[Info-vax] PowerX Roadmap - Extended beyond 2020

[IanD]

On Sunday, September 11, 2016 at 7:55:13 AM UTC+10, David Froble wrote:
> IanD wrote:
> 
> > Not sure where OpenVMS is going to fit in the IoT picture, it's not lean
> > enough or it's file system not quick enough to act as a data collector. Maybe
> > as an aggregator?
> 
> You've stated things like this in the past.  You got any citations, facts, or 
> such to back up your statements?
> 
> While I don't have any specifics, I remember reading years ago how the size of 
> VMS compared to weendoze, and the comparison was rather favorable for VMS.  Much 
> smaller footprint.
> 
> With the memory available today, I'm not sure how much a difference in footprint 
> matters, in comparison to capabilities.
> 
> You also got to differentiate between the OS and the utilities that come with 
> it.  In an embedded situation, much of the utilities would perhaps not be included.
> 
> When you mention "file system", are you really referring to the file system, or 
> to RMS?  I can do some rather fast I/O on VMS.

When one looks at things like the Gartner report on IoT for 2017 - 2018, the power requirements of devices is going to need to be extremely low

As to the slowness of VMS file systems, I was referring to RMS since that is the layer most people work with and I doubt anyone that is developing for IoT is going to bother with anything lower level than the native file system on the device / OS they are implementing on, especially since there are already protocols and libraries out there that people are levering for software development (which will still have to be ported to OpenVMS if OpenVMS is going to participate)

I would be extremely surprised if anyone wrote code to go block mode I/O on OpenVMS for data capture in the IoT space either

High transaction rate environments resort to items like sharding and distributed DB's like NoSQL Cassandra etc as well as other techniques. So far OpenVMS doesn't have anything like these technologies to my limited knowledge. At the device level the options are stripping but then you get hit with lack of redundancy which isn't going to fly in most environments and even stripping isn't going to save you for lots of small data writes which is what IoT will be primarily focused on

In time, OpenVMS might participate in some up-stream data aggregation but I seriously don't see it acting in the data collection part of the spectrum

The sorts of things being looked at for IoT is ballooning and the spectrum of what people are wanting to capture data on is growing all the time

It's going way beyond wanting to capture data out of your toaster, there is not much of a commercial drive behind wanting to know how your toaster performed last night ;-)

Things like Smart Concrete however and items used in public infrastructure are certainly prime targets. Knowing if/when public infrastructure like a bridge might collapse or be subject to extreme forces etc are of high interest. 

Imagine a dam with literally 10's of 1000's of collection points embedded in the concrete all sampling and sending their data back. You are talking about a lot of small quick data packets. 

There is an dam not that far from where I live. It's small but it's 66 m x 390 m long. If you place a sensor in the concrete at say 1 m intervals, your talking about 25K sensors. If you sample at even a paltry 2x's per second, which for embedded devices is near in a sleep cycle, that's 50K samples per second of data. Can RMS take in data at those rates without issue? 50K writers at once?

http://h20565.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c04618690

This was an interesting find, this is OpenVMS with SSD support. Some of the upper range shown here is below even the modest example I made up above for the dam and HP were testing 4K writes, not what IoT will be targeting, which will probably be under 1K writes. I really think (without proof) that RMS will bottleneck quickly, especially in trying to keep it's index current

IoT will drive the whole data / storage industry up another notch

We will see the early adopters take the lions share of the IOT space and I happen to think that will be linux yet again :-(, I really don't think OpenVMS is in any shape at present to even begin to participate, it's having enough fun and games getting itself onto x86

The rebuilding of OpenVMS is going to need to address why people abandoned the platform in the first place, it's not just a lack of x86 support. People are coding for other architectures currently and are doing so I think primarily because of good porting tools and excellent development frameworks and Open source is now just not a nice to have but an essential

On a philosophical front, man seems hell bent on sampling everything possible in the hope of controlling his environment and ultimately planning his existence. I happen to think it's folly to pursuit such things to the nth degree but until this approach as abandoned then expect IoT to keep getting more wild in it's hype and promises. I mean if central banks cannot give up on their notion of a controlled economy (yeah, how well has that been for the planet!), then what hope is there that IoT will be de-hyped in the near future? i.e. none!