Of revolutions and succession

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Source: Stockfresh

11 April 2014

It’s no often a genuine revolution comes along, in technology or anywhere else.

We read constantly about revolutionary products, services or approaches that will, eh … revolutionise the world, but mostly they are, or rather the companies that proffer them are, full of hyperbole and bluster.

But one development reported this week, the Intel SGI cooperative on new cooling is a development with the potential to be revolutionary in the ICT industry.

The report said that Intel and SGI were working on new methods of cooling for servers that completely immersed them in a special liquid called Novec developed by 3M.

Now, it may surprise you to know that once upon a time, back in the heady days of 60s mainframes, plumbers were second only to programmers and network specialists in the ranks of IT due to the vast amounts of water needed to keep those ancient machines working. But more recently, as processor speeds started to hit and exceed 1Ghz, liquid cooling made a return, especially in the dark world of overclockers. But even enterprise saw the benefits again of the stability that could be derived from liquid cooled systems and certain high performance applications, such as super computers, clusters for modelling and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as used by the likes of the Formula 1 industry, used water cooling.

Others went a step further and used liquid nitrogen to cool high overclocked machines for very specific jobs, but this was problematic as the extremely cold liquid, on the order of more than -196 Centigrade, made the printed circuit boards degrade very quickly and they would lose cohesion and fail.

So it is interesting that a new liquid has been developed to make this practical, or at least to iron out the kinks in the approach. But the report does point out some challenges and here is where the potential revolution comes form. There are not only performance benefits in terms of being able to keep the silicon working in an optimal temperature range, but most modern electronics have their printed circuit boards (PCB) are laid out in such a way as to maximise air cooling effects. If suddenly that were no longer the driving force, what breakthroughs could be made to allow this new wonder liquid, Novec, to be effective?

Think of it, no more fans, but rather pipes and pumps to move the fluid around. The fluid would be moved through heat exchangers that could potentially be integrated at rack rather than server level, further improving packaging. High density could pack even more compute power into smaller spaces and dry break lines could mean that there was still the highly configurable and hot-swappable nature of current systems.

The possibilities are vast and the potential immense — especially for the vendor that cracks it first. That opportunity must be enticing indeed.

Watch this space.

On an entirely different subject, I had some good news recently. After the departure for personal reasons of the government CIO Bill McCluggage, many feared and myself among them, that the momentum would be lost and the very capable and qualified person that was Mr McCluggage might not be replaced. The important role, now more than ever as the economy finally seems to have finished lurching along the bottom of the abyss and begins to head for shallower depths at least, still has the potential to be instrumental in shaping that recovery.

Having heard nothing of late about the role, the search for a replacement or a likely time table, I was very much heartened to hear some news on the matter.

I have it on good authority from a source close to the matter that the process of finding a replacement is not only well underway, but should yield results in the short rather than the longer term. We should expect to see an appointment “by the summer” said the source.

Now, I don’t want to get into semantics about what exactly “the summer” might mean in an Irish political context — would that be 1 June, for those who count June July and August as ‘the summer’, or would that be 1 May, for those wrongheaded loons who say 1 February is the start of spring, or perhaps 21 June, the solstice?

Which ever way we look at it, the conclusion, according to the source, is that we should see a new government CIO within a matter of weeks, not months, years or never, as I with many had feared.

This is indeed, a good thing.

 

Footnote:

There is an interim government CIO already in place that took over in March.  Michael McGrath took over on 24 March for a period of six months, which in itself would seem to confirm the broad timeline suggested by the source.

According to the Public Expenditure and Reform site (per.gov.ie), McGrath came from a position as Executive VP of IT at ICON plc, where he was a member of the executive management team reporting to the CEO. ICON plc is described as a “$1.2B Irish headquartered company and the number four global provider of outsourced drug development services to the pharmaceutical industry”.

McGrath was previously head of Group IT and Director of IT for Europe in the same organisation, with spells at GE Capital, Woodchester Bank ESBI Computing Ltd, where he held senior IT roles.

McGrath holds a BSc in Information Technology from Dublin City University, is a Sigma Six Black Belt and a member of the Irish Computer Society (ICS).

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