GigaOM

Yahoo announced yesterday it would collaborate with CRL to make supercomputing resources available to researchers in India. The announcement comes on the heels of Yahoo’s Feb. 19 claim to have the world’s largest Hadoop-based application now that it’s moved the search webmap to the Hadoop framework.

There are a number of Big Computing problems today. In addition to Internet search, cryptography, genomics, meteorology and financial modeling all require huge computing resources. In contrast to purpose-built mainframes like IBM’s Blue Gene, many of today’s biggest computers layer a framework atop commodity machines.

Google has MapReduce and the Google File System. Yahoo now uses Apache Hadoop. The SETI@Home screensaver was a sort of supercomputer. And hacker botnets, such as Storm, may have millions of innocent nodes ready to work on large tasks. Big Computing is still big — it’s just built from lots of cheap pieces.

But supercomputing is heating up, driven by two related trends: On-demand computing makes it easy to build a supercomputer, if only for a short while; and software as a service means fewer instances of applications serving millions of users from a few machines. What happens next is simple economics.

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Author and productivity expert David Allen, the man behind the Getting Things Done movement, says knowledge workers are stressed because they try keep track of all they have to do, even when it’s not what they’re focusing on. The key to productivity, he says, is “making sure that everything you need is collected somewhere other than in your head.”

Researchers have been trying to collect everything you need and put it somewhere other than in your head — first in bulky backpacks and now documenting them online — for years. The collection and storage of one’s life was taken to an entirely new level with “lifelogging.”

MIT media lab alumnus Sunil Vemuri logged his own life for two years as part of a PhD thesis. His company, Reqall, has spent the year since its DEMO07 launch learning what its users want. Today it unveiled an updated offering to the service that handles delegation, keyword-based tagging, intermittent reminders to strengthen recall, and an iPhone interface designed in conjunction with folks close to Apple. With the release, the firm hopes to tackle two of the biggest challenges in memory enhancement.

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Web analytics giant Omniture has 4,400 customers that, taken together, represent roughly 30 percent of the world’s online ad spending. Last year the company’s servers recorded 2.7 trillion individual interactions, each of which represents a grain of knowledge about the Internet’s preferences and behaviors.

At the company’s user summit this week in Salt Lake City, Omniture unveiled a variety of enhancements to its service that open it up to external tools and developers. For example, marketers can share visitor activity with advertising networks, e-mail marketing, video delivery and visitor surveys. Or they can test different content to see what increases visitor engagement. Or adjust hundreds of search terms across several search companies to maximize purchases.

In its quest to help customers build the optimal online experience, Omniture last year acquired two firms whose technologies can not only test different content, keywords and offers, but can automatically modify a web site based on what drives more traffic, better engagement, or increased purchases.

Fans of this autonomic site optimization say it will free marketers to focus on what they do best: creative marketing. But critics warn that pandering to visitor whims leads to lowest-common-denominator content and countless computer-optimized sites that resemble one another.

We sat down with Gail Ennis, Omniture’s chief marketing officer, to get her take.

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Want to know what your visitors are thinking? iPerceptions has launched a free version of their MarketMotive service to help site owners with that very task. Called 4Q, it asks randomly selected visitors who opt in four fundamental questions:

• Why did you come here?
• Did you accomplish what you hoped?
• Why or why not?
• What was your overall experience?

The service is a joint effort by the web survey firm and blogger/author/analytics guru Avinash Kaushik, who is an adviser to the company.

Voice-of-the-customer analytics fill a gaping hole in the information desired by site operators. Traditional web analytics tools show you what users did — whether they bought a product or abandoned a transaction, for example — but seldom reveal why. “Gleaning insights from your web site data has meant a delightful and extensive torture of your clickstream data. But the story it tells is only about the what,” said Kaushik. “Free solutions like 4Q give you easy access to the why data.”

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Last week, we wrote that the registrars were under increased pressure. Their higher-margin businesses, such as turnkey hosting, were threatened by third-party hosting, simplifiers like Google, and the trend towards distributed SaaS applications. The pressure went up a notch with Google’s relaunch of Jotspot, now running on the Google computer, as Google Sites.  What’s most interesting about Sites is the sign-up process, which lets users either claim their domain or enter a domain they want. Continue »

Police in Quebec staged a series of raids this morning on young hackers located in Montreal and elsewhere throughout the province, arresting 17 computer users and confiscating numerous machines. RCMP allege the gang controlled a bot network of nearly a million computers in 100 countries. The arrests were the result of an ongoing investigation that started in 2006.

To be sure, naive users play a part in the vulnerabilities that these hackers exploit. Without proper firewalls and antivirus software, most consumer desktops are easy to take over. And botnets are getting nastier. They’re used in everything from online attacks to identity theft. Increasingly, the bot networks can also fight back against those who try to stop them: In 2007, the Storm worm launched DDOS attacks against researchers trying to study it. Cyberattacks in Estonia, as well as the highly publicized death of anti-spam startup Blue Security, were launched from such networks.

What does the legal system do about crimes that are easy to commit but whose effects to are potentially devasting? Continue »

The promise of virtual machines is that operators don’t need to worry about where their servers are. You can have one big server running on five physical computers, or a hundred tiny servers running on one physical machine. This makes it easy to adjust capacity; it also means creating a new server is as simple as dragging and dropping.

But while data center operators might not care where their servers are, the servers do. Today’s data centers are based on Web Services and SOA architectures. Instead of one big mainframe, we have many small servers all talking to one another.

In a traditional data center, machine-to-machine conversations like these can take milliseconds, resulting in slow applications. But if chatty virtual servers live on the same physical machine, they can communicate in microseconds.

Done right, putting virtual servers that need to talk together on the same physical machine could make applications a thousand times faster.

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