The speech of Mr Didier Lamouche, CEO of Bull, about Technology trends and major challenges of the digital world, during the World eDemocracy Forum's first session, last October 16, is online.
9th World e-Democracy Forum
Didier Lamouche, Chairman and CEO, Bull 
Technology trends and major challenges of the digital world
In 2006, at the World e-Democracy Forum, I turned the spotlight on three key trends: the explosion of networks, with their unification centered on the Internet and the proliferation of Web access points, not just for people (with their PCs, PDAs, games consoles, TV set-top boxes, mobile phones...), but also for objects, from goods en route to the family fridge, which in the future will increasingly be natively connected to and managed via the Internet. And the third trend which I wanted to highlight was the hidden part of the iceberg: the increasing centralization of processing power.
These three trends have indeed come to pass. Today I am going to explore the concept of centralization once again, which is still perhaps the least perceptible of the three. And I am going to highlight two more trends that are vital for the development of the societies in which we live: security and ‘green computing’.
1. Centralization and explosive growth of processing power
The pendulum is swinging back towards the centralization of computing
When you have millions, even billions of individuals and objects communicating with each other via networks, you need power to process all that information. The multiplication of data is an exponential and inescapable phenomenon. Everything contributes to it: globalization of exchanges, individualization of processing, the advent of everything digital, the development of e-commerce, of e-government, Web 2.0, and regulatory constraints… IDC and EMC have estimated that some 161 billion gigabytes of data was created in 2006 – the equivalent of three times everything that has ever been written in books! And storage space will have to be increased by a factor of at least four to cope with the 60% annual increase in the amount of information being produced globally.
What are needed are veritable computing power plants to process this proliferation of data. And I use the term ‘computing power plants’ quite deliberately, because to my mind there is a complete analogy between what is now happening in computing and what happened in the past with electricity or water in the 20th century, with the emergence of large-scale production and distribution plants. Following on from the mainframe era in the 1960s and the age of the personal computer in the 1990s, the pendulum is swinging back towards the centralization of computing. These ‘computing power plants’ will be used much in the same way as electrical power plants, for example. Hence the strategic importance of having the capacity to develop ‘hyper-systems’ made up of parallel computers that can simultaneously support millions of users. Google has opened up the way to this, with its huge suites of servers, some of them covering an area larger than two football stadiums! These power plants are the nerve center of the future.
In Europe, Bull is the only company with the necessary skills to provide such powerful infrastructures. We have already done so, for example at the French Atomic Energy Authority (the CEA), for its high-performance computer simulation infrastructure. In Germany, Jülich their largest Research Center and one of the biggest in the world has chosen Bull to deliver its new supercomputer delivering 200 Teraflops of power (or 200,000 billion floating-point operations per second). To give you an analogy, this new system will do as much in one second as the whole population of France working round the clock for a whole month! Currently, we are working with the teams at the CEA to design the petaflop-scale system that will support France’s nuclear weapons simulation program, the first such hyper-system designed in Europe, capable of carrying out one million billion operations a second!
2. Security is critical
Our connected, mobile world opens up unlimited opportunities… just so long as you know how to combine openness and security.
The risks associated with mobility are growing in both their scope and their intensity. The annual cost of incidents and malicious acts of all kinds (vandalism, sabotage, cyber crime, industrial espionage…) is more than $100 billion a year. But the risk also comes from inside the organization: almost 80% of incidents where information disappears arise from individuals who are authorized to access that information. And no-one is immune from an accident or malicious act. To give you some recent examples:
- Early October, 17 million items of customer data were stolen from Europe’s largest telecoms operator
- In the UK, the Ministry of Defense lost a laptop holding personal information about 600,000 recruits, while HM Revenue and Customs lost two disks containing information about 25 million child benefit claimants.
- One of the world’s largest banks recently lost a disk containing personal information about 370,000 customers in the mail. In the UK and Ireland, several banks have lost data, and the UK’s Financial Services Authority has fined one of the banks some €1.3 million for failures in its security control procedures.
And Bull has come up with globull, at just €600 a piece; the return on investment is immediately obvious! Because even if you lose your globull, no-one can access your data, thanks to its defense-level security… globull, the world’s first mobile encrypted desktop is Bull’s most significant innovation for a number of years, which effectively combines security and mobility; globull allows you to carry your data, application and entire working environment with you wherever you go, inviolable.
3. Green’ and eco-efficient Data Centers
The age of intelligent energy management
As already stated, worldwide collaboration via networks, content digitalization and the advent of computer simulation are demanding phenomenal processing power and storage capacity. Did you know that the carbon footprint of the IT industry is equivalent to that of the aeronautical sector? But at the same time, energy is becoming an increasingly expensive resource: piling up processor upon processor, without considering anything except the power they deliver and how much they cost, is no longer possible.
From now on we need to be looking at their power/Watt ratio. By including energy consumption in the equation, we’re looking at systems for the long term. The situation is such that some large-scale Data Center will eventually not be able to expand any more, because there simply will not be enough electrical power available. Between 2000 and 2005, the electricity consumed by all the servers installed worldwide doubled, from 6.7GW to 14GW, the equivalent of 14 nuclear power plants. In short, we must no longer blindly pursue pure performance; we are now entering the era of what we call ‘intelligent energy management’, in other words, optimizing power/Watt ratios in a global and sustainable approach to IT infrastructures.
Bull is exploring a number of ways to improve energy and thermal management in the Data Center. This involves designing environmentally-friendly servers and working with partners such as SAP, Europe’s leading independent software vendor, to minimize energy consumption at the application level or with Schneider Electric for energy auditing services delivered jointly with our partner.
I’d like to give you an example, to help you understand the precise order of scale that we are capable of achieving when it comes to improving power/Watt ratios. In 2006 we delivered a 60 Teraflops supercomputer that consumed 1.8MW; this year we delivered another system to the same customer, this time delivering 300 Teraflops of power, but consuming just 0.6M. So at the same time as we increased the power of the system by five, we reduced the energy consumption by a factor of three, not to mention the floor space occupied by the new system. These real-life figures are eloquent.
Europe SWOT
American domination
The main challenge for France, and for the rest of Europe, stems from the fact that the IT industry is largely dominated by the USA and Japan. But IT is the bedrock of growth and development, for all sectors of the economy put together. IT is the main driving force behind innovation and productivity improvements (60% of improvements in productivity in the USA result from the use of these technologies, as do 40% in Europe). So IT is hyper-strategic and at the same time it is the only sector where the USA has quite such a dominant position.
Europe has to take its rightful place in this industry, which is so vital for its whole future
The advent of computing power plants together with Open Source software and virtual platforms for collaborative working constitute veritable technological step-changes that redistribute cards and open up new opportunities. There is a whole network of players and world-renowned expertise across France and the rest of Europe, which gives us some precious assets when it comes to regaining a leading position in information technology, and take full advantage of the growth of the digital economy. But faced with the growing power of the USA and the so-called BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India and China), there needs to be strong political will to capitalize on that potential.
Bull’s proposals and initiatives
I would like to tell you about just three of the proposals put forward to the French government for its 2012 Digital Plan; all of them highly pragmatic. They all make the most of the economic value of digital technologies and will contribute to helping France close the gap in this sector.
1. Launch a specific High-Performance Computing (HPC) program in Europe, at the very heart of future advances in science, industry, healthcare and environmental science, with appropriate funding, to the tune of about €100 million a year at a European level.
2. Encourage French innovation in IT and expand research in the digital sector, by doubling funding from the French National Research Agency (ANR) and the number of competitiveness clusters, to come closer to American ratios and support French start-ups.
3. Specify, as part of public sector invitations to tender that involve information technologies, a Europe-wide value-added clause. In addition to the criteria relating to quality, performance and price, I would suggest that these tenders include local value-added criteria: European value-added, in other words, which would avoid employment systematically going elsewhere. Such a measure would balance added value that was bought and produced locally. This is common practice in the USA, Japan, China, India... who all rightly consider IT to be vital for their economies. France is one of those rare countries that have not implemented such a measure, until now.
Thank you.
