Systems software technology and business
This press release is particularly fluffy, but whatever the reality of this very vaguely defined algorithmic development the basic message is correct
to validate nine terabytes of data (nine million million or a number with 12 zeros) in less than 20 minutes, without compromising accuracy. Ordinarily, using the same system, this would take more than a [...]
Lovins observes that power inputs in many industrial processes go into a bottleneck that makes power conservation hard if you start at the wrong end. The power goes into a long pipeline of process that emerges on the other end with some useful (in theory) work. If you start on the power input end, then [...]
Data centers show up around minute 24.
We’re starting to see a confluence between IT and energy that will change both industries. A windmill power data center is an interesting data point. At some time, we’re going to want to control the energy generation from the data center – for example, to run big batch jobs when the wind is blowing or [...]
I have a blog post up at fsmlabs.com about our TimeKeeper software for time synchronization. TimeKeeper is currently aimed at financial trading markets, but we also hope to market it to electric power distribution and transmission engineers who have a similar need for precise time synchronization within substations and for instrumentation. There are also applications [...]
Real-time operating systems are either a solved problem or a backwater of engineering design. Threads, semaphores, mutexes, some basic I/O, priority scheduling all of this has been more or less standardized in the POSIX 1003.13 smaller profiles (51,52) for many years. The basic programming model has not changed in years. Even FSM’s original RTOS and [...]
The idea that Germany is playing catch-up with Europe’s most promising strategy for renewable energy is jarring. This is Germany, after all, the country that 11 years ago put the Green Party in government, decided to phase out nuclear power, and pushed wind energy and photovoltaics to grid scale. Today Germany’s installed wind-turbine capacity of [...]
It is becoming more common for fire ants to build nests in pad mounted equipment. Their nesting materials can cause short circuits, the ants can eat away at conductor insulation, and they make equipment maintenance a challenge.
from Power System Reliability, by Richard Brown, in the Electric Power Engineering Handbook
The subdued poetry of engineering documents “and [...]