[Freedombox-discuss] Fwd: [PRIVACY] [apfma] Can the mother of all supercomputers save us from Big Brother?
Russell Edwards
russell at edwds.net
Thu Nov 15 14:27:30 UTC 2012
Another independent call for a FreedomBox, more or less.
I have sent the author an email with lots of links and thoughts...
funnily enough he was my doctoral supervisor.
Russell
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [PRIVACY] [apfma] Can the mother of all supercomputers save us
from Big Brother?
Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2012 11:07:28 +1100
Reply-To: privacy at lists.efa.org.au
To: apf-media-archive at lists.privacy.org.au
http://theconversation.edu.au/can-the-mother-of-all-supercomputers-save-us-from-big-brother-10584
Matthew Bailes
12 November 2012, 8.11am AEST
Today I’m annoyed at Facebook. Among the amazingly witty and
touching postings from my friends and Amnesty International are
“pages you might like
<http://www.insidefacebook.com/2012/08/02/facebook-adds-sponsored-stories-to-pages-you-may-like-mobile-module/>”
and advertisements for things I don’t need, especially single women.
But on a happier note, I’m thinking about the mother of all
supercomputers (and if there’s one thing I’ll always be grateful to
Saddam Hussein for, it was for introducinginto the Western lexicon
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_of_all>the expression, “the
mother of all
”).
As I speak, the internet is enabling me to be simultaneously sitting
in on an international advisory board meeting from the privacy of my
own bedroom using a webcam, running jobs to look for neutron stars
on 57,344 processing cores on my new toy, Swinburne’s “Gstar
Supercomputer <http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/supercomputing/green2/>”
(or what I like to call “the beast”) and of course, thinking about
this article.
I learnt long ago that when you rock up at a university and tell
people you are an astronomer it sounds a bit esoteric and
irrelevant, but when you say you’re a supercomputer expert it gains
traction, funding and subsequent glory!
Why? Well fortunately, most senior bureaucrats in universities like
to invest in enabling infrastructure, and supercomputers sound like
serious, hard-core investments that will lead to engineering and
scientific glory.
Supercomputers can also be turned off at no cost, and because of the
wonders ofaccrual accounting
<http://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/accrualaccounting.asp>their
impact on the budget is minor.
Enter the beast
At Swinburne we have an astonishingly-powerful supercomputer. It has
more than 100,000 cores, a 2,000-terabyte “disk” and 10,000GB of RAM
all linked by 40 gigabit-per-second networking.
It is the sort of machine that brings a tear to an astrophysicist’s
eye. We can literally simulate the universe in it, make movies, and
find neutron stars in astonishingly peculiar environments.
The beast’s architecture and “building blocks” are not unlike the
machines used by Google and Facebook in large data centres. It
comprises about 150 “enterprise-grade”GPU servers
<http://www.sgi.com/products/gpu/>on an uninterruptable power supply
in a custom machine room.
Over the next few years it will grind through Petabytes (1PB =
1024TB) of data and serve the Swinburne and wider Australian
astrophysical communities, courtesy ofAstronomy Australia Limited
<http://astronomyaustralia.org.au/>.
But the beast is but a mouse compared to the cumulative domestic
computational power plugged into the internet and owned by Mr and Ms
Average in their own homes.
And there are some computational problems, such as searching for
aliens, that are “embarrassingly parallel
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel>” – that is,
a problem divisible into so many independent parts that can all be
run in parallel that I’m embarrassed to say how many – a fact
recognised bythe geniuses
<http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_about.php>behindSETI at home
<http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/>andBOINC <http://boinc.berkeley.edu/>.
The SETI at home project has used more than 3 million home computers to
look for aliens, and is the largest distributed computing project
ever devised. A computational marvel. A triumph of software engineering.
And the current alien body count? Nil. Even inRoswell
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident>. But even
SETI at home is only using a tiny fraction of the “mother of all
supercomputers”, the global internet and every home PC on the planet.
Facebook is watching
So what other problems apart fromclimate research, cosmology,
gravity and alien-hunting <http://www.gridrepublic.org/>map to this
massively distributed paradigm? Well, maybe Facebook?
Facebook houses a repository of everyone’s friends, postings, photos
etc. When you log in, Facebook builds a web page that lists your
friends' posts, their photos, and responses to your friends' posts.
It is an embarrassingly parallel problem with a bit of data exchange.
It also works out from all your data what advertising you are most
likely to respond to and hits you with ads. It knows who your
friends are, and what you like. It spies on you to know what to try
and sell you.
It tracks you around the world. It is the modern version of Big Brother.
I don’t like that. Some people thought Facebook was worth almost
US$100 billion. I don’t think it is andneither
<http://news.yahoo.com/facebook-stock-slides-lock-expires-141803895--finance.html>,
apparently, does “the market”.
The algorithm required to build a web page is trivial compared to
alien-hunting. The storage capacity per user is tiny compared to a
typical user’s home storage, and as the need to push for extra
advertising revenue increases it is inevitable that people will
become alienated and want out.
Finally, unlike a bank, Facebook is about trivia, and if it “goes
down" the world doesn’t end. So it is a very safe application to
work on. Indeed if everyone who used Facebook left their computers
on 100% of the time, software to emulate Facebook’s core activities
would be fairly simple to implement.
For each friend, a local application could bug all your friends'
computers for recent “activity”, and build up the relevant web page
for display without any market bias or promotional activities. Bliss!
The problem is that most of us turn our computers off. So that
complicates any would-be programming model. An alternative is
therefore for users to lease space for their private data on “the
cloud”, and allow friends with an appropriate key to see what you
have been up to.
Another option might be to have a micro PC like the amazing 5
WattRaspberry Pi <http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs>permanently online
in your house that contains all of your social media data.
The Raspberry Pi costs A$35, and only costs about 2c/day to run.
As users become increasingly uncomfortable with Big Brother knowing
things about them that they’d prefer were kept secret, programmers
will find ways to harness the mother of all supercomputers – the
massively distributed global internet and all the home computers
that reside on it.
The community-run networkDiaspora* <https://joindiaspora.com/>is one
attempt to do this for Facebook but other applications will follow.
When someone gets one right they might not discover aliens, but the
effect on our lives might be almost as profound.
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