VMware releases its 'cloud OS'

VMware has released the latest version of its core virtualisation platform, vSphere 4, claiming it acts as a cloud operating system to the datacentre.

The product, the renamed successor to VMware Infrastructure 3, was made generally available on Wednesday, having been announced in April. The company says vSphere 4 will allow companies to centrally manage servers, storage and networks in the datacentre as though they were a single pool of computing resource.

Potentially, the new platform can reduce capital and operational costs by up to 30 percent in consolidation ratios, and 20 percent in power consumption, according to VMware.

"The bottom line is that this will enable customers to remove a lot of unnecessary overhead costs in the datacentre, where they might currently only be using 10 percent of server capacity," said Fredrik Sjostedt, VMware's EMEA director of product marketing. "vSphere 4 operates within the datacentre like a normal OS on a single server, but it provides access to the entire infrastructure, from storage to memory and switches."

The key improvements in the latest version of the platform are improved scalability for large-scale environments, more sophisticated management tools to control security and service levels, and an increased flexibility for customers choosing heterogeneous hardware, software and service-delivery models.

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One of the key new features of vSphere 4 is the additional functionality provided by the 'virtual distributed switch', says Sjostedt. Previously, virtualised servers each needed their own virtual switch, a complex and time-consuming process. With vSphere 4, it is possible to create a single virtual switch that can manage the entire infrastructure.

"What's interesting is that the physical networking team can now manage virtualised infrastructure for the first time, using the normal management tools. This makes the entire configuration process much easier, and reduces overall complexity," Sjostedt said.

VMware is building private rather than public clouds, but potentially organisations will be able to move virtual machines to third parties, according to Chris Ingle, a research analyst with IDC. "It's hard to measure who is ahead in the market, but VMware is showing some strong performance numbers with this release," Ingle said.

The most useful new feature in vSphere 4 for customers is likely to be the increased level of support for CPU, memory and storage, said Ingle. This may persuade enterprises that currently do not use virtualisation to make the leap, he said.

New technology translates human thought into robot action

An Asimo robot raises its left hand in response to the thoughts of a test subject. (Photo courtesy of Honda Research Institute Japan et al)

A research team gave the public a glimpse of the future Tuesday as it demonstrated technology allowing a person to move Honda's Asimo robot simply by thinking about it.

The technology, developed by the Honda Research Institute Japan (a subsidiary of Honda Motor Co.), the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute (ATR) and Shimadzu Corp., allows a person to direct Asimo to raise its right and left arms, run, or "eat" by thinking of specific actions.

The system, a combination of electroencephalography (EEG) and near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), does not use electrodes in direct contact with the brain, but rather a helmet that reads brain activity. Specifically, the helmet processes patterns in brain waves and blood flow in the brain associated with each action and then transmits the appropriate commands to Asimo.

For example, if a person thinks about moving his or her tongue, then Asimo will raise its hand to its face as though eating. Among the three human test subjects to participate in the research, the system was successful in interpreting their thoughts and sending them on to Asimo about 90 percent of the time.

However, there is currently a 7-9 second delay between the human controller's thoughts and Asimo's reaction, and due to the wide differences in brain activity patterns between individuals, the system must be specifically calibrated to each user.

In the future, the research team hopes to apply the technology to hands and feet-free driving and household robots.

Intel details future graphics chip at GDC

On Friday, Intel engineers are detailing the inner workings of the company's first graphics chip in over a decade at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco--sending a signal to the game industry that the world's largest chipmaker intends to be a player.

During a conference call that served as a preview to the GDC sessions, Tom Forsyth, a software and hardware architect at Intel working on the Larrabee graphics chip project, discussed the design of Larrabee, a chip aimed squarely at Nvidia and at Advanced Micro Devices' ATI unit.

And Nvidia and AMD will no doubt be watching the progress intently. Intel's extensive and deep relationships with computer makers could give it an inside track with customers and upset the graphics duopoly now enjoyed by Nvidia and AMD. In the last decade Intel has not competed in the standalone, or "discrete" graphics chip market where Nvidia and AMD dominate. Rather, it has been a supplier of integrated graphics, a low-performance technology built into its chipsets that offers only a minimal gaming experience. (In the 1990s, Intel introduced the i740 GPU which, in relative terms, was not a success.)

Forsyth said that there is not yet a Larrabee chip to work with--it's expected late this year or early next year--and that "a lot of key developers are still being consulted on the design of Larrabee." But Intel will offer ways for developers to test the processor, he said. "On the Intel Web site there will be a C++ prototype library. It doesn't have the speed of Larrabee but has the same functionality. Developers can get a feel for the language, get a feel for the power of the machine."

Beyond games, Intel is also trying to catch a building wave of applications that run on the many-core architectures inherent to graphics chips. Nvidia and AMD graphics chips pack hundreds of processing cores that can be tapped for not only accelerating sophisticated games like Crysis but for doing scientific research and high-performance computing tasks.

One of the largest test sites for Larrabee is Dreamworks, which will use Larrabee for rendering and animation. To date, Dreamworks had to wait overnight to get a rendering project completed. "Using (the) Nehalem (processor), Dreamworks can almost do it in real time and it is only going to better with Larrabee," said Nick Knupffer, an Intel spokesperson.

Larrabee is "Intel's first many-core architecture," Forsyth said. "The first product will be very much like a GPU. It will look like a GPU. You will plug it into a machine and it will display graphics," he said. (GPU stands for graphics processing unit.)

"But at its heart are processor cores, not GPU cores. So it's bringing that x86 programmable goodness to developers," Forsyth said. Larrabee will carry the DNA of Intel's x86 architecture, the most widely used PC chip design in the world.

ntel is touting the performance of Larrabee's vector unit.

(Credit: Intel)

"It's based on a lot of small, efficient in-order cores. And we put a whole bunch of them on one bit of silicon. We join them together with very high bandwidth communication so they can talk to each other very fast and they can talk to off-chip memory very fast and they can talk to other various units on the chip very fast." In-order processing cores are used, for example, in the original Pentium design and in Intel's Atom processor.

"It's the same programming model they know from multicore systems already but there's a lot more of them," he said.

The centerpiece of the chip's core is the vector unit, used to process many operations simultaneously. "The interesting part of the programming model is the SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) vector unit and the instructions that go with it," Forsyth said. "We want to show off this big new vector unit and the instruction set."

Forsyth described what the vector unit can do and how it works with the scalar unit. "(The vector unit) can do 16 floating point operations every single clock. That's a lot of horsepower. Even in just one of these cores--and we have a lot of these cores. So it's a very high-throughput unit. The good thing is that it's independent of the scalar unit. You can issue instructions on the scalar unit and vector unit at the same time. The scalar unit is extremely useful for calculating addresses, doing flow control, doing housekeeping--and keeps all those miscellaneous tasks off the real powerhouse, which is the vector unit."

At GDC, Intel is encouraging developers to experiment. "They're going to have questions about how do I find 16 things to do at once. But a lot of it is just getting in there and playing with the thing," according to Forsyth. The GDC sessions will be a tour around Larrabee's instructions--"how to actually use these new instructions," he said.

And what about markets beyond gaming? "A funny thing happened on the way to the architecture. We designed this architecture to be 100 percent graphics focused. Whatever we needed to do to get graphics good, we did. And then a year ago, we looked at what we had and said how much of this stuff is actually specific to graphics. It turns out, very little. Graphics workloads are increasingly similar to GPGPU (general-purpose graphics processor unit), increasingly similar to high-powered (high-performance) computing. So, we actually have very little that is specific to graphics. Most of the instruction set is very general-purpose."

Skype for iPhone: It's official

Months after teasing us at CES with an announcement of Skype's native VoIP client for the iPhone, the free Skype for iPhone will finally be available to download from the iTunes App Store sometime on Tuesday. We got a chance to sit down with the application's principal engineer before the announcement was made at CTIA 2009, to see Skype for iPhone do its thing. While most of the features aren't too surprising--Skype does want to maintain some consistency across its mobile applications, after all--there are a few capabilities that are notably missing, and a few iPhone-only perks that are refreshing to see.

At long last, Skype has come to the iPhone.

(Credit: Skype)

In terms of navigation, Skype's VoIP app for iPhone looks more like your traditional iPhone app than it does Skype 4.0 for Windows. For many who already prefer Apple's sleek interface archetype, that's a triumph, but those who enjoy Skype's branding may feel disappointed.

Skype's screens are well organized and use the iPhone's ability to add filters, for instance, to sort your contacts alphabetically, or by who's online. There's chatting as well, though Skype's flagship feature is its VoIP calling that's free to other Skype users and an inexpensive per-minute fee to landlines. Calls on Skype for iPhone work only if you're in range of a Wi-Fi network, so your call quality will in part be at the mercy and strength of wireless networks nearby--calls will not work over the cell phone network on the iPhone (but chatting will.) Assuming your connection is solid, you can dial a number or quickly call a contacts stored in your address book. iPod Touch users will need earphones with an embedded mic to talk. During a call, you can mute the line, go on hold, or put the call on speakerphone. In the My Info window, you can follow a link to buy more SkypeOut credit online.

Taking a photo from within Skype to serve as your avatar image, or pulling a picture in from the camera roll are two iPhone-only features that makes use of the phone's hardware attributes. Another imperfect, but still neat, feature is the ability to accept incoming conference calls. While you won't be able to initiate a call, we're told, you will be able to jump on one if a buddy invites you in. We hope the next version includes placing conference calls from the iPhone.

Skype left a few more skills out of its maiden iPhone voyage. SMS, setting up a conference calling group, purchasing SkypeOut credit directly, and being able to field a second incoming Skype call are a few. File transferring and getting Skype voicemail native on the phone are two more. We expect to see at least two of these added in the next version, but we'll hope for more.

Skype versus the competition
Here's the big question on our minds: will Skype's iPhone app replace competitors like Nimbuzz and Fring, which focus on cross-network IM but also include VoIP calls with Skype pals even though they've been available for the iPhone for months? Kurt Thywissen, the principal engineer for Skype for iPhone, thinks so. He says what the other apps use is a workaround that requires them to channel calls through a server and transcode audio, resulting in poorer-quality calls than Skype can do in its own app. He may be right, but those who IM more than they vocalize probably won't ditch the likes of Fring too soon. They might, however, let Skype handle the calls and let another app take care of the multinetwork chatting.

Inside Skype for iPhone--photos

Terrafugia's flying car makes maiden voyage

It may look like a Volkswagen Beetle in the belly of a carp, but the Terrafugia Transition (at right) is a bona fide flying car.

(Credit: Terrafugia)

This story has been updated. See below for details.

The start-up Terrafugia first popped up on our radar screens in early 2006 with a one-fifth scale model, $30,000 in prize money, and an urge to build a car that could fly. Or is that an airplane you can take on the highway?

Some signs point strongly to the latter. Terrafugia describes its Transition vehicle as a "roadable aircraft" and is pitching it in part as giving private pilots an easy travel alternative when bad weather makes flying a bad idea, or simply to avoid having to take a separate car to the airport. Also, in the eyes of the Federal Aviation Administration, the vehicle falls into the light sport aircraft category.

On March 5, Terrafugia got to show that--whatever the eventual business prospects--the Transition can indeed fly. The maiden voyage (the duration wasn't specified) took place at the Plattsburgh International Airport in New York, with a retired U.S. Air Force Reserve colonel in the pilot's seat. The flight followed six months of static, road, and taxi testing.

As a car, the two-seat Transition is designed to be easy on garages and oncoming traffic--its wings fold up quite snugly. In folded mode, the approximately 19-foot-long vehicle is 80 inches wide, and 6 feet, 9 inches high. As an airplane, it stands a few inches shorter and has a wingspan of 27 feet, 6 inches.

The vehicle runs off unleaded fuel from your run-of-the-mill gas station for both terrestrial and aerial travel, cruising at highway speeds on land and better than 115 miles per hour in the air.

But Woburn, Mass.-based Terrafugia (Latin for "escape from land") still has a long road ahead of it. The vehicle that flew earlier this month is still just a proof of concept, and a production prototype has yet to be built, tested, and certified. The company says it expects to make the first customer delivery of a Transition in 2011.

Photos: Terrafugia's flying car flies

Update March 20, 9:41 a.m. PDT: Terrafugia CEO/CTO Carl Dietrich rolled out the Transition for an appearance on the CBS Early Show. He said that the price tag for the carbon fiber-built vehicle is $194,000, and that the (refundable) deposit is $10,000.

In the video below, you can get a look at the controls inside the cockpit--er, at the driver's seat?--and watch the wings unfold.

Watch CBS Videos Online

Google ad exec tapped to head AOL

Time Warner's CEO Jeff Bewkes announced this evening that AOL's current chairman and CEO Randy Falco will be replaced by Tim Armstrong, President of Google's American Operations and board member of the Advertising Council, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and The Advertising Research Foundation.

Bewkes called Armstrong an advertising pioneer, who has "a stellar reputation and proven track record." Armstrong will also be of crucial importance in Time Warner's decisions about the future of the AOL brand.

The timing of this appointment could prove critical in several aspects of AOL's business. The advancement of AOL Classifieds, which is a classified advertisement service, for one, stands to benefit from Armstrong's expertise in the advertising field. AOL Classifieds is stepping up to Craigslist and the weakening eBay by selling classified ad listings based upon their visibility. The pool of listings comes from some 80,000 sources from Oodle, including MySpace Classifieds, Washington Post Express, and Petfinder.com.

Even further into Armstrong's realm of expertise is AOL's Platform-A advertising network, which is actually more successful than both Yahoo and Google in terms of US online audience reach.

Bewkes announced that CEO Randy Falco and COO Ron Grant will be leaving the company after Armstrong transitions into the leadership position. "Under Randy and Ron, AOL's programming sites exhibited year-over-year growth in unique visitors for 23 consecutive months with many of its sites now in the top five of their categories," Bewkes said. "They also assembled Platform-A, the number one display ad network in the US with a reach of more than 90%. They also aggressively cut costs as they restructured the Audience business portion of the company into three distinct operating units: People Networks, MediaGlow, and Platform-A. As Randy and Ron move on, they leave AOL with our gratitude and appreciation for remaking the company and bringing it to a new and promising level."

This is all part of a continuing evolution at AOL, which has successfully transitioned the company from the number one ISP of the dialup era into the #4 Web property owner in the US, whose sites attract some 57% of all US Internet users.