Many governments across the globe are beginning to believe in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). But, after all, beginning is just the beginning. They now must follow through.

Much open source in government today happens because it is often easier and cheaper to get the job done that way. Equipment can be re-purposed and there is no long procurement process. The downside is that there is little solid support or official recognition for systems built this way and their vitality depends upon the continued availability of a few talented or enthusiastic internal proponents.

Ultimately to harvest the benefits of FOSS, the ground must be prepared now and proper seeds sown. For many in the European Union, this ground is a new knowledge-based economic paradigm called eEurope. Policy makers insist that eEurope can only be built by emphasizing open standards while at the same time establishing a stronger competitive tension between FOSS and proprietary software models. Into this fertile ground concrete projects are being sown. Across Europe, three initiatives are emerging. Specifically, proponents of FOSS and eEurope see the need to:

1. Clearly state the problem: lock-in by fragile and expensive single source software

Leading the way in articulating the software problem has been Germany. Like other large enterprise customers, Germany is faced with changes in Microsoft licensing that threaten to multiply costs. The root cause of stiff new licensing terms, according to German analysis, is lack of effective competition. Dependence on a single vendor increases lock-in and promotes higher prices. In addition, new risks appear, including 9/11. 9/11 represents the vulnerability of non-diversified IT infrastructure to catastrophic disruption. Other threats include the rampant and costly spread of e-mail viruses, made easy by the fact that everyone uses the same proprietary e-mail program having the same cookie-cutter vulnerabilities. The German Information Ministry coined the moniker “IT monoculture” to capture the economic dependence and security risks of monopolistic, proprietary software.

2. Develop an information and support campaign: web-sites, mailing lists, conferences, call-in help, contracted support

Solving the IT monoculture problem is impeded by the its very success and ubiquity. Nobody wants to learn new ways of doing things, when the old ways work just fine. After all, ordinary users care less about the fragility or cost of a software monoculture than its perceived ease of use and utility. To overcome the perception that Open Source is more difficult or less useful, governments are beginning to build official support mechanisms and to promote complete infrastructure switch-overs.

For example, the Scandinavian countries have jointly produced a multi-language Nordic Open Source Website to explain and to provide links to the best consumer oriented FOSS products. Germany sponsors a much larger and more technical FOSS information and support service called BerliOS. BerliOS tries to meet the interrelated interests of users, developers and commercial providers of OSS. Germany has also contracted with commercial firms such as IBM to provide OSS support to government jurisdictions and agencies. The German Information Ministry expects these efforts to transition as many as 10% of government desktops to Linux and OSS. Intentional diversity will increase pressure to meet open standards across all products and will induce healthy competition and serve to lower prices.

3. Set policy

As long as policy about Open Source is silent, experience demonstrates that formal procurement criteria will always favor proprietary interests. To break this cycle, the government must be proactive in policy formulation. Today, the European Union and many of the strongest member countries are beginning to codify an encouragement of open standards and FOSS. While the effect so far has been modest in terms of practical procurements, the long-range influence is likely to devastate core proprietary software interests. Significant policy formulation is occurring at the level of the European Union because of its desire to further unify the economies and e-governance of the constituent nations. The EU’s eEurope envisions joining all the information processing of public administrations in Europe. Such interoperability and sharing can only be based upon open standards and the initiative explicitly encourages FOSS.

Conclusion

Government Open Source advocates must study the detailed lessons of eEurope as it unfolds in the EU and plays out in the member countries. But the broad lesson plan is already established: the right problems must be recognized, supportive processes must be encouraged, and strong policies must be enacted. Real projects and real resources are being applied to building a next-generation, knowledge-based economy in Europe using open standards and FOSS. By the collaborative feedback of open technology, the benefits eEurope derives will in turn promote the global knowledge-based economy. And that’s a lesson every country can learn.

Before Beowulf began in 1993, High Performance Computing Clusters (HPCC) belonged to the world of elite organizations with large, very specialized projects and multi-million dollar budgets. Then along came Intel exploiting its founder’s vision of exponential increases in compute power coupled with corresponding decreases in cost. Suddenly box vendors like Dell were able to make supercomputers into a mainstream enterprise computing item. Even IBM and HP could see the possibilities for new ways of profiting - no longer primarily from the raw hardware, but in the design, services and support of large-scale, complex systems.

From Academia to Enterprise

High performance clusters are groups of computers connected together to operate in parallel on discrete parts of a large compute problem. By executing a high number of calculations simultaneously and minimizing memory and communications latency, clusters deliver enormous computing capacity.

HPCC on Open Source originated in labs and academia due to budget restrictions as well as to an abundance of high quality programming talent. Scientific research, weather forecasting, genomics, geochemistry and others have achieved great success with clusters of cheap Intel PCs and OSS clustering technologies. Now, HPCC is steadily moving from academic applications into the enterprise with automobile, bioinformatics, entertainment, and oil exploration companies leading the way.

A new level of organization - grids of clusters and compute resources - is emerging in the form of on-demand distributed environments where complex data is available over the same networks as the ones that deliver email to end users’ desktops. The combination of high performance clusters, supercomputers and desktop systems has led to the formation of “grid communities”, which can target a variety of massive computation problems cost-effectively.

Great Examples of Linux HPCC

HPC at PNNL
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) grid-enabled Linux cluster cost a mere $24.5 million. It is a 11.4-teraflop, 1900 node Intel Itanium based cluster for research in nuclear science, biology, genomics, and material sciences. It’s 45 times faster than PNNL’s earlier supercomputer, an IBM SP/2 which was the 19th fastest supercomputer in the world when deployed in the dinosaur age of 1997. PNNL selected a Linux based cluster because of robust scalability, high reliability and superior access to applications and tools.

HPC at AIST
IBM has recently deployed a Linux based solution for Japan’s National Institute for Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). The eServer supercomputer has 2116 Opteron 246 processors, and 520 Intel Itanium processors. Its 11.2 teraflops would rank the AIST HPCC just above the current Linux king, a cluster based on Intel’s Xeon processor at the U.S. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). AIST will link this cluster with others in a supercomputer grid that will explore grid technology, life sciences, bioinformatics and nanotechnology.

High Expectations

The economies of Open Source HPC have been based upon harnessing cheap hardware to solve complex problems. But a close look at HPCC reveals that not only can commodity hardware change the way the game is played, the forces of commoditization actually apply to the software as well. Software commoditization is now beginning to take place everywhere. Just as the bulk of scientific computing can be handled, often better, using Open Source HPC technologies, the day is nearing (some say it’s already here) when the bulk of all computing (scientific, medical, office, factory, retail, embedded) can be handled by the winning combination of increasing capabilities and decreasing cost in the form of open standards and an evolving platform of Open Source Software and tools: the gathering power of Linux might just demonstrate a kind of Moore’s law of software. Exciting times are ahead!