Click here for the answer! ( november 2004)

This week I attendend the “Network Society: Social changes, organizations and citizens” event organized in Barcelona .  We had an excellent programme and speakers . With about 200 people attending the event, the event tryed to create a valuable “brain storming” for all those interested in the analysis of the changes that our society faces and the role of technology and culture in the whole set.

The term Network Society (extracted from wikipedia) was coined by Jan van Dijk in his Dutch book De Netwerkmaatschappij (1991) (The Network Society) (1999, 2006), and by Manuel Castells in The Network Society, the first part of his trilogy The Information Age (1996). In 1978 James Martin used the related term ‘The Wired Society’ indicating a society that is connected by mass- and telecommunication networks. Barry Wellman and the team of Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff also have done work on the concept of network society. Van Dijk defines the network society as a society in which a combination of social and media networks shapes its prime mode of organization and most important structures at all levels (individual, organizational and societal). He compares this type of society to a mass society that is shaped by groups, organizations and communities (’masses’) organized in physical co-presence.

This course was an opportunity to create  an open and critical conversation about the so-called “network society”.The speakers of the event were:

• Andrew Rasiej
• Carlos Domingo
• Carol Darr
• Enrique Dans
• Ethan Zuckerman
• Gumersindo Lafuente
• Irene Mia
• Josu Jon Imaz
• Juan Freire
• Miquel Iceta
• Santiago Ortiz
• Tom Steinberg

An excellent and useful summary of all the conference can be obtained form the official page.

Google is 10 years old this moth (or that is what they say!). In these years the company has developed from a small search tool only known to geeks (frikis in Spanish or Catalan at my Computer Science School in Barcelona ) to a technology giant becoming one of the most well known brands on the globe. One of the initiatives of Google for this celebration is the set of special articles “Google at 10” at the official Google Blog writen by relevant researchers in the IT area. In my opinion a very interesting articles to be read by my students. Try it!

• “The future of search“, por Marissa Mayer
• “Ad perfect“, por Susan Wojcicky
• “The social web: all about the small stuff“, por Joe Kraus
• “The future of online video“, por Chad Hurley
• “The intelligent cloud“, por Alfred Spector
• “The future of mobile“, por Andy Rubin
• “The democratization of data“, por Hal Varian
• “Building a future that’s clean and green“, por Bill Weihl
• “Wiping out the next smallpox“, por Larry Brilliant
• “The next Internet“, por Vinton Cerf

Last week Vicenç Beltran did the PhD presentation obtaining the maximum mark. The unstoppable growth of the World Wide Web requires a huge amount of computational resources that must be used efficiently. Nowadays, commodity hardware is the preferred platform to run web server systems because it is the most cost-effective solution. The work presented in this thesis aims to improve the efficiency of current web server systems, allowing the web servers to make the most of hardware resources. To this end, we first characterize current web server system and identify the problems that hinder web servers from providing an efficient resource utilization. From the study of web servers in a wide range of situations and environments, we have identified two main issues that prevents web servers systems from efficiently using current hardware resources. The first is the extension of the HTTP protocol to include connection persistence and security, which dramatically impacts the performance and configuration complexity of traditional multi-threaded web servers. The second is the memory-bounded or disk-bounded nature of some web workloads that prevents the full utilization of the abundant CPU resources available on current commodity hardware. We propose two novel techniques to overcome the main issues with current web server systems. Firstly, the Hybrid web server architecture that can be easily implemented in any multi-threaded web server to improve the CPU utilization with better management of client connections. And secondly, a main memory compression technique implemented in the Linux operating system that makes the most of current multiprocessor’s hardware to improve the performance of memory bounded web applications. The thesis work is supported by an exhaustive experimental evaluation that proves the effectiveness and feasibility of our proposals on actual systems. It is worth noting that the main concepts behind the Hybrid architecture have recently been implemented in popular web servers like Apache, Tomcat and Glassfish.

The work was coadvised by Eduard Ayguadé and myself. Congratulation to Vicenç for their excellent work.

Here you can find the PDF file of the PhD dissertation.

What books are you planning to read this summer? I’m reading the new novel of Noah Gordon, El Celler (and the Spanish translation “La Bodega”), a story of political intrigue, winemaking, and love, set in Catalonia in the late 19th century.

I’m reading this book for now and I’m currently contemplating which one to check out next. The long hot days of summer provide lots of time to read.

If you love book recommendations like me, here there are another one: “CLOUD COMPUTING: Some of the relevant issues in current Execution Environments for Distributed Computing” (Lulu.com publisher, 2008. ISBN: 978-1-4092-1787-9).

This book is composed by 8 chapters and it is the result of a surveys done by master students on different areas related with the “Execution Environment of Distributed Systems” course in the CANS master program at the Technical University of Catalonia (Barcelona, UPC). Taking into account the interest of this issues, it has been decided to publish it as a book. I am very grateful to them for their patience and accepting this challenge. I ask to the reader to keep in mind that this is an academic exercise done by students, not a research work done by researchers, and that none of the authors are English native speakers. Please be generous if you find some mistakes that may escape our revisions. This year’s special focus of the course is on the hot topics of next generation data centres and cloud/utility computing because we are definitely at an inflection point today whereby distributed computing execution environments turn towards cloud computing environments. You can order a Hardcover copy at lulu.com bookstore or download a free electronic copy from this link.

If you love book recommendations, here you have two options! Have a good summer vacation. 

Vas is a Technical lead and the Virtualization Strategic Initiative Manager in the Virtualization Runtime & Tools Department. Vas presented us with an interesting talk about Virtualization technology and how it is driving profound changes in the way large data centers are designed and managed. Moving to a virtualized infrastructure solves many problems such as hardware utilization and power consumption. But it also creates many new problems such as virtual machine image sprawl and a new management layer in the IT stack. The talk included an interesting overview of the emerging trends in the industry by the adoption of virtualization, followed by an IBM Research perspective of what new technical challenges this creates.

Ahir, Noelia Fernández , la Programming Director de Yahoo Europe, en una xerrada que vaig poder assistir a Barcelona (Dia de l’emprenedor), ens va fer una bona exposició de l’impacte que internet ja té en els nostres hàbits. Fins fa poc internet només era massivament usada des d’entorns universitàris i en tot cas d’alguns llocs de treball. Però les coses estan canviant i ara ja hi ha molta gent que està sentada al sofà de casa seva o viatjant en autobus i alhora està connectada a internet des dels seus dispositius mòbils. Això té ja ara un impacte important amb com la gent obté i usa la informació. El que es coneix per xarxes socials propicien per exemple que quan busques un hotel a una zona que no coneixes et dirigeixis directament a internet i fas ús del coneixement col.lectiu i compartit i miris la valoració que han donat altres clients a diferents hotels de la zona, especialment aquells que són com tu, per exemple que van amb nens (això mateix he fet aquest jo per planificar les vacances d’aquest estiu). Tots en som conscients d’això, però us heu preguntat mai els sistemes i les plataformes informàtiques que donen suport a tot això? Us haig de dir que és impressionant. Per exemple, només per a que us feu una idea, google té més de 500.000 ordinadors repartits en diferents centres per poder oferir els seus serveis. Això només google. Us imagineu tot el software que fa que això pugui funcionar?

Però com la mateixa ponent anunciava en la conferència “Lo que hemos vivido hasta ahora es revolucionario pero los cambios fuertes estan todavia por llegar”, referintse a l’impacte que internet tindrà en la nostra societat i a l’augment de les noves funcionalitats que la gent tindrà. Això implica un dels reptes més importants viscuts fins ara pels sistemes informàtics i els entorns d’execució d’aplicacions, que han de suportar aquesta nova etapa, i sense cap mena de dubte requerint un ús més rendible i sostenible dels recursos TIC. Espero que des de BARCELONA TECH hi poguem aportar propostes que contribueixin a aquestes millores requerides.

…

…

Barcelona, located at the Mediterranean sea in the very north of the Spanish coast, is certainly the most cosmopolitan and economically most active city in Spain. Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia with a 7 millions of population. It has always proved its will to be modern, to follow the latest international tendencies or be ahead of them. To the tourist this is evident specially in its architecture, which so well reflects the general approach to life in this always pulsating city.

Since its foundation over 2000 years ago, the city has served as been the traditional gateway of Spain. Romans, Arabs and Christians have all passed through, leaving their distinct mark on the city. The visitor will gain a sense of Barcelona’s history simply by walking through the city, whether roaming the streets of the Gothic Quarter, built on the original Roman site or the Modernist Eixample district that is illuminated by the exuberant architecture of Antoni Gaudí.

Such diversity and harmony also flourishes in the character of Barcelona’s citizens. Enterprising and hard-working, they also possess a hedonistic streak along with strong civic pride and a love for culture. These traits have made Barcelona into a first-class tourist destination and the perfect setting for meetings and congresses. This open, welcoming city which hosted the Olympic Games in 1992 is now focusing all its energies on another global project: the Universal Forum of Cultures, which is being held in 2004 and will enable the city to complete its seafront area.

Barcelona enjoys a mild climate and an average annual temperature of 17 degrees Celsius. The sun shines on most days of the year and the Mediterranean brings cooling sea breezes to the city and moisture to the atmosphere. Rainfall is light, except during the few rainy months of the year, and needless to say, it rarely snows. Even the lowest temperatures are relatively mild. At June, one can expect temperatures of approximately 25 degrees Celsius.

UPC Information: http://www.upc.edu/eng/practical_info

Information on Barcelona: http://www.bcn.es/turisme/english/turisme

Information on surroundings: http://www.gencat.net/turistex_nou/home_ang.htm

A good reason to visit us: EUROPE’S COOLEST CITIES: Barcelona’s Sense and Sensuality. By Helene Zuber, (from SPIEGEL Online International) http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,502312,00.html .

Virtualization is becoming one of the most powerful (yet simple to apply) tools to consolidate applications in centers for processing calculations (CPDs) and in consequence is one of the clearest and fastest ways to obtain large energy savings.

Our research group, is convinced that we should collaborate in the spreading of this message, and has helped in this disclosure with TV3 (Catalonia Television) last January (the video can be seen at energyefficientcomputingtv3 in Catalan).

TV3 program: EL MEDI AMBIENT - January 3th 2008