Cloud Computing and Math

I've just spent the better part of two hours now trying to figure out Cloud Computing. I'm focused of course on where my product line can fit in this latest hyped paradigm. While it's positioned right now as more of a disruptive technology than anything else, there's clearly going to be some kind of future here. There are a number of nuggets out there, but so much of what I'm seeing is based either on scalable storage (seems that this one is almost solved with things like Hadoop and Map-Reduce). Which is fine for the data center people, but what about the analysts? How do you distribute your long-running simulations in these environments?

Grid technologies have been around for a long time now. The Globus Toolkit has been around for more than a decade. I've actually set this up a few years ago on a couple dual CPU Linux boxes that have been retired to my basement - so I know it's real and works. This is certainly one avenue to the distribute math solution, but it's very different than all these "cloud" solutions. Web Services underlies the communication is many architectures, but Grid isn't about SOA or SaaS.

So if you have "real" problems to solve (beyond SQL queries and other general database/data center type problems), how do you get there? I'm just not seeing it. What's actually running on the Cloud? And how do you get there? With volatile virtual Xen images, where do my compilers live? What runtime libraries are available? I haven't found anything real here at all. One of our customers is actively looking at Amazon's EC2 in concert with our Java library and he's worried about licensing issues as the solution possibly scales out to 1000s of nodes. Of course we have pricing for this having lived in the MPI world for a long time, but this isn't your father's parallel computing environment anymore.

Apparently you can create your own Amazon Machine Image with all your software on it. But how do these images talk to each other? If you spin up 500 images to run a simulation, what are the APIs for getting your data back out? Is it really just like having 500 of the same machine sitting in the back room and you just have each one dump data to a web service running on a master node on your desktop?

I guess nobody is writing articles to address these kinds of questions, so I'll have to immerse myself in Amazon's developer forums -- but that's immensely frustrating as 99% of them are solving regular old data center things and not doing anything interesting.

Loving For All

Yesterday I learned a bit about Mildred Loving. It's fascinating the stuff you learn about in History and Social Studies classes in high school and the stuff they just skip right over. This is probably somebody (or an issue) that I should have been aware of. Even with all the gay marriage stuff going on now, it actually never occurred to me that it was literally illegal to marry someone from another race. Sure, it was clearly not socially acceptable for a long time there, but I didn't think there were actual laws against it.

About a year ago, Mildred Loving released a statement on the 40th anniversary of her lawsuit against the state of Virgina. The details of the case can be found in Wikipedia and elsewhere, but I've pasted her statement below (taken from the Positive Liberty web site) because it's very revealing of the culture at the time -- note the judge's comments.

As a "privileged" straight white male in America, there are lots of things I haven't had to contend with directly. Sexism, racism, and heterosexism are words and issues I know -- but I've never had to deal directly with them. It is appalling to me that people think the way the judge's comments reveal; like I said, it just never occurred to me that this kind of marriage would be illegal. I figure it's about time I become a little more vocal on these issues. I'm not sure where to begin with that, but starting off at UUCY is probably as good of a starting point as any.

I can only hope my kids someday will read something similar about this time period and be similarly appalled about today's restrictions on marriage.



Loving for All

By Mildred Loving, June 12, 2007, the 40th Anniversary of Loving vs. Virginia

When my late husband, Richard, and I got married in Washington, DC in 1958, it wasn’t to make a political statement or start a fight. We were in love, and we wanted to be married.

We didn’t get married in Washington because we wanted to marry there. We did it there because the government wouldn’t allow us to marry back home in Virginia where we grew up, where we met, where we fell in love, and where we wanted to be together and build our family. You see, I am a woman of color and Richard was white, and at that time people believed it was okay to keep us from marrying because of their ideas of who should marry whom.

When Richard and I came back to our home in Virginia, happily married, we had no intention of battling over the law. We made a commitment to each other in our love and lives, and now had the legal commitment, called marriage, to match. Isn’t that what marriage is?

Not long after our wedding, we were awakened in the middle of the night in our own bedroom by deputy sheriffs and actually arrested for the “crime” of marrying the wrong kind of person. Our marriage certificate was hanging on the wall above the bed. The state prosecuted Richard and me, and after we were found guilty, the judge declared: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” He sentenced us to a year in prison, but offered to suspend the sentence if we left our home in Virginia for 25 years exile.

We left, and got a lawyer. Richard and I had to fight, but still were not fighting for a cause. We were fighting for our love.

Though it turned out we had to fight, happily Richard and I didn’t have to fight alone. Thanks to groups like the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, and so many good people around the country willing to speak up, we took our case for the freedom to marry all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that, “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men,” a “basic civil right.”

My generation was bitterly divided over something that should have been so clear and right. The majority believed that what the judge said, that it was God’s plan to keep people apart, and that government should discriminate against people in love. But I have lived long enough now to see big changes. The older generation’s fears and prejudices have given way, and today’s young people realize that if someone loves someone they have a right to marry.

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the “wrong kind of person” for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.

I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.