Facebook Shares

Facebook Shares Its Cloud Designs

Cloud hardware could get cheaper because of the social network's self-interested altruism.

The machinery: A Facebook employee shows one of the servers 

that the company’s engineers designed from scratch

for its massive data center in Oregon. 

Jason Madara

If you invented something cheaper, more efficient, and more powerful than what came before, you might want to keep the recipe a closely guarded secret. Yet Facebook took the opposite approach after opening a 147,000-square-foot computing center in rural Oregon this April. It published blueprints for everything from the power supplies of its computers to the super-efficient cooling system of the building. Other companies are now cherry-picking ideas from those designs to cut the costs of building similar facilities for cloud computing.

The Open Compute Project, as the effort to open-source the technology in Facebook's vast data center is known, may sound altruistic. But it is an attempt to manipulate the market for large-scale computing infrastructure in Facebook's favor. The company hopes to encourage hardware suppliers to adopt its designs widely, which could in turn drive down the cost of the sever computers that deal with the growing mountain of photos and messages posted by its 750 million users. Just six months after the project's debut, there are signs that the strategy is working and that it will lower the costs of building—and hence using—cloud computing infrastructure for other businesses, too.

Facebook's peers, such as Google and Amazon, maintain a tight silence about how they built the cloud infrastructure that underpins their businesses. But that stifles the flow of ideas needed to make cloud technology better, says Frank Frankovsky, Facebook's director of technical operations and one of the founding members of the Open Compute Project. He's working to encourage other companies to contribute improvements to Facebook's designs.

Among the partners: chip makers Intel and AMD, which helped Facebook's engineers tweak the design of the custom motherboards in its servers to get the best computing performance for the least electrical power use. Chinese Web giants Tencent and Baidu are also involved; after touring Facebook's Oregon facility, Tencent's engineers shared ideas about how to distribute power inside a data center more efficiently. Even Apple, which recently launched its iCloud service, is testing servers based on Facebook's designs. Eventually the Open Compute Project could exist independently of the company that started it, as a shared resource for the industry.

Facebook's project may be gaining traction because companies that manufacture servers, such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell, face a threat as business customers stop buying their own servers and instead turn to enormous third-party cloud operations like those offered by Amazon. "IT purchasing power is being consolidated into a smaller number of very large data centers," Frankovsky says. "The product plans and road maps of suppliers haven't been aligned with that." Being able to study the designs of one of the biggest cloud operators around can help suppliers reshape their product lines for the cloud era.

However, not everyone wants servers to run just like Facebook's, which are designed specifically for the demands of a giant online social network. That's why Nebula, which offers a cloud computing platform derived from one originally developed at NASA, is tweaking Facebook's designs and contributing them back to the Open Compute project. Nebula CEO Chris Kemp says this work will help companies that need greater memory and computing resources, such as biotech companies running simulations of drug mechanisms.

Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM, which sells open-source cloud software to help businesses manage customer relations, sees challenges for Facebook's project. "There have always been efforts on open hardware, but it is much harder to collaborate and share ideas than with open software," he says. Nevertheless, Augustin expects the era of super-secret data center technology to eventually fade, simply because the secrecy is a distraction for businesses. "Many Internet companies today think that the way they run a data center is what differentiates them, but it is not," he says. "Facebook has realized that opening up will drive down data centers' costs so they can focus on their product, which is what really sets them apart."

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Computerization

English Articles Computerization

‘‘Computerization’’ refers to worldwide technology integration and adoption of computers and other electronic IT devices, along with the Internet, to support the activities that people do in the course of their daily lives. A person who uses a computer online exemplifies computerization, as do millions of other people who use any type f IT device. Thus, computerization generally has to do with the integration of IT evices and computerized systems into communications, transportation, manufacturing, ilitary weaponry, entertainment systems, and virtually all other technological reas of modern life. The process of computerization began in the late 1940s with he invention of modern computers to provide munitions guidance systems for the .S. military. However, it was not until 1969 with the invention of the Advanced esearch Project Agency Network (ARPANET) that computerization as we now nderstand it really began to expand. This is because ARPANET pioneered packet witching technology, which began the basis for the Internet in 1983, its commercialization n 1988, and finally the World Wide Web in 1991. Over this period of time, xtending half a century, what began as a small number of mainframe computers volved into personal computers (PCs) that have been widely adopted for academic, overnment, business, nonprofit organization, and individual user purposes.

Today over 1 billion computers exist on the Earth, with approximately 1.5 billion ndividual users of the Internet. The adoption of computers and other IT devices nhances Internet usage, and vice versa. High-speed (broadband) Internet connectivity expansion also drives computer, IT, and Internet technology adoption and utilization by individuals and organizations throughout the world. Utilization of the Internet expanded nearly 275 percent from 2000 to 2008. In North America alone approximately 72 percent of the domestic population (244 million out of 337 million people) now use the Internet regularly. North America represents approximately 18 percent of worldwide Internet users. And there are currently over 100 million Web sites existing on the World Wide Web, with thousands of new Web sites created everyday.

Growth of computer and IT device users and the Internet also stems from how much easier these technologies are to use. Long gone are the days in which a user needed to understand programming in order to use computers. Originally, computers were built with bulky vacuum tubes and comparatively crude electronic components by today’s standards. Consequently, these ‘‘mainframe’’ machines with their computer punch-card readers and their printing components would literally take up very large or several rooms within a building. Each mainframe computer cost millions of dollars.

Today digital computers, IT devices, and plug-in media/components are increasingly smaller, portable, and much more affordable. They have faster processing speeds, greater memory, and increasingly more built-in functions. For example, Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch devices are media players that also have Internet browsing and communication abilities. Several manufacturers are integrating personal digital assistant (PDA) and cellular phone capabilities, and it is difficult to purchase a cell phone without a built-in digital camera.

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Gold Standard

Gold Standard

A standard defining a national currency in terms of a fixed weight of gold, and allowing a free exchange and trade of gold. Until the nineteenth century, most of the countries maintained a bimetallic monetary system, in which national monetary units were valued against a certain weight of either gold or silver. The widespread adoption of the gold standard during the second half of the nineteenth century was largely due to the Industrial Revolution that brought a tremendous increase in the production of goods and widened the basis of world trade. During its existence, the classical gold standard is widely seen to have contributed to equilibrium of balances of payments worldwide. The same institutions that lent support to a period of remarkable globalization and economic modernization later contributed to interwar instability and the depth and length of the Great Depression of the 1930s. By the late 1930s, the gold standard as a species of monetary policy was mostly extinct.

The countries that accepted the gold standard had three principal objectives: to facilitate the settlement of international commercial and fi nancial transactions, to establish stability in foreign exchange rates, and to maintain domestic monetary stability.

Monetary authorities in different countries believed these aims could best be accomplished by having a single standard of universal validity and relative stability. In the early part of the nineteenth century, virtually no country had a gold-based currency. The gold standard was introduced by Great Britain in 1821 and adopted by Australia and Canada in 1852 and 1853, respectively. Between 1870 and 1910, however, Gold Standard 281 most nations came to adopt it. The far-reaching changes of 1871 led Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Finland, and the United States to adopt gold standards by 1879. In the 1880s, Argentina, Chile, Greece, and Italy chose gold-based regimes, but these experiments did not last. Many of the countries soon reverted to fi at currency regimes where it became impossible to trade a fi xed number of domestic notes for gold specie at the legally mandated quantity. By the first decade of the twentieth century, most of these nations nonetheless adopted the gold standard again. In the 20 years after 1890, Asian nations also linked up to the gold standard. With some exceptions, the prevalence of the gold standard lasted until the economic crisis of 1929 and the ensuing depression.

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Breast Cancer photographer makes women feel beautiful

Breast cancer photographer makes women feel beautiful

(CNN) -- Nearly every day, Terri Shaver comes face to face with cancer and can't help but think about her life and how short it could be.

For more than four years, the 56-year-old photographer from Laingsburg, Michigan, has taken free portraits of people with terminal and life-threatening illnesses as part of the Oldham Project, the nonprofit she founded in 2008 after her husband's two sisters-in-law died from breast cancer.

Although the Oldham Project, named for the two sisters, provided photos for families and children, Shaver started Be Bold, Feel Beautiful, a campaign specifically aimed at women with cancer, in summer 2010.

"I'll never be the same," she said. "These women are already dealing with the choices of the things they want to accomplish or need to accomplish before their time here is over. They really see the things that are important."

The campaign began as a way to provide the women who lost their hair from cancer treatments photos in which they felt beautiful. Although she had already been taking photos of people with cancer, Shaver wanted to raise awareness, and from her extended family, knew what a powerful effect going bald had on women in particular.

"When they lose their hair, 99.9% of these women have said that they lose themselves," she said. "They lose their identity."

Shaver remembers one woman telling her that when her eyelashes and eyebrows fell out, she looked in the mirror and saw an alien. But when the women see their photos -- some somber and some lighthearted, posing with something significant to them -- they regain their self-image. Shaver said some have even told her that they stopped wearing their wigs after the session.

Since the campaign started in July 2010, Shaver has photographed about 100 women -- ages 20 to 82 -- who have had cancer, as well as partnering with a local spa to pamper them and try to make them feel gorgeous for a day. Although it began as a campaign planned to run until October, which is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Shaver said the feedback from the women was overwhelming and she extended the campaign to be a permanent fixture of the Oldham Project.

"Your will has a lot to do with progress that you make when you're sick," Shaver said. "I firmly believe that if I can make women feel better about themselves, while they're undergoing this treatment and have no hair, their treatment will be much more successful."

Before starting a session, Shaver turns up the music in her studio and strives for an optimistic perspective, determined to make the day an uplifting experience for the woman, even though she knows this particular visit is likely a trip woven into a schedule of radiation treatments and countless doctor visits.

"You can't help putting yourself in these women's shoes as I talk to each and every one of them, thinking, 'What if that was me?'" Shaver said. "How would I react? How would I deal with that? Many times, I don't even have words."

If she didn't consciously take a more analytical approach to each woman's cancer, Shaver said, the project would be awful. It doesn't mean the emotions are absent, but Shaver, who used to be a nurse, knows she can't take on every burden she witnesses.

Toward the end of last fall when Be Bold, Feel Beautiful was in full swing, Shaver was scheduling sessions with up to 10 women a week and began to become physically and emotionally drained.

"I was sleeping three hours a night because I was thinking about the person I photographed yesterday or the woman I was going to," she said. "When you hear these people's stories, you spend a couple hours with them -- photographing them, interviewing them -- you become part of their lives."

She stepped back from updating the campaign's blog -- which was as often as she had a session -- and to her husband's relief, scheduled the portraits at a slower pace to give herself time.

Shaver said the only thing more difficult than a session is hearing the news that one of her photo subjects has died. The first was Denise Acker, 55, who died in August 2010 after fighting lung cancer, and was also the very first person to be photographed with Be Bold, Feel Beautiful. Shaver said five women have died since she began and it is devastating every time.

Dealing with the grief and looking mortality in the face has made Shaver live differently. She said she doesn't stress out about as many things because she has realized they simply don't matter. What gets her out of bed in the morning when she knows that the day's session will be tough is imagining that she has the ability to watch a woman overcome her insecurities and find peace in how she looks.

"It doesn't matter how bad my day is, I'll bet you their day is worse," Shaver said. "And I'm going to do all I can to make them look as good as I possibly can."

A little more than a year later, Shaver knows it sounds like an extraordinary statement, but she believes the ongoing campaign has the potential to save lives.

"If other women who are just newly diagnosed or haven't even been diagnosed yet see women like this who are strong, powerful, bold and feel good about themselves, they, too, will know that I can do this," she said. "They won't panic when they find a lump, they won't just stick their heads in the sand and hope it'll go away."

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