Thomas Hughes of UT Austin and Michael Miller of Johns Hopkins described the new era in disease identification and treatment that HPC is making possible. The big push is for patient-specific models that determine optimal treatments for specific individuals instead of a random population sample.

The process begins with medical imaging as we know it today: a CT scan, ultrasound, or MRI. From those information pieces, mathematical models are built. In the case of a cardiac patient, computational mechanics and a cardiovascular modeling toolkit isolate the necessary image; then a mesh template – based on technology from computational geometry – creates a 3D aspect. Fluid/ structure interaction analyses are run to determine flow patterns, which can pinpoint not only problems that exist but problems in the making: Is there a fatty deposit behind that section of artery wall? Has the aneurism grown? Is that swirly spot a place where sclerosis could form?

Loren Miller of Goodyear Tire & Rubber spoke about the company’s switch to analysis-based tire design in 1994. The traditional design – build – test process was very expensive and clearly needed to be changed, but engineers were skeptical about switching to modeling and analysis. Why? Modeling tires is difficult and complex. The simple-looking tire conceals all kinds of hidden complexity: 18 components, 12 compounds, 2 fabrics, 2 kinds of steel, and 60 other raw materials. And the rubber itself is a pain; it’s incompressible. The estimate on turnaround time for the kind of modeling and analysis the company wanted to do with the technology they had was 16 years.

What to do? Goodyear worked with SANDIA to develop codes specifically for Goodyear that slashed turnaround time. Over time, Goodyear designed its own automated design/ analysis systems and increased its Linux clusters from 16 to 128 nodes.

To date, expenditures on tire building and testing dropped from 40% of R&D budgets to 15%, resulting in $100 million dollars redirected to other R & D needs. Key product design times went from three years to one. Mr. Miller describes Goodyear as an innovation company, not a tire company, with one winning strategy: continue to invest in R&D.

Server virtualization has been a cash cow for OEMs, VM vendors, ISVs, and partners. Until now, the desktop virtualization market has been far less competitive. VMware sees an immense, almost untapped, and very profitable open ground, and they’re driving in their stake in a big way. From the beginning of the first keynote address to the analyst/ press briefings to the workshops, client products are a huge buzz in Las Vegas this week.

The best breakout session of VMworld 2008 – by far, in our opinion – was “VDI versus Terminal Services” with Brian Madden, who describes himself on his website as “an independent technology analyst, author, and thinker.” Sounds good to us; his posts will be a GCG must-read from now on!

So what did he say?

If you attended VMworld 2007 in SFO, you will understand my confusion. The theme last year seemed to be, “We totally rock. Look at our cool stuff. No other vendor compares. No one else even understands virtualization. If you have not already virtualized your entire data center, you are losing money right this minute, you poor fools.” Even fledgling GCG staff were aghast at the hubris of it all. Only the pompoms were missing.

And this year? To paraphrase: Our focus is on providing business value to customers (yes, yes, yes!) by moving in three main directions: Virtual DataCenter O/S, the vCloud Initiative, and the vClient Initiative. Our roots are in desktops, and we are going after that untapped market. End users want seamless mobile computing, and we intend to deliver it to them. We aspire to be a platform player. Our partners are a key part of our success…

“JAVA” is, of course, the ticker symbol for Sun Microsystems. The news is that Southeastern Asset Management, along with the subsidiary Longleaf Partners, has become the largest Sun stockholder in recent weeks by accumulating a stake totaling 14% (107,719,299 shares) of the company. There isn’t a lot of information out there on Southeastern; their public persona is as the parent company of Longleaf Partners Funds, a mutual fund company that “Invests primarily in mid- to large-cap U.S. companies believed to be significantly undervalued.”

A recent SEC filing on June 6th disclosed that Southeastern passed the 5% ownership threshold and thus was compelled to report their total holdings. This makes them the largest single investor in the company by a factor of almost 2x. The next largest institutional holder, Lord Abbet LLC and their Affiliated Fund, has slimmed down their JAVA holdings by about 25% in the last reporting period. Other institutions are also cutting back on Sun stock in recent months, according to the WSJ institutional investor tracking service. Insider holdings (McNealy, Jonathan, etc.) have negligible holdings relative to the public float and their shares.

Taking a cursory look at Longleaf didn’t reveal a whole lot. They are value investors, looking to buy solid companies on the cheap and then reap the rewards when the rest of the investment world catches up. They have large positions in a number of companies, but don’t seem to take an activist role. They also aren’t technology-centric; their holdings are widely diversified in a number of different industry sectors. So why take this big position now? And what are their plans for the future, if any?

A speaker (Kris Kaspersky – who I don’t think is affiliated with Kaspersky Labs) at the upcoming “Hack in the Box” Security Conference in Malaysia is garnering headlines with his presentation, “Remote Code Execution through Intel CPU Bugs.” Kaspersky is saying that bugs in Intel Core 2 and Itanium processors allow hackers to remotely control or crash any systems using the chips. In his session, he will outline methods that bad guys can use to convert systems running these procs into robots or, best case I guess, just crash the systems outright. He will also discuss his new CPU malware detection research, which was funded by Endeavor Security.

  Kaspersky’s most outlandish claim is that these bugs can be exploited locally or remotely regardless of any operating system safeguards or security software. He also states that there aren’t any existing workarounds or SW solutions to close the security holes. Hmm…this sounds pretty nasty and is, from a computing standpoint at least, end-of-world type stuff. But, before we give in to panic and start the looting and burning, let’s consider this for a moment…..

Don’t just download our papers and scroll through our disjointed rants… listen to Dan Olds, GCG Principal Analyst, talk data center hardware and strategy with host Ashlee Vance of The Register.  From the The Register: Episode 17 of Semi-Coherent Computing…

http://www.hpcwire.com/features/The_New_Science_of_Visual_Analytics.html

Anything with “Analytics” in the title is going to make us sit up and pay attention. We at GCG are keeping watch on the growth of decision-making based on statistical analysis of huge data sets of information, and its sweeping effect on pretty much everything, from the course of treatment your doctor prescribes to the way a movie studio chooses to end the film you’re watching.

So what’s visual analytics? According to Jim Thomas, Director of the National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC), “Visual analytics is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces.” Uhhh… ok. Anyone else need an example? HPCwire’s John E. West illustrates:

Consider the news stream at CNN.com and imagine that you are an analyst employed by Amalgamated Office Buildings to monitor what your competition, ACME Builders, is up to. You might be interested in news about big real estate deals, large purchases of steel, new metropolitan construction projects, and so on. But ACME is smart, and they know not to let news of their future projects into the press before they have the contract. There are clues, and any of these news stories individually might give a hint about what your competition is doing. The whole story, however, won’t be clear until you put all the pieces together.

Just think about how great it would seem to be a smart-guy type – a “Distinguished Engineer” – who possesses a sweeping, all-encompassing vision of the future of IT.

Now imagine how great it would seem to be that smart guy, possess that vision, and be able to explain it in a comprehensible way to a bunch of dopey industry analysts who are all jacked up on coffee, Coke, and snickerdoodles.

If you also have the patience to talk details with small groups of the aforementioned dopes and answer their tedious questions, you’d be Anders Vinberg of Microsoft.

Our particular questions for Mr. Vinberg related to his ideas about desktop computing: Where will we be five years from now?