A tale perseverance:

Mai Muneeran

Thinking about change helps us believing in ourselves, and gives us the hope to make plans bigger than our existing circumstances. But when it comes to the womenfolk in Pakistan, all their aspirations become more difficult to realize compared to the male members of the society, unfortunately. In the most of the underdeveloped areas, women have to struggle more for everything, starting from developing an identity of their own to getting themselves established financially.

The story of Mai Muneeran, resident of Panu Aqil, is no exception. Her Husband was the primary breadwinner for the family and when he became unable to do so due to lack of job opportunities available, things went from bad to worse for the whole family. Her children were pulled out of school and even bare sanitary matters became hard to deal with, such desperate times called only for desperate measures.

One thing distinguished Mai Muneeran from the average women was- instead of falling apart in the face hardship- she had a strong resolve to support her family and to give them a chance to build a brighter future free of financial dependence. This led her to a decision of starting her own livestock and Dairy business.

Mai Muneeran decision was a difficult task to accomplish. On her way to success, she faced implications like social and domestic backlash and contending with lack of resources. Putting aside all her inhibitions, she contacted Khushhalibank, the pioneer bank in microfinance, for financial assistance. Khushhalibank responded Mai Muneeran request with not only the initial finances to enable her for starting dairy and breeding livestock but also gave her the best possible financial and business advisory to run her business smoothly.

Now with the support of Khushhalibank, Ms. Mai Muneeran is running Dairy and livestock breeding business successfully with plans for expansion to a larger scale. She has become a successful entrepreneur who is a role model for other members of the society at the same time. 

Intel Perspective:

A Greener Cloud with better ROI

By Naveed Siraj

Cloud-based services are spreading exponentially with the explosion of public and private cloud services, social media, cross-device data syncing and online storage - to name but a few. Companies and service providers are heavily investing in high-performance, efficient data centers to cater for ever-increasing demand and the power to stay ahead of the market.

It’s no surprise that running data centers of this magnitude is a costly operation and as such, a great deal of importance is placed on efficiency in data centers to ensure a return on the investment. Trust and reputation are critical in cloud environments and consumers and businesses alike require the utmost in service and security.

Many factors affect our ability as an industry to streamline and minimize the operational costs associated with running effective data centers that are less energy consuming but with higher performance. The largest issue is one of methodology and the progression of technology. Ultimately, we are only able to work within today’s technical capabilities, which do not always satisfy industry demand. For instance, HPC has significant business potential, yet due to the high amount of energy needed to run such systems it is not a sustainable or cost effective approach today. However, there are many technologies in the pipeline that will enhance our future technical capabilities and rapidly solve today’s IT challenges when available.

As an engineering company, Intel is constantly making technological advances on a micro level with the intent of reducing costs and improving efficiencies on a macro scale, that are particularly beneficial to businesses. Intel’s technology today can deliver more performance per watt than in any time in the past. By enabling our partners to capitalize on lower operational costs will mean that they will become greener, more profitable and their investment will be returned at a much higher rate and ROI will be realized in shorter time, with increased revenue.

In order to improve data center efficiency and ensure that businesses cloud offering or storage solution investments are profitable, we need to consider three key steps:

·         Modernizing and refreshing technology;

·         Utilizing management systems that measure and account power efficiently (Node Manager and Data Center         Manager [NM/DCM]) and;

·         Maximizing the operational efficiency in terms of power and thermal profile of each server (Power Thermal             Aware Scheduling [PTAS]).

Modernize and Refresh

A holistic and integrated approach to data center infrastructure management can lower operational costs by up to 20 percent.  Power Thermal Aware Scheduling (PTAS) is a new concept for Intel that manages metrics at the workload level such as CPU consumption, memory consumption, input and output levels. Traditionally this data would be separately aggregated into a capacity planner along with building management data, if it was done at all. PTAS takes all of this into account and catches metrics at the server level such as input and output temperature. It allows users to run analytics and make decisions to migrate workloads that are creating “hot spots” to cooler areas of a data center, for example.

Intel has pushed the boundaries by trialing the connection of PTAS to building management systems at a data center in India and Taiwan – so it can interact with air conditioning units to efficiently cool specific areas when needed – rather than the wasteful use of all units at the same time.

Management

Intel’s Power Node and Data Centre Managers allow control and monitoring of server power at the rack and data center level which means there is transparency in where energy is going – and with transparency comes the ability to control and reduce costs.

From the system level energy reports, you can limit individual server power consumption, limit total rack power draw to increase productivity per rack, and limit aggregated row power draw.  This is very useful if there is an unplanned power event where the Data Center is running on power generators and fueled by on site fuel.  This condition means there is a finite amount of fuel and battery power on site and using a method to “tell” the servers that there is a building emergency and power is in a critical state means the servers can “throttle” back enough to maintain the customer SLA, but intend the on-site fuel.  This is similar to your notebook PC.  When you unplug the power from the wall the notebook changes state because it knows it is on battery power.

Maximizing Operational Efficiency

The costs involved in cooling a data center are a significant outgoing cost – so operating at a higher temperature will help to reduce these costs. Data centers 10+ years ago were typically cooled to 18-21 degrees Celsius for a number of reasons – including warranty on servers stipulating this temperature, this is no longer the case with warranties now set closer to 35 degrees Celsius. For every one degree rise in temperature, there is an estimate four percent operational saving, which shows how Intel’s High Temperature Operation solution can dramatically cut costs. 

To put this into perspective, if data centers were to increase operational temperatures by five degrees Celsius, there could be a total annual power saving of $2.16 billion globally. Achieving these significant results requires innovative solutions in modernizing, managing and maximizing both the infrastructure and cooling methods of data centers.

There are a number of hardware and software products already on the market to achieve this, with significant development in technologies such as PTAS that are paving the way to more efficiency. By cutting operational costs this way, Asian businesses can see a stark return on their investment in data centers much quicker than the way in which most still operate. Only when industries stop and take a look at how their data center is operating, rather than just letting it run the way it always has, will they see the rewards and benefits of a more sustainable and cost-efficient operation.

The writer is Country Manager Intel Pakistan.

Intel Perspectives

Competing Ahead of the Exascale Pack

By Naveed Siraj

It’s no surprise that governments across the globe – including China, Japan, the US, and Europe’s biggest players – are in a race to develop exascale systems. Being able to house the most powerful supercomputers will enable public or large private organisations make them the first port of call when looking to address current and future computing needs. It will create not only significant revenue and employment opportunities, but the chance to become the global hub of IT innovation for various industries. As I’m sure you can imagine, competition is rife.

Currently, Asia is on the way to take ahead of the pack. For instance, the world’s current fastest supercomputer, which is built entirely with Intel chips, was created by the National University of Defence Technology in China, while Australia has just launched its largest supercomputer at the Australian National University. Furthermore, over a quarter of the world’s top 500 HPCs are located in APAC. Without a doubt, Asia is well placed to grab its share of HPC revenue, which is expected to reach US $14 billion by 2016 according to IDC.

However, with the level of global investment in High Performance Computing increasing across the globe, what must Asia do to ensure it goes ahead of the game and is the first to develop exascale systems?

First and foremost, Asian developers must map a true path to exascale success, which I’m sure you can imagines is no easy feat. How can developers anticipate future needs, build platforms that are able to integrate technologies which in some cases may not even have been developed yet, and account for market changes?It seems an impossible task, but if Asia wants to stay at the cutting edge it needs to be able to answer these questions and many more.

At Intel,we are working with organisations in Asia (and across the globe), to provide the answers through our ‘pathfinding’ platform. The process involves identifying the desired product development ‘path’ and setting clear objectives alongside it to keep everything on track.

If countries in Asia are going to be successful in being the first to develop exascale systems, then technological breakthroughs are also going to be vital. An ability to increase processor performance is critical, which means developers must constantly look at ways to enhance memory technology, interconnect and integrate new functions into the processor, reduce power consumption, identify innovative cooling techniques, and identify new technologies delivering increased flexibility to software developers. 

We know that memory is a major factor in the mix, and Intel’s commitment to Moore’s Law will ensure developers have access to processors capable of addressing their current needs today and in years to come.Unfortunately, we can’t yet rely on memory and processors scaling at the same rate, but there are some promising memory technologies that could change all that in the future.For example, Intel recently announced that the next generation of Intel Xeon Phi processor will deliver integrated on-package memory allowing leadership compute and memory bandwidth, and we’re researching new technologies includingmemory stacked on memory.

At Intel we’re also working to create world-class fabric solutions to meet the growing need of High Performance Computing (HPC) and scales with workload system requirement. Creating a single processor with integrated fabric controller results in fewer chips and therefore fewer chip crossings. In turn this delivers lower cost and power consumption, as well as higher performance and density, which are all critical hurdles that must be overcome on the journey to exascale success.

Another key consideration for Asian developers on their path to exascale success is power. If we were to reach exascale today, we would need the equivalent of two power plant’s worth of energy to power one exascale machine. This is of course an unrealistic approach, which is why we need to think about how far we can push energy efficiency today, and in the future with the various technological breakthroughs that are expected. While ‘Near-threshold Voltage Technology’, which improves energy efficiency at the cost of performance, is one possible solution, more innovation is needed in this area. 

Encouragingly, Intel and European researchers have established three European labs with the goal being to create simulation applications that begin to address the energy efficiency challenges of moving to exascale performance.Similarly, we have in place effective parallel programming models where we work in close collaboration with academics and researchers to tackle the various issues affecting HPC.Through the subsequent findings, Intel will be well positioned to advise developers across Asia and the globe as they look to overcome the challenge of exascale power supplies.

The path to exascale by 2020 is certainly achievable, and Intel is supporting organisations across the globe as they attempt to be first over the line. If Asia is to continue leading the charge, then hurdling the challenges posed by energy constraints and adopting and identifying the latest technologies will make the journey much easier. There’s still some way to go, but the hard work already undertaken by developers in the region will ensure that – if they stay on track – Asia will have high chances in the leading pack coming to the finish line.

The writer is Country Manager Intel Pakistan.