Dawn: What do you like about working in Intel's Open Source Technology Center?

Eddie: Intel's Open Source Technology Center is a great place where I learned, grew up and contributed. The team here in China is young, open and skillful, and we all are in a very good atmosphere to help each other and work as a team. Each individual contribution is small, but we are proud of the whole team effort. That is the sole reason we received an Intel Achievement Award in 2006.

Dawn: How are you involved in performance tuning work for open source virtualization projects?

Eddie: I started my virtualization life in early 2004, and started working on open source virtualization projects, i.e. Xen, at the end of year. Performance is critical to the success of open source virtualization projects, but it was not that good at that time. I started the work with help from the team, accumulated all the expertise necessary and was able to improve it dramatically both in Xen and KVM.

Dawn: Can you tell us more about your efforts with SR-IOV Networking in the Xen project?

Eddie: SR-IOV, as part of Intel Virtualization Technology for Connectivity, is a significant product to improve I/O virtualization performance. It takes the advantage of Intel Virtualization Technology for directed I/O, i.e. VT-d, to reduce the intervention of hypervisor in I/O sharing. As a team, we implemented the SR-IOV support for open source virtualization and tuned the performance to achieve close to native performance.

Dawn: What do you do for fun when you aren't working at Intel?

Eddie: I like to spend time with my kid, playing chess or having fun together.

Canonical announced the availability of Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition, which includes Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) powered by software from Eucalyptus Systems. What makes this particularly interesting is that the technology is based on the Amazon EC2 APIs allowing companies to easily deploy their solution in a private cloud within their internal IT infrastructure or externally on Amazon EC2.

Steve George, Canonical's director of support and services, recently told Computerworld's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols that "People who have been exploring cloud computing have really only be able to use public clouds. UEC allows companies to build a cloud internally first, and then think about how to make use of public clouds like EC2."

They also made a special effort to create an image that works both on KVM (Ubuntu's preferred virtual environment) and Xen (the virtualization solution used on Amazon EC2). In an interview with CNET's Stephen Shankland, Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical Founder and CEO, said: "It's possible to build one machine image which works in both places. We went to a lot of trouble to make a version for 9.10 that works on EC2."

It is nice to see Ubuntu providing a flexible cloud computing solution for their customers. Companies need this kind of flexibility to easily move between internal, private cloud solutions and cloud solutions using heavy duty, scalable architectures like Amazon EC2 based on their changing business needs.

You can learn more about Canonical's cloud computing strategy in this video from the Intel Developer Forum.

Here are a few highlights from the report:

• Open source software meets the definition of "commercial computer software" and can be used within the government.
• Executive agencies are required to conduct market research before making software purchases, and the research should include any open source software that meets the needs of the mission.
• Positive aspects of open source software should be considered (peer reviewed code, unrestricted ability to modify the code, reduced vendor lock-in, etc.)
• Software fixes and enhancement should be released to the public when possible, but it is not a requirement to release changes back to the public except in specific licensing situations.

Open Source analyst Jay Lyman at The 451 Group said that "this is a model for government and enterprise end users to use for determining where open source software best fits into their organizations." He went on to talk about how "the memo and reaction to it represent something larger in adoption of open source software, not only by the U.S. DoD and among other governments around the globe, but also including enterprises and even SMB users: the official embrace of open source."

The memo was written by David M. Wennergren, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Information Management and Technology / Deputy Chief Information Officer US Department of Defense, and he will be keynoting the upcoming GOSCON event in Washington, D. C. on November 5th if you want to learn more about this announcement or discuss other uses of open source in government.

You may have already watched some of the videos that were recorded in the Intel booth at OSCON, but if not, you can still catch up on the earlier videos:

• Ken Drachnik from Canonical on Landscape for Ubuntu Systems Management
• Sven Dummer from Wind River on Developing Open Source Mobile Applications
• Joseph Hill from Novell talking about Mono
• Glynn Foster from Sun Discussing OpenSolaris
• Dr. John Busch from Schooner Information Technology
• David Stewart Talking about Moblin
• Robert Kasten on OpenSolaris Collaboration

You can watch more of our open source videos on the multimedia page.

Prior to their acquisition by Intel, Paul was the Business Development Manager at OpenedHand. In 2003 Paul and former colleague Scott Thompson founded OpenAdvantage at the University of Central England (now Birmingham City University). OpenAdvantage was the first and only independently-funded vendor-neutral Open Source solutions centre in the UK which helped over 250 local business take advantage of Open Source solutions. Previously he has worked as a web developer, programmer, database administrator, systems administrator, IT gofer, administration assistant, bouncer, box maker, sports coach, bicycle mechanic, musician, and paper boy.

Paul lives in Birmingham with his wife Jude, daughter Ileana, son Timon and 3 demanding cats.

Dawn: What do you like about working in Intel's Open Source Technology Center (OTC)?

Paul: My approach to things has always been to find a bunch of smart people taking on interesting challenges and somehow find a way to tag along. And that's what OTC is; a (big) bunch of very smart people tackling a lot of very interesting challenges. Plus me tagging along trying not to look too stupid and make some small contribution :-)

Dawn: What are some examples of how your team has improved the user experience for Moblin?

Paul: We do a lot of things, and I'm bound to get in trouble by forgetting someone's very important work :-) But broadly our work is focused around three things: the UX shell, the Media player, and the Browser.

The UX shell consists of the zones, the toolbar, and the various panels: myzone, status, people, internet, media, applications, zone switcher, and system panels: bluetooth, power, volume, and network.

The whole UX is built on top of our UI library, Clutter, which allows us to draw upon the expressive power of Intel Graphics Technology in a netbook (and in the future other devices). In addition to the base elements in Clutter we've created a set of UI elements, called NBTK, that allow us to build our specific UI for netbooks.

There are many improvements across the board from 2.0 to the upcoming 2.1. If I were to highlight a few:

• UI now scales to any screen size above the standard netbook resolution of 1024x600/576 - this means your netbook plays nicely with external monitors and can also be used on the growing number of Atom based nettop devices.
• Streamlined the zones experience for faster applications startup and zone switching
• New bluetooth panel for pairing and managing BT devices
• Support for 3G connections
• Many improvements in the browser: windowless plugin support and other plugin improvements, expanded right click menu, keyboard shortcuts, find in page, many small visual design tweaks, and many, many bug fixes.
• Media player: In 2.0 we tried to abstract over audio, video, and images and treated the same in terms of interactions and the playlist interaction. In 2.1 we tried to keep the same approach of the media player while streamlining a custom view for each media type to make it more specific.
• We have an online catalog of applications at the Moblin Garage and a client app called Moblin App Installer, which allows you to view and search the catalog and install or uninstall applications.

Dawn: Can you tell us a little more about your work with GNOME Mobile?

Paul: Really, I don't do a great deal - I do my best to represent the project at conferences and within Intel. But, like any open source project, the work happens in the trenches with engineers from various mobile and embedded companies working on the various GNOME components as well as their own GNOME Mobile based systems (for example: Intel with Moblin, Nokia with Maemo, Vernier with the Labquest, etc).

Dawn: What do you do for fun when you aren't working on Moblin?

Paul: Well apart from hanging out with my wife and kids, which is always fun, I volunteer my spare time at my local University coaching American Football. I'm the Offensive Coordinator of the University of Birmingham Lions, and we are the defending National Champions. Our first game of this season is on November 6th, so with that and the upcoming 2.1 release I'm going to be pretty busy over the next few weeks!

Avoiding Vendor Lock-In

Both Red Hat and Novell see avoiding vendor lock-in as a key issue for adoption of cloud computing; however, while their approaches to the issue are similar, there are some slight differences. Red Hat talks more about the need for open standards while Novell focuses on vendor interoperability.

Red Hat:

"while the benefits of clouds are well understood by most CIOs and IT managers, the barriers to widespread cloud adoption are also becoming clear. One of the most important barriers relates to cloud standards or, the other side of the same coin, the need to avoid any sort of vendor lock-in. Clearly, until cloud standards are established and accepted by cloud service providers, customers are likely to limit their usage of cloud computing, reducing its potential value."

Novell:

"The compute cloud will democratize computing by utilizing open interfaces and avoiding platform lock-in. This is harmonious with our brand promise of “Making IT Work as One”. It is also characteristic of Novell as a company who is passionate about Open Source, yet willing to work on interoperability with vendors who are committed to proprietary platforms."

Virtualization

Virtualization and cloud computing tend to go hand in hand, so it was no surprise that both Red Hat and Novell talked about virtualization as an important part of their cloud computing strategies. Red Hat highlighted a customer solution from NTT Communications with Red Hat Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization technology and talked about their partnership with Microsoft for virtualization certifications. Novell's virtualization focus leans toward Xen and virtual appliances.

Growth of Cloud Computing

Both Red Hat and Novell agree that adoption of cloud computing is growing rapidly, and they see this as a key technology trend. Most companies and analysts see cloud computing as a growth area, so it should not be a surprise that Red Hat and Novell are benefiting from cloud computing.

Novell's post has some interesting comparisons to past technology trends that have revolutionized the industry.

"Cloud computing is next. It will be equally transformational. The web provided clicking for “information” and cloud computing will provide clicking for “information resources”. Over time this will revolutionize every part of IT. ... The potential of cloud computing is great, but it won’t happen overnight—just as the other paradigm changes did not happen overnight. There will be many participants in this all playing different roles. For example there will be companies that provide cloud computing, and others -like Novell—that provide infrastructure software that are used by cloud providers or enterprises. Many layers of the compute stack will change to support the move to the cloud. Novell will not invest in all of them—no one vendor can have that impact. However, in the cloud infrastructure Novell will play a key role."

Red Hat focuses on innovation and progress in cloud computing:

"the last few months have seen great progress from Red Hat in the cloud computing space. Standards-based open source technology is a natural fit for the cloud. As with other areas of technology focus, Red Hat seeks to drive innovation as rapidly as possible to enable customers and partners to realize the efficiencies of cloud computing quickly."

Cloud computing is one of the more revolutionary trends that we've seen recently in the technology industry. According to Gartner, this isn't just hype: "Looking at real benefit, rather than the hyped expectations, we see a number of potentially transformational technologies that will hit the mainstream in less than five years, including Web 2.0, cloud computing, Internet TV, virtual worlds and service-oriented architecture (SOA)." Red Hat, Novell and many other software vendors will benefit from this growth in cloud computing.

If you want to learn more about how Solaris and OpenSolaris will use some of the new features in the next generation Xeon processor, currently codenamed Nehalem-EX, you will also want to read The Solaris OS and Intel Nehalem-EX (PDF) white paper published jointly by Sun and Intel in September.

You may have already watched some of the videos that were recorded in the Intel booth at OSCON, but if not, you can still catch up on the earlier videos:

• Ken Drachnik from Canonical on Landscape for Ubuntu Systems Management
• Sven Dummer from Wind River on Developing Open Source Mobile Applications
• Joseph Hill from Novell talking about Mono
• Glynn Foster from Sun Discussing OpenSolaris
• Dr. John Busch from Schooner Information Technology
• David Stewart Talking about Moblin

You can watch more of our open source videos on the multimedia page.

Dawn: What do you like about working in Intel's Open Source Technology Center?

Peter: The two primary things I like about the Intel Open Source Technology Center is the caliber of people -- by now there are maybe four other companies in the world that have an equivalent collection of Open Source talent -- and the ability to work with the hardware architects. I have a long background of working with hardware people, and I really enjoy it, even though it can occasionally be frustrating. In general, I think if something isn't occasionally frustrating, it probably isn't worth doing.

The final thing I enjoy about the Intel Open Source Technology Center is that management is incredibly supportive of all my Open Source projects, not just the "big banner" project of Linux kernel x86 architecture maintenance.

Dawn: How has your work on Linux changed since you joined Intel?

Peter: The main thing, obviously, is being able to work with the hardware architects; both being able to get insight into what is coming down the pipe years ahead of public release and being able to influence the hardware roadmap. I have worked for hardware companies in the past, but none anywhere near as influential as Intel, so at those places we had limited room for invention.

Dawn: You have been working on Linux since the very early days. What are a couple of examples of your work?

Peter: What I'm best known for is probably the Syslinux boot loader, and that is almost certainly the one single project I have spent most total time on over the years. I also enjoyed working on the original autofs, which I handed over to Ian Kent a long time ago. However, what I really think is my biggest contribution to Linux is the aggregate work I have done on the kernel over the years.

Dawn: Can you tell us more about your hobbies of hacking programmable logic, scuba diving, and fuzzy bunnies?

Peter: I started hacking programmable logic back in the early 2000's, since I wanted to get a better understanding of how life looks from a hardware designer's perspective. I found it quite addictive, and ended up designing a replica of a 1978 Swedish microcomputer, the Luxor ABC80, using an Altera FPGA board; I also designed a 16-bit microcontroller core at one point. This even briefly turned professional at Orion Multisystems, where I ended up co-designing a southbridge-NIC combo chip.

I got into scuba diving at my honeymoon in Kauai, Hawaii in 2000. My wife loves sea turtles, and after going snorkeling a few times we decided to try actual diving. A few years later we ended up doing a dive trip on the Coral Sea in Australia in conjunction with linux.conf.au; since then we try to go diving as often as we can. It is a marvelous feeling and a lot of fun.

Back when my wife and I were first dating, this adorable little white bunny rabbit named Scamper hopped into our lives, and really never left even though she passed away last year. We now have a pair of rabbits named Dash and Eclipse, who can best be described as the fuzzy versions of Pinky and the Brain. Rabbits are really wonderful creatures, in part because they are so very genuine... you always know where you stand with a rabbit.

Cloud Computing Spotlight: Virtualization's Next Frontier

"Because of its strengths in collaborative, standards-based innovation, Open Source software holds great promise for moving the cloud forward. Building on the foundations of mature hypervisor technologies such as those in Xen* and KVM*, open Cloud Computing infrastructures will advance the ecosystem as a whole." Read more ...

Project Spotlight: Xen and KVM Enablement for Trusted Computing

"The security of Cloud Computing is vital to end customers as they consider placing their data on public infrastructure. They need to be assured of a trusted environment, even as they share hardware with other organizations, cede administrative control to the cloud operator, and comingle data and applications of multiple security levels. Current work by Intel within the Xen* and KVM* projects is helping to advance that goal through a mixture of hardware and Open Source software technologies." Read more ...

Ecosystem Spotlight on Virtualization

"Nowhere do the benefits of Open Source seem more compelling than in the burgeoning Cloud Computing space, where virtualization and advanced technologies create bright opportunities for innovative companies. To explore the enterprise perspectives on public and private clouds, Intel invited a panel of notable experts from Cisco, Citrix, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and VMware to share their viewpoints at the Intel Developer Forum 2009." Read more ...

Content Spotlight: Security in a Virtualized Environment Whitepaper

"As with any major change to an organization’s IT architecture, virtualization brings with it a number of new security challenges and considerations. The hardware and software ecosystem continually introduces new measures to help address these challenges. The security outlook around virtualization continues to unfold, including the following key changes to the physical security model." Read more ...

Intel Expert Series: Billy Cox and Jun Nakajima

"Billy Cox is particularly involved in the development of strategic relationships between Intel and hypervisor projects, especially Xen* and KVM,* as well as cloud platforms such as the Eucalyptus project. Among his key goals are enabling trusted multi-tenancy in Cloud Computing environments." Read more ...

"Jun Nakajima is a Principal Engineer at the Intel® Open Source Technology Center who focuses on Open Source virtualization projects, such as Xen and KVM. In fact, Jun wrote the first code for Xen to take advantage of Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT) and continues to be recognized as one of the key contributors to Xen." Read more ...

Platform Technology Spotlight

"In the application virtualization space, many Citrix customers are looking to simplify their environments by virtualizing their Citrix XenApp* servers on Citrix XenServer*. Citrix recently benchmarked its XenApp 5.0 application virtualization solution with new XenServer 5.5 on the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series and demonstrated dramatic performance benefits, compounded by the use of Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology." Read more ...

You can visit the Open Source at Intel website for more information on open source at Intel.

• Ken Drachnik from Canonical on Landscape for Ubuntu Systems Management
• Sven Dummer from Wind River on Developing Open Source Mobile Applications
• Joseph Hill from Novell talking about Mono
• Glynn Foster from Sun Discussing OpenSolaris

In this video, David Stewart, Senior Manager of the Open Source Product Engineering Team at Intel talks about some of the most important features of Moblin, an open source project focused on building a Linux-based platform optimized for the next generation of mobile devices including Netbooks, Mobile Internet Devices, and In-vehicle infotainment systems. David talks about the importance of fast boot, fast shutdown, user experience, graphics advancements, web 2.0 integration, media, power usage and much more.

You can watch more of our open source videos on the multimedia page.

Dawn: What do you like about working in Intel's Open Source Technology Center (OTC)?

Wilfred: We have a great mission here and a great team of people to make it happen. People are not shy about questioning the status quo. We get to work on challenging problems and we get to do these with the best and brightest inside Intel and in the community. If you're into bleeding edge stuff, OTC is the place.

Dawn: Can you tell us more about the work that Intel is doing for open source virtualization?

Wilfred: We have been working for the past five years to add Intel virtualization technologies (VT) to open source virtual machine monitors (VMM) projects. Xen was our initial target, but we have extended our involvement over time to include KVM. Initially, Xen could only boot para-virtualized Linux guest. We added code to enable Xen to use Intel Virtualization Technology (VT-x) to boot unmodified guest OSes, like Windows. We worked with the Xen maintainer to extend Xen to 64-bit. We added support for Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed-IO (VT-d) so you can assign PCI devices to guest OS's. We also added support for Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) so you can authenticate the VMM you are booting on a platform. We are now pushing virtualization changes for power management, IO virtualization and RAS.

Dawn: How important are open source virtualization projects, like Xen and KVM, to cloud computing solutions?

Wilfred: Very. Some of the most prominent cloud solutions out there are built on open source VMMs. The cost factor is an important determinant. And the fact that you can get full sources to the VMM means that you can make changes to meet your cloud needs. I truly believe that open source virtualization is powering the cloud.

Dawn: What do you do for fun when you aren't working on virtualization technologies?

Wilfred: What's more fun than work? Seriously. I have kids that are approaching college age. I spend time with them when I'm not doing Intel work.

code used to hide the cursor

As you can see, I create a pointer to a Graphics Window object and I set the “useCursor” option to false. This hides the cursor so the user can focus on where the cannon is positioned, rather than the cursor. Another bit of code I added sets the starting position of the cursor to the middle of the screen. Because I start the application with a window that is 800x600, the beginning position is (400, 300). I originally set this position to (0,0) since when you are setting angles, the center point is (0,0). However, it turns out that this is not correct for setting this function. Here’s the line that sets the cursor:

code used to center the cursor

One thing I discovered is that you have to set this cursor position AFTER the window is realized, even though you hide the cursor previous to this.
Now that I have the cannon moving with the mouse and the camera following the cannon, I want to be able to move the cannon to the right and left as well as backwards and forwards. Although the cannon will move to the “right” or “left”, the actual movement I want to generate is a circular movement around the central object which is the castle. So the center of this circle is (0, 0, 0). The cannon is originally positioned at (2000, 9000, 180). At first I was thinking that the radius of the circle would be 9000. Remember, in OSG the ‘z’ axis is up, so the ‘y’ axis is the “distance” direction (for lack of a better description). The actual radius of my circle, then, is found by use of the Pythagorean Theory. The equation is below:

The radius then turns out to be approximately 9219.544. Using the radius as the distance from the Castle leaves me with the following code:

Moving the Cannon Right and Left

The change in location around the diameter of the circle with a radius of 9219.544 is determined by dividing 2PI by one less than an arbitrary number (g_scnNumCircleDivisions). The sin of this value is then multiplied by the radius found in the global “g_fDistanceFromCastle” . The height above ground is retained from the original position of the cannon. This vector is added to the circle center vector to obtain the correct position around the circle. I use “g_v3TerrainPos” as the center mark because it is centered on (0, 0, 0). To circle right, I add the delta amount to the total angle and to circle left I subtract it from the total.
The code for moving forward and backward is pretty much the same as above except that the changing value is the distance from the Castle (g_fDistanceFromCastle). This section also clamps the distance value so that the cannon cannot get too close or too far away from the castle. The code follows:

Code used to move the Cannon Forward and Back

For those of you who missed the previous blogs, here are some links:

Blog 1: "Threaded Graphics to MID: A New Journey"
Blog 2: "From DirectX to OpenGL - Wheels Up"
Blog 3: "OpenGL Graphic Formats and Conversion"
Blog 4: "Scene Graphs and Instancing"
Blog 5: "Load, Follow, or Get Out of the Way"

This virtualization partnership announcement came out on the same day as the Red Hat Analyst day where they gather industry and financial analysts together with Red Hat executives to talk about the performance of the company. Stephen O'Grady from RedMonk and Gordon Haff from CNet both had nice summaries of the analyst event if you want to learn more about Red Hat's strategy and performance.

According to the Red Hat press release, the virtualization certification includes:

• Validation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, using the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, with Windows Server 2003, 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 guests.
• Certification of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 host with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4 guests.

From ZDNet, Paula Rooney's take on this announcement is that "time’s are a changing. Microsoft and Red Hat delivering anything in cooperative fashion is big news and marks more major milestones for interoperability, virtualization and Linux."

Hadoop is an Apache project focused on open source software for reliable, scalable, distributed computing. One of the largest contributors to Hadoop is Yahoo, and Hadoop is part of the solution powering Microsoft's new Bing search engine. According to the Who Uses Hadoop page, other companies using Hadoop include Amazon, Adobe, AOL, Facebook, Google, Hulu, IBM, The New York Times, several universities, and many more.

Cloudera was founded to provide enterprise class support for organizations using the open source Hadoop product, and they recently announced the availability of a new product, Cloudera Desktop, a graphical interface for Hadoop that can be used with internal clusters or clusters running in a public cloud. Cloudera has also put together a strong team of people with deep expertise in open source, data management, search and cloud computing. One of the most recent additions to the Cloudera team is Doug Cutting, a search engine specialist from Yahoo and one of the founders of the Hadoop project. This is a big loss for Yahoo and a huge gain for Cloudera.

Om Malik recently weighed in on Cloudera to compare them to Red Hat. He sees many parallels between what Cloudera is doing now for Hadoop and what Red Hat was doing for Linux in the early days from similarities in the executive team, venture capital funding, technologies and more. Here's how he summarized his comparison:

The big change came this past August, when Doug Cutting left Yahoo and joined Cloudera. Cutting’s involvement is like the icing on the cake, giving the company the ability to corner all the Hadoop talent out there. It also helps that Cloudera has started to make inroads into newer markets, including biotech and retail. “Hadoop is going to find potential markets in any industry where there are large data sets that need complex analysis,” CEO Olson told me.

I remember talking to Red Hat executives back in the day and listening to their pitch about Linux everywhere, how they were going to go beyond the web community and help drive Linux into other corporate environments and eventually, build a services business around it.

Cloudera is following that same path. It’s developed its own version of Hadoop, one that’s optimized for the needs of large corporations, especially those that prefer a little hand-holding from their suppliers. By giving them this version of Hadoop, Cloudera hopes to make revenue from services. And the timing — the company unveiled Cloudera Desktop at Hadoop World (we are media partners) in New York, an event it organized — is perfect.

Game, set, match for Cloudera. (Quoted from GigaOM)

With cloud computing taking off, the open source Hadoop project is well positioned to become a key part of the many clustered solutions with large, complex data requirements, and Cloudera will be right there for those organizations that need help implementing Hadoop.