What’s a Computer?

Desktops
Desktops (literally)
Turf Wars: Apple, !Linux, Intel
HP 360 ProLiant Server
Laptops
Machine Organization
Olde Skool: Abacus
Hybrids
Handhelds: PDAs, Calulators
Robotics
Other
Statistics
 45 Desktops
 7 Laptops
 2 Servers
 3 Abacus (Abaci?)
 3 Other (PDA, Robot, Concept)
The Experience Economy
In the beginning…
…coffee was a COMMODITY

 Commodity = undifferentiated, substitutable product

After being differentiated,
coffee became a GOOD

 Roasted, blended, flavored, decaf, organic

Next coffee became a SERVICE

 Coffee could be ordered after dinner and it

would be provided on one’s behalf.
Finally coffee became an EXPERIENCE

 Funky music, comfy chairs, Wi-Fi, fireplaces.

 Coffeehouses are a place to see and be seen.
Where is computing going?
 Commodity
 Raw units like cycles & bytes: central mainframes
 Good
 Products and features: Windows or Linux?
 Service
 Work on behalf of clients: Google, Amazon, e-tail
 Experience
 People value the computing experience itself, not
just the outcome of services on their behalf.
 Design Heuristics
 Optimize for the common case
 Favors performance over robustness
 Perpetuated by benchmarking

 But what if the uncommon case is

unavoidable and potentially grave?

 We can’t afford to optimize for the

common case at the expense of
preparing for the inevitable case
 Self-Stabilization

 Universe: Set of all finite directed graphs

 Safety: Only acyclic graphs with one sink
 Self-Stabilization

 Program actions closed under safe states

 Program actions converge to safe states
Example: Acyclic Communication Graphs

Destination
Link Failure in Mobile Networks
Bad node: no path to destination

Good node: at least one path to destination

 Self-Stabilizing Network:
Sink nodes reverse all edges.
sink
sink

sink sink
sink

sink
sink
Adaptive Computing
 Systems should heal themselves, locally.

 The cost of sorting should be proportional to

the number of inversions (out-of-order pairs).

 The scope of a failure should be proportional

to the underlying gravity of the fault.
The Martians
Problem Description
 All Martians have red or green eyes
 No Martian knows its own eye color
 Martians never communicate about eye color

 Any Martian that learns its own eye color is

red goes to Disneyland at sunrise the next
day
What happens if…
 A human visits the village and announces “At
least one Martian in the village has red eyes”

 What if the human is telling the truth?

 What if the human is not telling the truth?