A few weeks ago I had the privilege to attend and speak at the opening ceremony of the ASTRON and IBM Center of Exascale Technology in Dwingeloo, the Netherlands. The Center is part of a joint research project, called DOME, to address the computing needs for the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), a huge distributed radio telescope to start operation in 2019. The SKA will explore the origins of our universe, trying to understand what happened at the Big Bang and immediately afterwards.

The DOME scientists from IBM and ASTRON

When the SKA starts acquiring data in its fully deployed state in 2024 it will produce more than twice the current global internet traffic. To process this data a computer system 1000 times more powerful than the recently inaugurated SuperMUC will be required. Even with water-cooling SuperMUC still uses a significant amount of power.

So for the SKA a lot of new invention is still required to fit its computing needs into a reasonable energy budget.

Scientists at ASTRON and IBM have a number of ideas how we would want to deal with these challenges, most important is probably the 3D integration of chips, use of low power micro servers and new storage class memory – based on Phase Change Materials -  replacing disk drives.

Perhaps the most exciting piece for me is the 3D integration of chips. Current computer systems are laid out like sprawling suburbs made up of homes only one story high. As travel between these homes covers great distances, it also requires a lot of energy in the form of gasoline. In a computer the situation is similar, moving data between memory and CPU is what now takes the most energy because of the distance the data needs to travel. If we were able to stack the memory on top of the CPU – like in a high-rise building – the data would not need to travel as far and consequently the energy consumption would shrink significantly.

Incidentally our brain is constructed in a 3D fashion as well – it runs on 20 Watts of power. So once we’re able to put layers and layers of silicon on top of each other with efficient and effective liquid cooling between the layers, we’ll get closer to the biological efficiency of our brains.

So clearly with the DOME project we get to explore new limits of computing and as important learn more about the origins of our universe once the SKA gets deployed. Where so far our motto in Research has been the World is our Lab, now the Universe has become our Lab.

Side note: We are hiring for DOME.  Find out more.

This past Friday the Leibniz Rechenzentrum (LRZ), a large scientific computing center serving the universities across Europe, inaugurated their latest acquisition — SuperMUC, a 150k core supercomputer, currently the world’s 4th fastest machine, #1 in Europe. Photos of the event can be found here.

Prof. Dr. Karl-Heinz Hoffmann, president of the BAdW, Prof. Dr. Arndt Bode, Chairman of the Board of LRZ, Martina Koederitz, IBM Germany, Federal Minister Annette Schavan and State Minister Dr. Wolfgang Heubisch (from left) power on SuperMUC on 20 July 2012. Photo Credit: LRZ

SuperMUC Addresses Energy Challenges

Why am I proud of this? Well, SuperMUC is not only a fast machine, but it reaches the lowest datacenter-level carbon footprint, making it extremely energy efficient. It uses 40% less energy than an equivalent air cooled machine because SuperMUC is hot-water cooled computer. The idea to cool computers with -water is not new and in fact, IBM has been researching the concept since the 1960s - see timeline.

Commercial data centers already account for more than 2% of the electrical energy use in the United States alone. About half of that energy is spent to power the computers, the other half is spent on air-conditioning to remove the heat that gets generated when the computers run.

Our idea was to avoid the air-conditioning as much as possible and instead of using conventional air cooling we cool each major chip on the printed circuit board with water. So we pipe warm water anywhere from 35 to 60 degrees C through the computer, where it gets heated by 3-10 C. When you have water with 40 to 70 C, you can easily use it to heat buildings or run it through radiators on top of the data center where it gets cooled down by the ambient temperature, to be used again to cool the computer.

In hot geographies or in a data center that still runs legacy hardware you can use the hot water in a so-called adsorption chiller to generate cold air for air-conditioning, again avoiding the use of much additional electricity.

So while I am proud of SuperMUC, I am equally proud that we managed to bring this technology from idea to product in a only five years. Many of you may think this is a long time, considering how many new things our industry puts out every year, however be assured, all of these things, when they go beyond pure software innovations, have been in the pipeline for many, many years.

Aquasar

We came up with our own concept of chip-level water cooling in 2005 and build our first hot-water cooled zero-emission datacenter prototypes in the lab in 2006 and 2007.

A few months later ETH Zurich, the renown Swiss university,  showed interest in the concept and we created Aquasar, which went live in early 2010. ETH was a great partner to help scientifically validate the concept in real life.

At the end of 2010 LRZ ordered SuperMUC and only 18 months later the system came to life and made it onto the top 500 supercomputer list. This spectacular achievement was a result of a concerted world wide collaboration between IBM’s Research labs, business units, and country organizations.

3D Chip Stacking

By 2025, chip stacks with embedded liquid cooling, communications in 3D and minimal power consumption will shrink supercomputers to the size of a sugar cube.

Now the research team is onto even more interesting concepts to packaging the next generation of computer chips.

They will consist of multiple layers of silicon in a single package. The layers will be cooled by running the coolant through the package. As supplying electricity into modern CPUs is already a challenge, we will explore a dual use of the coolant, it will also chemically supply power into the chip where it then gets converted into electricity. Similar to what happens in the human body, where our blood supplies the organs with energy and is also responsible to remove heat. Read more about it in this paper.

I wish we would see this idea in products again in 5 years, however the scientists tell me a lot more basic research is needed so it will take a little longer this time. The vision is a great one though, we want to build chips that ideally will be as energy efficient and dense as the human brain that uses only about 20 Watts instead of modern supercomputers that use a ten thousand times more power.

SuperMUC so is just the start, but one I am extremely proud of.

While I am waiting here in Istanbul for my delayed flight back home to Zurich, I have time to write a much belated blog post.

Last week, I attended, as a speaker, IBM’s EMEA Academic Days in Frankfurt. The main topic of the event was “Big Data Analytics“. I was particularly intrigued by the presentation of Professor Andy Neely from Cambridge who spoke about “Big Data and Analytics: Changing the Face of Business Performance Measurement“.

Andy Neely gave an invited presentation at the IBM Academic Days conference on Big Data Analytics in Frankfurt (14-15th May).

His main message was that (big) data and analytics should be used for creating a learning organization rather than controlling the organization. He gave some very intuitive examples from his research where he explained that one of the pitfalls of having a lot of data available and being able to analyze it was that it would be used to construct key performance indicators on how an organization performed and what needed to be managed to meet performance targets.

First, he explained that too many performance metrics actually confused people because it was no longer clear what was really important. Then secondly, that when performance metrics are introduced they may change peoples behaviors in sometimes counter productive ways to satisfy the metrics.

One such example is to measure in call centers the time it takes to resolve a client’s issue. Andy explained, that if the target is 2 minutes many agents will find a reason to hang up or terminate the call in some other way when 1:45 minutes is reached, just to meet the target. Whether the issue has actually been resolved or not becomes immaterial to the agent.

We all know that what one should really care about is doing the right things rather than doing things right.

He gave another example from the airline industry – how fitting since I am waiting here for my flight – on what drives client satisfaction with the airline. The assumption being that clients will fly more often with an airline where they have fond memories of the experience.

So the drivers for client satisfaction are: friendliness of the staff; check-in time; on-time departure; and quality of the food. Yet when he analyzed data collected by British Airways it turned out that on-time departure actually had a negative correlation to passenger satisfaction. The explanation he gave was that when the plane was late, the staff put in a lot extra effort to calm down the passengers and really treat them well, so they would not be unruly during the flight. When the departure was on time, the passengers felt the staff was less friendly. Apparently people remember the staff’s behavior a lot longer than the fact that their plane was late.

So the lesson was – one should use the various sources of data rather to create models, discuss the models and refine them, learn from the data and not use it exclusively to control people’s behavior.

I agree with Andy here. I wonder what you think and what your experiences are with performance metrics.

Two of my readers have been bugging me for weeks now to write another post. I must admit, I sometimes wonder whether my thoughts are really so important that the world wants to read them. But anyway here we go – it is not original but something I probably intuitively knew all my life but then explicitly learned while taking a course a few years ago.

In a nutshell, it is like the title says or more specifically, don’t complain and consider yourself a victim, but rather take ownership of the situation and realize that if you take over responsibility you also have the power to change it.

During the course the teacher used the following two questions as examples:

“When you speak to somebody and they don’t understand you, how much of that misunderstanding would you attribute to yourself and how much to the other person?”

“When you listen to someone and you don’t understand what they’re saying, how much of that misunderstanding would you attribute to the other person and how much to yourself?”

Then we were asked to give our answer in percentages.

When you think about it, it comes down to the fact that it is 100% up to you to make yourself understood and to understand the other party. Once you realize this and take the responsibility for it, you also have the power to drive a conversation such that it becomes an effective two way communication.

You can apply this principle pretty much to all situations in life. Note to scientists: it doesn’t work to violate the laws of physics.

For example, if you feel your job does not give the kind of satisfaction you’re looking for, it is up to you to do something about it – this is no one else’s responsibility. Once you start doing something you’re the one in power and control.

I wonder what you think about this principle? Please let me know your experiences.

Yesterday was a very special day. Together with Professor Ralph Eichler, the president of ETH, I received an award for “Standortmanager of the year 2011.”

For the non-German speakers “Standortmanager” is somebody who has a business leadership function and cares about the place/village/state/country they work in.

The award was in recognition of the very successful public-private partnership we created between ETH and IBM with the Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Center that we opened in May. The organization awarding the prize felt that this partnership was something truly unique that held a lot of promise for Zurich and Switzerland to attract others to work on Nanotechnology right here, where Binnig and Rohrer invented the Scanning Tunneling Microscope.

I am very proud that our efforts were recognized with such an award – and we did get a nice sculpture to go with it.

Matthias Kaiserswerth (IBM) (l.) and ETH-Präsident Ralph Eichler (r.) received the SVSM Award from Stefan Vogler. (Picture: SVSM)

The real thing though I am looking for are the future awards to the scientists that work in the Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Center for work that they do in this unique research environment. Ultimately it will be those awards for scientific and technical excellence that will attract others to come and join us here in Switzerland to work in a field that holds extreme promises for our future.

This week I spent two days in a workshop for IBM’s emerging technical leaders. Among others, they had asked me as an executive to sponsor the progress of the young talent we have in our company.

To briefly summarize, it was a very interesting experience. The organizers had selected 18 female candidates and no males for this workshop. In my opinion this was a very clever choice. When I look at our technical leaders (who can reach the executive ranks with science-friendly titles including Distinguished Engineer or Fellow), it is a predominately male world. Somehow we really miss a huge opportunity here. If women aren’t equally represented in all aspects of an organization’s workforce, we only use 50% of the available brainpower to serve our clients. This is like playing tennis with only your right hand or football/soccer only using your right foot.

From talking with the participants I observed two points:

• The demands of a scientist are not yet really conducive to being a mother and pursuing a career at the same time.
• I learned (though I have to admit, I already knew it from having been married for almost 24 years ) that women and men deal differently with issues. It seems that men approach matters in a very linear fashion, we solve one problem after the other, i.e. if it cannot be solved, we go on to the next.  While women on the other hand solve problems, but then continue to reflect on whether that was the right approach and what they could have done differently much after the fact. If something is not solved to their satisfaction they may dwell about it for many months or even years to come.

The combination of both observations means that mother’s really have a much harder time in succeeding in a scientific environment because they will always have a bad conscience if they have children that they don’t live up to the expectations and that they cannot as easily deal with the way we men (and companies) approach problems – which is like “shooting ducks one after the other.”

I wonder what experiences my readers have and how they think we can improve the field for our female colleagues such that we get to leverage the significant contributions they will bring to work and capitalize on the fact that they represent 50% of the intellectual capital available to mankind.  Obviously, this is only a small sample size, so if I have any female readers from science, please share your tips and thoughts on how you overcome these observations.

I certainly wish the 18 participants in our workshop that they will succeed with their career aspirations and become part of our technical leadership that eventually should be made up of half females and half males!

A tree grows in Rüschlikon

This week IBM turned 100. As part of this anniversary the company pledged a “day of service” for all its employees to give back something to the communities we operate in. The service could be to help a social charity, go into schools to talk about the importance of science and technology for our future, or do something for the environment. In total, IBM is donating more than 2.5 million hours of volunteer services to communities worldwide.

In our lab, we decided to offer two activities for those who wanted to do something with their colleagues. We started to engage with a charity called Rainbows for Children  which wants to improve basic education in Ethiopia. Here we apply our IT skills to help bring wind power to Ethiopian schools to power PCs in computer classes and better manage the schools through IT. This is an ongoing project that is not finished with just one day of work.

The other project where over 100 colleagues participated centered around another (grassroots) charity myblueplanet.ch whose goal is to bring down green house gas emissions by changing our own behavior and through projects that have a positive impact on climate change. One of those projects is to plant 100’000 trees that carry fruit varieties that have become rare in our industrialized food industry. We decided to support this project through planting rare apple trees in Rüschlikon the community where the lab has been located now for more that 48 years of its 55 year history. In addition we worked in the local forest to protect the rare yew tree from being destroyed by deer who consider the young, extremely slow growing trees a delicacy. The forest ranger who helped us distinguish yew trees from the more common silver fur, later on commented that he had never worked with such a disciplined and focused group of volunteers before. So as we try to be the best in our research, we strive to excel at volunteer work as well

We were very lucky, for our day of service the weather was splendid and so we managed to accomplish everything we had set out to. As we had randomly assembled the teams, a lot of people got to talk to colleagues they usually don’t meet. We concluded the day with a nice picnic.

Quite a few people commented that we should do such days of service not only when the company celebrates its 100th anniversary but more often. I will take up that idea and we will find something for us to do next year again. Maybe we can make this into a regular activity?

I’d be curious to learn what my readers would suggest we could do?

A few years ago I had the CEO of a Swiss bank visit us at the lab for a briefing on our research as we often do with clients. At some point our conversation moved to a topic of a great concern to him. He said when people ask my employees who they work for, they say they work for a bank and don’t say the name of the bank as if that wasn’t important. He was trying to change that part of their culture so they would say with pride the name of the bank.

Gustavo Stolovitzky is an IBMer

This conversation reminds me of a similar discussion we have had at IBM. Who do you work for? Is it the manager or group you work in? Is it the physical lab? Is it the strategic area that we like to drive across our Research division? Is it IBM Research or is it IBM?

Obviously it depends upon who asks you; whether it is a fellow IBM employee or somebody from the outside.

While, like the bank’s CEO, we would like people to say “I am an IBMer” (see video below)  when they’re asked by outsiders, many of our employees will quickly follow that up that they really work for IBM Research – Zurich.

The real question is who does someone identify with, the larger organization or the unit?

Why is this important? I think it poses a very interesting dilemma. Smaller groups or organizations are very easy to identify with because you have a sense of belonging and you work with a team you personally know. In fact, one of the groups in my lab even has given itself a unique “trademark” to identify itself with. They’re proud to belong and are highly motivated in their team and often go beyond the call of duty.   This sense of belonging is so strong that others have remarked that they feel excluded and not as special. Which is the flip side of the equation. Looking at it from a global perspective it becomes even more challenging. If you want to drive a larger program you need people to identify with that unit rather than the immediate work group they’re in.

So the question becomes who do you really work for?

And if you happen to see me at an event or conference, please come up and ask me, “So Matthias, who do you work for?”

Here is an interview I gave at the CeBIT IT fair last week in Hanover, Germany.  It was quite an event that was kicked off with German Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel and IBM Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano.

A few weeks ago I received an e-mail from an unknown colleague at IBM, who had stumbled upon my blog. He was very nice to say that it was a very unusual blog that he found interesting to read but he was also quick to point out that I hadn’t written anything in quite some time. Unfortunately true – I am a great procrastinator and while I sometimes have ideas for new topics, I never sit down to write them up.

Now I promised this colleague that his prodding would be enough to put me over the hump to write a new post.

One of the things that has always puzzled me is the nature of work. Particularly the work in our environment where we are responsible with innovation and leading the company to new businesses.

Last year I heard an interesting talk by a German author Anja Förster. She started with the example of the printing on most Apple products: “Designed by Apple in California – Assembled in China” to exemplify the management dilemma she wanted to talk about.

Which is more important?

“Assembled in China” stands for the management methods and expectations in employees we had throughout most of the last century, employees were expected to be hard working, obedient, punctual, and if possible intelligent. Interestingly enough you can pretty much order people to behave like this and also measure and enforce such behavior. Most management approaches still follow this model.

“Designed in California”, however stands for new employee qualities. We want employees to be engaged, be creative, and have passion for what they do. The interesting challenge is that these latter qualities cannot be obtained with the same management methods as the former nor can they really be measured all that easily. In fact, the old management methods probably run completely counter to what we look for in employees today. If you think not everybody can develop these qualities, think of what people do in their spare time, how they pursue sports (train for marathons, climb mountains, …) or other hobbies (work in charities, sing in choirs, build cars, …) – how can we translate that type of engagement and passion to the work place?

Do we do it by setting aggressive targets (financial or otherwise)? Do we do it by offering rewards (financial or otherwise)? I would claim that more often than not, neither financial targets nor incentives, serve to inspire these qualities. I believe often it is a sense of doing/changing something important, of charting unexplored territory, of doing the impossible, or simply belonging to a team is what causes engagement and passion and lets creativity flow.

As an aside, I worked in sales for a few years and when I started, I was told all sales people are “coin operated”, my experience was very different, they cared about doing something good for their clients.  Yes, they also cared about winning against the competition, but the sales plan always came last and never drove their actions. Now this may have been unique, but then I may have been fortunate to be with that group of people.

I wonder what your experiences are in developing engagement and passion and being creative at work, your own and that of your colleagues or employees?

Please let me know your comments.