Linux, Windows or both? Doesn't matter to virtual desktop vendor, Ulteo

Ulteo is poised to offer commercial support for its free virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) software, which the open-source startup says will cost companies a fraction of established offerings from Citrix Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp. and VMware Inc., while offering, in some cases, more choice in platforms. Neither the Microsoft nor the Citrix app can deliver Linux apps, according to Koehrlen. The Paris-based company has already released a second version of its Open Virtual Desktop software, which lets companies host Windows and Linux apps on the same server and then stream them to remote desktop or laptop PCs. The software has been downloaded by tens of thousands of users, mostly IT managers who have been testing OVD as a less expensive, more flexible substitute for Microsoft's Terminal Services or Citrix's XenApp (formerly MetaFrame Server), according to CEO Thierry Koehrlen. VMware's technology, like Ulteo's, can support either OS, he said.

Ulteo hasn't finalized prices for its enterprise support plan, though Koehrlen said it "will be very cheap compared to Citrix or VMware. Dual OS support is something cost-conscious IT managers are seeking, Koehrlen said, since it enables them to reserve pricier Windows for power users, and then offer free Linux to the rest. "We have several dozen users who are using OVD today to manage several hundred users each in production, and are itching to go into the thousands," Koehrlen said in a phone interview. We want it to be a no-brainer in terms of cost compared to the big guys." Ulteo was co-founded by Gael Duval, founder of Mandrake Linux (now Mandriva) , and Koehrlen, who co-founded Intalio, which makes an open-source business process management software. Though called Open Virtual Desktop, Koehrlen said the current version of the software is neither true desktop nor application virtualization. It is small - 10 employees - though Koehrlen said that development and testing is aided by hundreds of contributors.

Rather, Open Virtual Desktop's "session virtualization" technology rides on top of simple streaming technology such as Terminal Services to paint the screens of users with Java-enabled Web browsers running on their clients, said Koehrlen. Companies won't start adopting application virtualization en masse until they start planning their upgrades from Windows XP to Windows 7 , he said. Applications can be hosted at Amazon's EC2. Ulteo is working on offering true application virtualization , but Koehrlen said it's not urgent. Eric Lai covers Windows and Linux, desktop applications, databases and business intelligence for Computerworld . Follow Eric on Twitter at @ericylai , send e-mail to elai@computerworld.com or subscribe to Eric's RSS feed . Read more about virtualization in Computerworld's Virtualization Knowledge Center.

Scientists, IT Community Await Exascale Computers

The race is on to develop a new generation of far more powerful supercomputers that could help solve some of the world's most vexing problems. Scientists also expect exascale systems to help them come up with processes for creating biofuels from weeds rather than corn. Exascale supercomputers, expected to appear by 2018, could, for example, play a significant role in efforts to combat climate change or develop ultra-long-life batteries for powering automobiles. Much of the work at various national labs to design and develop the new systems is funded by corporations that hope their IT operations can take advantage of the new technologies.

The need for exascale systems, and the difficulties developers face in trying to boost hardware performance without soaking up excessive megawatts of power, was widely discussed among many of the estimated 11,000 people who gathered last month in Portland, Ore., for the SC09 supercomputing conference. "There are serious exascale-class problems that just cannot be solved in any reasonable amount of time with the computers that we have today," said Buddy Bland, project director at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Oak Ridge, Tenn. For example, the next generation of supercomputers could be used to solve big programming problems and allow for the development of a new generation of scientific and business applications. The world's fastest supercomputer today, a Cray XT5 system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that's known as Jaguar, has a peak performance of 2.3 petaflops. The total capacity of the latest Top500 list of the most powerful supercomputers , released at SC09, was 27.6 petaflops, up from 22.6 petaflops in the previous list, released in June. A petaflop is a quadrillion, or 1,000 trillion, sustained floating-point operations per second.

One exaflop is 1,000 times faster than a petaflop - performing 1 quintillion, or 1 million trillion calculations per second. "We think exascale is a 100 million-core kind of enterprise," said Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM. In mid-2008, IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer - a hybrid system that runs both AMD's Opteron processors and Cell chips designed by IBM, Toshiba Corp. and Sony Corp. - was the first to achieve petaflop speeds. These future systems must use less memory per core and more memory bandwidth. Now the U.S. Department of Energy has started making plans to build an exascale system that's 1,000 times more powerful than Jaguar. Systems running 100 million cores will face continuous core failures, and the tools for dealing with them will have to be rethought "in a dramatic kind of way," said Turek. Addison Snell, CEO of InterSect360 Research, expects general-purpose exascale systems to come out of the supercomputer research efforts, though he predicts that "special-purpose [systems] will probably come first." Stephen Lawson of the IDG News Service contributed to this story.

Sharing Data Securely to Foster Product Development

Boston Scientific wants to tear down barriers that prevent product developers from accessing the research that went into its successful medical devices so that they can create new products faster. It's a classic corporate data privacy problem. "The more info you give knowledge workers, the more effective they can be in creating a lot of value for the company," says Boris Evelson, a principal analyst at Forrester. "This creates disclosure risks-that someone's going to walk away with the data and give it to a competitor." To read more on this topic, see: Security Breaches: Three Tools for Preventing Data Loss and Sustainable Innovation at Boston Scientific. But making data too easily accessible could open the way to theft of information potentially worth millions or billions of dollars.

This tension compels the $8 billion company to seek out software that allows the broader engineering community to share knowledge while managing access to product development data, says Jude Currier, cardiovascular knowledge management and innovation practices lead at Boston Scientific. That is, regularly monitor who's accessing what and adjust permissions as business conditions change. Active security is the way to address this problem, Currier says. Open but Protected Keeping the pipeline of new stents, pacemakers and catheters fresh is especially important because heart-related items account for 80 percent of Boston Scientific's sales. Boston Scientific had inherited regulatory problems from acquisitions it made during that time.

Over the past few years engineers have been focused on quality system improvements, Currier says. Now that those situations are addressed, the company is ready to reinvigorate internal innovation, he says. Before, Boston Scientific's product developers worked in silos with limited access to research by colleagues on different product lines. Boston Scientific is piloting Invention Machine's Goldfire software, which, Currier says, provides the right mix of openness and security for data. Information was so locked down that even if scientists found something useful from a past project, they often didn't have access to it. "We're changing that," Currier says. It combines internal company data with information from public sources, such as federal government databases.

Goldfire makes an automated workflow out of such tasks as analyzing markets and milking a company's intellectual property. Researchers can use the software to find connections among different sources, for instance by highlighting similar ideas. The goal is to have any engineer access any other's research. "The people in trenches can't wait for [that] day to arrive," he says. Engineers can use such analysis to get ideas for new products and begin to study their feasibility. Although the goal is more openness, not all data stays open forever. He adds that since installing Goldfire, patent applications are up compared to similar engineering groups that do not use the Goldfire tool. "We have had to educate [people] that we aren't throwing security out the window [but] making valuable knowledge available to the organization," he says.

For example, as a project gets closer to the patent application stage, access to the data about it is clipped to fewer people, Currier says. Senior Editor Kim S. Nash can be reached at knash@cio.com. Follow me on Twitter @knash99. Follow everything from CIO Magazine @CIOMagazine. Do you Tweet?

Apple customer collates 27-in. iMac display problems

A large number of problems with new iMacs, especially the top-of-the-line 27-in. model, has prompted one user to create a site that tallies issues ranging from cracked screens to flickering displays. Core i7-based iMac arrived with a broken screen. Canadian Web designer Scott Pronych created the Apple iMac (Fall 2009) Issues site to track the problems, in part because his new 27-in. By digging through Apple's support forum, Pronych identified 343 different users who had reported problems with their new machines.

On Apple's support forum, customers have reported receiving iMac displays with shattered glass, most of the time in the lower left corner of the screen. Cracked screens have garnered the most attention from bloggers and the media. The bulk of the cracked-screen problems have been reported by people who purchased a new iMac equipped with Intel's Core i7 quad-core processor . Apple unveiled the quad-core iMacs, along with revamped dual-core models in both 21.5- and 27-in sizes, on Oct. 20 as part of a broad product refresh that also debuted a redesigned MacBook and a new Mac mini-based server. Screen will go completely black for a second and then come back on. The cracked screen issue was actually low on the list, with just 54 incidents out of the 343, or 16%. The most widespread problem was a screen that flickered, "tore" or just went black: 179 cases, or 52% of the total. "That shocked me, too," said Pronych today. "But the thread is huge." The support thread Pronych referred to had more than 1,000 individual messages as of early Monday, with a view count of over 144,000, easily the most read of those on the iMac forum discussing problems. "I have been experiencing some problems with the all new iMac 27-inch display," said Jan Sampermans , who kicked off the thread on Oct. 27. "Screen distortion/flicker somewhere random in the screen (feels like it is more in the lower part) that looks like a horizontal bar of about 2-3inches just popping in and out of the screen.

Sometimes 2-3 times in a row." Although many users who reported the flickering said Apple had exchanged their iMacs, some noted that they had gone through as many as three machines before getting a defect-free system. In the first place, the best reason why I wanted iMac 27-in is the screen, so without this, why the **** would I spend money on this?" Kim was eventually given a third iMac, but that one sported shattered glass. Others complained about the solutions Apple support had suggested, or said they had run into roadblocks. "[The second] iMac had dust underneath the glass and a dead pixel," said Minsoo Kim Sunday on the "New iMac 27inch screen flickering/tearing/shutoff" thread. "Since it was a cluster of dust, I had a valid reason for it to be swapped and again, drove 40 minutes to the Apple Store. "There, the genius told me that without saying sorry for any inconvenience I may [have] had, 'Apple will not exchange any further iMac for minor screen problem like this.' I was shocked. Pronych, however, remained a loyal Mac user. "I got a replacement, and it's worked fine," he said. "I haven't encountered any of the other problems people have been reporting." The flickering display problem is not limited to the quad-core iMacs; of the 179 total cases Pronych documented, 94 involve dual-core iMacs, while 85 involve an i5- or i7-powered iMac. iMac have been posted on Apple's support forum. More than 81% of all the problems he cited, however, were for the 27-in. model; relatively few reports of issues with the smaller 21.5-in.

According to Pronych's analysis, more-recent iMac production runs have not exhibited as many problems as the Week 46 and Week 47 batches. Customers can log their problem with Pronych's Web site by filling out an online form . Apple did not respond to a request for comment on the iMac issues that Pronych collated.