The Network is the Anti-Computer

With this statement I may have rubbed various people in various ways, so I have to justify my position. I had not had this position until this afternoon. But let me explain…

I spent the afternoon in the SGI booth doing something I’d never done before: installing software for a demo. The software is an open-source ray tracer co-developed by SGI and the University of Utah, with much of my work in it. But the software is not really the issue, the data is. The dataset involved in this demo is 34-Gigbyte, representing the whole Boeing 777 airliner in all its glorious and gory details. You see all these wild pipes and wires and... stuff. Screws, rivets, and buttons are not exactly wild objects, but it's wild to have so many of them; it's wild to have all of them represented in detail.

In any case, the plane is digitally bulky at 34 Gigbytes and 350 million triangles. Triangles? Sorry for the geek speak, but these were what Jim Clark founded SGI to draw, and SGI is still doing it, so many years later, with Jim watching (or not) from his sailboat. Yeah, the drawing of triangles has a tradition in the Silicon Valley that far predates nVidia and ATI... I still have not explained why we draw triangles, but you get the idea – it's the starting point of a great adventure, the first masterpiece by a man revered as a national treasure, and a stepping stone to the mighty heights of Netscape.

Did they tell you that it was easy to digress in a blog? I’m going back to installation of the demo. The first sign of trouble came when I noticed that the data file was appallingly small – about 2 gig. My heart sank further when I found that, in fact, it was the wrong data – a much smaller piece that was usually used only for testing.

In case you have not realized, we were in trouble. The good thing was that there was no confusion; the problem was well defined: ship 34Gb of data in the fastest possible way from 1500 Crittenden Lane, Mountain View, CA to 1001 Marquette Ave., Minneapolis, MN, i.e. from SGI headquarters to a Hilton Hotel in Minneapolis. (I have the full addresses here because they will become relevant later.)

The first thought, of course, was to transfer it over the network; the immediate second thought was, don't even try. Despite widespread gossip about Paris Hilton and her Sidekick handheld, this hotel isn’t exactly a high-tech place and nowhere near the backbone of the Internet. For a while Alan was able to pull only a few K’s per second. Something else had to be done.

George came to the rescue. The SGI campus at Chippewa Falls is about an hour away, so George came up with an idea. His good friend Brian would transfer the data to the Chippewa Falls office, and George would go and fetch the hard drive via the public road system. I felt relieved… George got into his car and went on his way, speeding towards Chippewa Falls. In the meantime, swarms of data packets of delicious bits flowed relentlessly from California to the same destination. They’d rendezvous and make me whole. It all sounded good.

Then I got a phone call and it was George. No, his car didn’t break down. Despite the tens of thousands of explosions required to get him home (uhr, they call these “internal combustion”, but you know what I mean), George arrived without an issue. But the bandwidth from Mountain View to the Chippewa Falls office wasn’t good. I forgot the actual number, but it was not good at all – the ETA, or expected time of arrival, would be many hours; not good to the extent that George suggested that we have a back-up plan.

The backup plan was… drums rolling… FedEx. This has been a joke in the large data processing community, but it was now unfolding in front of my eyes. I called home and the good man and woman of SGI, Mountain View, (you know who you are – thank you!) managed to get a disk loaded and mailed out at sundown. It will be delivered before 10:30 tomorrow morning. After all the trouble, I can easily settle with that.

So if the network isn’t exactly anti-computer, it is easily the weakest link. (Imagery begins to arise, "you see Mr. Anderson, what is the use of a phone call if you can't spea..k?", but I refuse to digress.) The bandwidth will not be there when you need it the most.

Ultimately, to move anything around physically is an expensive deal. Moving around large collections of atoms (e.g. the bodies that comprise this conference) is the most troublesome. Moving electrons is relatively easy, but as we have learned, it’s not so easy to move e.g. 35Gb’s worth of them. I guess spintronics is to avoid moving the electrons… ok, I don’t know what I’m talking about, and so I stop.