The Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvZA9n3e5pc&list=PLoROMvodv4rMWw6rRoeSpkiseTHzWj6vu

by tosh • 6 years ago

125 37 6 years ago

guerrilla2• 6 years ago

Would someone like to tl;dr? I can't tell whether I want to watch this 1h26m video based on its vague title.

guerrilla2• 6 years ago

While our software systems have become increasingly elastic, the physical substrate available to run that software (that is, the computer!) has remained stuck in a bygone era of PC architecture. Hyperscale infrastructure providers have long since figured this out, building machines that are fit to purpose -- but those advances have been denied to the mass market. In this talk, we will talk about our vision for a new, rack-scale, server-side machine -- and how we anticipate advances like open firmware, RISC-V, and Rust will play a central role in realizing that vision.

justicezyx3• 6 years ago

This is a bland PR oriented statement. I was roughly expecting this level of details from the speaker.

The one statement feels rather bland: "those advances have been denied to the mass market"

What does this mean?

It was not denied, they were just too complex for mass market. People are happy to pay AWS so that they can worry not the machines, and write JS code from day one.

bcantrill2• 6 years ago

No, they've been denied: I elaborate on this in the talk, but if you look at (say) an OCP-based system (e.g., Facebook's Tioga Pass[1]), the innovations in that system are simply not available for any price to the enterprise buyer. And yes, those buyers emphatically do exist -- and no, they are certainly not everyone deploying on elastic infrastructure.

[1] https://www.opencompute.org/documents/facebook-2s-server-tio...

jamwt• 6 years ago

People are happy to pay AWS

Many of them are not.

We have serious vendor lock-in now, where a very few companies are gatekeepers to almost any business that runs on the internet.

And their margins are _enormous_ on this business. It ends up costing much, much more to pay them to run our machines for us.

And increasingly, the expertise to do this is being consolidated in these companies, so the talent available to pursue any other way is diminishing as new grads never learn about the magic places their code runs.

The reliability outcomes are nearly the same, despite the deferral to their expertise.

Labor savings b/c you don't to learn about provisioning your own machines? Not much. AWS is so sophisticated you need to develop a nearly equivalent amount of (non-portable) expertise to actually operate it well. Remember, the alternative isn't just rack your own, it's... dedicated hosting! And lots of other options with less lock-in and more standards.

It's sort of frightening how complicit the broader technology industry is in this power consolidation.

steveklabnik5• 6 years ago

This is probably the most thorough public explanation of what we're doing over at Oxide.

rudedogg• 6 years ago

When you posted about joining Oxide I couldn't quite figure out what they (now you) do by looking at the homepage. I stumbled across this other lecture (https://youtu.be/3LVeEjsn8Ts?t=2189) that is along the same line of thinking, and it started to make sense.

steveklabnik5• 6 years ago

Thanks, I'll have to check this out!

iamjk• 6 years ago

Their podcast, "On the Metal" provides more context at the work they're aiming to accomplish.

jpm_sd• 6 years ago

Got a TL;DW for us? Video is 86 minutes long.

kaliszad5• 6 years ago

Basically they want to build rack scale computers with open/ auditable firmware all the way down and really design the hardware for "hyper-scale" like computing. That means, no VGA/ USB/ DVD on the server, power and networking will probably be solved for more servers at once, there will be APIs for all of the low level stuff that is probably inconsistent with your typical Dells, HPEs, Lenovos, SuperMicros.

I find, Bryan Cantrill talks are generally worth it to watch even just for entertainment if for nothing else.

steveklabnik5• 6 years ago

The sibling comment is good.

The problem that we're trying to solve is basically laid out on this slide: https://youtu.be/vvZA9n3e5pc?list=PLoROMvodv4rMWw6rRoeSpkise...

The business is "we will be selling servers." You can't buy any yet, but in the future, you'll be able to.

The talk lays out a history of servers, describes the problems with the servers that you can buy from vendors today, and lays out why we think we can build better ones.

PhantomGremlin• 6 years ago

To add to sibling comments, I think this endeavor involves RISC-V based hardware supported by Rust software. That info is buried deep within the talk, I scrubbed thru so YMMV.

The specific complaint I (and the GP) have is: synopsis, synopsis, synopsis. Give me a few paragraph summary before asking me to invest an hour and a half of my time.

kaliszad5• 6 years ago

Good luck/ "kick ass and have fun" while pushing computing forward. I applaud the effort to make the very foundations of computing more robust and introspectable. The most laudable goal seems to me to be especially the general accessibility of some of these achievements in the long run even to non-customers. Maybe, open and robust firmware will become the standard. Please also embrace IPv6 to prevent taking all the brokenness in that area (e.g. network boot, remote management) for the ride into the 21. century.

steveklabnik5• 6 years ago

Thank you! It has been a lot of fun so far. My colleagues are some of the smartest, most helpful people I've ever worked with. I look forward to that future too :)

ArtWomb• 6 years ago

This is a great talk! I have to admit my first thought wasn't to the data center. Which is obviously the predominant global energy waste. But to the "local" problem of green compute for IoT / drones / autonomous systems. What's the state of the art in OS dvelopment for high efficiency embedded hardware such as Contiki, Tiny OS, RIOT, Zypher, Mbed and Brillo? And what are the major insights that are missing?

steveklabnik5• 6 years ago

I don't know! Since we're focused on the data center, that's where I have been too. I joined partially for personal growth; this is an area that I don't know as much about as I'd like to. It's only been a few weeks, but I've learned a ton. And there's enough of it in that space that I haven't had as much time or energy to look into other spaces. I do agree that there's a ton of IoTish things, and that it matters.

zeckalpha• 6 years ago

The title is a reference to Tracy Kidder’s book: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

teh_klev2• 6 years ago

It's a bit of a shame Cantrill jumps from the PDP11/70 to the Sun blob without even a brief mention of DG's finest (and the namesake company of the title of the presentation) such as the Nova and Eclipse ranges of their day. We should all feel cheated by this :) But anyway...

I was once-upon-a-time a Data General field engineer back in the 80's and bumped into The Soul of a New Machine around '87. It's a great read and a nice insight into DG as a company who were still considered a wee bit of a rogue outlier compared to DEC and IBM.

I'm a member of a closed group of ex DG employees on Facebook (was still permitted membership due to being in the broker game back then despite not being an employee), they're a really nice bunch of folks, though growing older by the day.

I had the pleasure and luck to work on older Novas (like the 800, 1200 and 3's) and the Nova 4 and the Eclipse 16-bit range such as the S/130's and all their associated peripherals (Phoenix and Gemini hard disks, Zebra disk drives the size of two washing machines etc). Fun fact - you could upgrade the Nova 4 to an S/140 by "obtaining" the correct microcode PROM's and performing some other minor patching; we did this, it wasn't always considered legal, but every other broker out there also was up to this game. DG didn't seem to mind because by then their mainline product by then were the MV's. DG was a very leaky company with regards to getting hold of "stuff", I don't recall anyone being sued for unlicensed and pirated copies of RDOS or AOS etc. A thing that was an expensive item from DG but almost like a consumable were these things called paddle boards. They're basically passive PCB's that allow interfacing between the inside of the machine to the outside world. We never bought these from DG, they always came from "some guy" and a box of 20 cost less than a bonafide DG part. DG knew this but never complained.

The diagnostic tools were tremendous (DTOS and ADES) which coupled with a portable fiche reader allowed you to diagnose and fix most problems on site. These were good times and I learned a huge amount about problem solving as a young broth-of-a-boy engineer. I still have a copy of "How to Microprogram Your Eclipse Computer" where I learned about microcode and that assembler wasn't really the true bare metal of a CPU :) I have other war stories I should write down some time.

bcantrill2• 6 years ago

Sorry to sell DG short! (I did give it a brief mention at the top, it was just very very brief.) For whatever it's worth, I did go into DG in more depth in my blog entry on re-reading of Soul last year[1] -- one that attracted some comments from some very closely associated with the company and book!

[1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2019/02/10/reflecting-on-the-sou...

vaxman• 6 years ago

yep, and was hoping the youtube would be a rock video...Question Stanford's position on this --DEC had a big office in Palo Alto, but it is where we kept the feral Unix (er Ultrix) monsters...and DEC won the 32-bit war baby (at least until the micro prism chip architecture was misappropriated into the 8080, er. Pentium "Pro").

TL;DR: DataGeneral (a spin off of DEC from before my time) with the Eclipse team was battling DEC (a 1950s tech giant that made its name subverting IBM) with the VAX team for "first 32-bit" bragging rights. (To make things interesting, for me at least, my Dad was an expert at Data General technology and I was a teenage mutant DEC nerd.) When I learned VAX MACRO32 they were drawing comparisons between it and the (even then, older than dirt) IBM 360 assembler and it was totally mind blowing. Getting rid of of the memory limit on the (preceding) PDP11's separate code and data segments and introducing a 4.3GB virtual address space (the "Virtual Address eXtension") changed everything. Prior to that, computer scientists had to rely on complex "overlay" techniques to swap program and data segments in and out of memory at the application level (under RT11 and RSX11, the preceding operating systems to DEC 32-bit VAX/VMS and under RDOS, the preceding operating system to DG 32-bit A/OS). Too hard for non-specialists, so someone wrote an entire operating system (RSTS/E) in BASIC which was quickly starting to dominate in the run up to VMS (also probably inspired Bill Gates and his BASIC interpreter ROMs for competing microprocessors).

iPhones/Macs and even Raspberry Pi are all dumping 32-bit now, but cost-effective 32-bit lives on in nRF and ESP class micro controllers that will surely "eat the planet" (who needs to carry a phone, dawn AR glasses/earplugs or sit at a desk/tablet when all planar surfaces for as far as you can see are I/O devices run by $0.10 micro controllers that network to edge nodes for any memory/compute heavy lifting).

stevebmark• 6 years ago

A 1.5 hour video with no context and no TL;DR top comment did NOT make it organically to the top of HN, it was upvoted strategically by members of Oxide. Could you at least do the rest of us a solid and post the TL;DR?

spikepuppet• 6 years ago

I'm a big fan of Bryan's talks and this was another great one. It's easy to forget that once you move outside of the hyperscalers, what's available to you is really showing it's age, or is filled with a whole bunch of honestly useless features. As such, i'm very keen to see what Oxide cooks up!

Animats• 6 years ago

And we'll deal with all those old standards by having our own new standard!

He discusses "open firmware", which is not Open Firmware.[1] That was a boot ROM system from the 1990s. It was written in Forth, and was intended for use with a console interface. That's not what you want today. A good question to ask is, what do you want today at that level, and what do you not want. For example, a security oriented "cloud" company might want to load the machine, restart the machine, and freeze and dump the machine in an emergency, but not have the ability to examine or alter memory while running. Who patches a running production machine any more? Today's server firmware, with an administrative CPU that phones home and listens for commands to do who knows what, tends to have way too much capability for making small changes quietly and listening to what's going on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

The Soul of a New Machine: Rethinking the Computer [video]

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