money in exchange for not turning off power grids. The capability to do this exists as the electronic security of girds in the U.S. and around the world is extremely weak. This is asymmetrical warfare–the resources and effort required to inflict damage is minimal compared to the devastation caused. And, it is very difficult to prove what really happened or to definitively identify the source of the attack. These are perfect conditions for organized crime, nation states and terrorists.
The National Academy of Science has published two major studies on cyberspace security, or more appropriately, our lack of it. The contents of these dense, authoritative research reports should shock us into immediate action. The opening paragraph says: “The United States faces real risks that adversaries will exploit vulnerabilities in the nation’s critical information systems, thereby causing considerable suffering and damage.”
At a minimum, senior-level executives should be calling their corresponding equals at their electric utility provider and grilling them on the physical and logical security of the utility’s generation, transmission and distribution control systems. The government quietly started this process several years ago, and calls from major customers will greatly accelerate the process of rapidly tightening control-system security.
Even if the Brazil blackout is ultimately traced to equipment failures or human error, this incident should be a national and world wake-up call. Much of what is needed can’t be purchased as a product. What is required is a mental mind shift. Every individual and institution needs to get back to deterrence basics. Just implementing known best practices would significantly reduce the threat of successful cyber attack.
Cybersecurity can’t be delegated or outsourced. This means reviving skills that many organizations have allowed to atrophy or never had. And the problem is similar to the military, which typically prepares a strategy for winning the last war–except the bad guys study the same books and intuitively change their attack because newer technology costs them so little.
In electronic term, Tuxedo is a middleware platform used to manage distributed transaction processing in distributed computing environments. Tuxedo is a transaction processing system or transaction oriented middleware, or enterprise application server for C, C++, and COBOL.
Tuxedo was designed from the beginning for high availability and to provide extremely scalable applications allowing Tuxedo to support applications requiring thousands of transactions per second on commonly available distributed systems. One of the first applications within AT&T for Tuxedo was to support moving the LMOS application off mainframe systems on to much cheaper distributed systems.
Tuxedo has been used as transactional middleware by a number of multi-tier application development tools. Tuxedo is at its core a message routing and queuing system. Requests are sent to named services and Tuxedo uses memory based inter-process communication acilities to queue the requests to servers. The requester is unaware of where the server that actually processes the request is located or how it is implemented. In essence, Tuxedo provided the elements of Service - oriented architecture (SOA) decades before the phrase Service-oriented architecture was coined. Tuxedo can use the content of the message to determine what servers should be utilized to receive the request by means of data dependent routing.
The BEA Tuxedo product features the integration of BEA Systems, Inc. industry-leading technologies–two programming interfaces (ATMI and CORBA C++), a high performance C++ application server, a Transaction Monitor, and a proven, scalable, reliable, and manageable back-end transaction platform, the BEA Tuxedo infrastructure.
Object files for the Tuxedo MQ Adapter are included as part of the standard Tuxedo distribution. After customizing the $TUXDIR/udataobj/RM file with any values specific to the MQ installation being used, the Tuxedo administrator uses the buildmqadapter(1) command to build the MQ adapter executables. The Tuxedo administrator also needs to use the buildtms(1) command to build the TMS for the WebSphere MQ Resource manager. This chapter describes the process of building the MQ Adapter executables.
$TUXDIR/udataobj/RM
buildmqadapter(1)
buildtms(1)
Oracle Tuxedo Mainframe Adapter for SNA is a domains-based connectivity product that provides bidirectional connectivity between Oracle Tuxedo clients or servers and IBM mainframe applications.
