India IT salary growth

In a previous post I wrote about IT India off-shore costs rising and how the open source model offers a better alternative to infrastructures savings. Today I came across this article on Forbes putting some figures on Indian IT salary growth:

As the fight for talent intensified last year, salary hikes rose from
the previous year’s average of 14.4%, according to the study. In 2008,
compensation is expected to increase by an average of 15.2%, making it
the fifth consecutive year that salaries have risen in excess of 10%.

Real estate salaries grew by an average of 25.2%, compared with 17.6% in retail and 16.4% in banking and finance.

Clearly, the IT off-shoring model can not be sustained with these numbers in mind. A mixed software development model is emerging, where commercial code representing significant, core competitive advantage follows the classic copyrighted model, while larger parts of the development effort is released as open source for the benefit of higher quality service and lower infrastructure costs. Nothing new really under the sun: major innovators such as Apple, Google and Yahoo have followed this path for years now, with the introduction of operating systems and search engines based on open source code. Microsoft and Oracle are following: here and here.

New software players like Trolltech and MySQL have adopted a dual licensing model, where open source code can be either used in commercial applications for a fee, or else modifications to the original code must be released with the same open-source license.


Technorati Tags: open source, off-shoring

The Open Group quest for parallelism

Yet another round of financing for academic research in parallelism, this time in Europe. EE Times reports:

Supported by the European Commission, the Java Environment for Parallel
Real-time Development (JEOPARD) project is investing over €3.3 million
(about $ 4.9 million) an advanced framework
for real-time Java running on multicore and parallel systems.

Led by The Open Group (Reading, England), the JEOPARD consortium
includes four universities and research institutes: University of York
(England), Vienna University of Technology (Austria), FZI (Research
Center for Information Technologies at the University of Karlsruhe,
Germany) and the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca (Romania); three
industrial manufacturers: EADS NV (Schiphol-Rijk, Netherlands),
RadioLabs (Rome, Italy) and SkySoft (Lisbon, Portugal); and two
embedded systems technology suppliers: Aicas (Karlsruhe, Germany) and
Sysgo (Klein-Winternheim, Germany).




Technorati Tags: grid computing, parallelism

Berkley lab

EE Times has an article on a $10M Intel and Microsoft grant that will finance the Berkley lab, a group focused on research in parallel programming. The move is meant to close the gap between hardware multi-core architectures, now in mature state, and software development tools.

The original Berkley lab white paper was published in December 2006 and is available here.

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Technorati Tags: parallel programming, distributed computing

Another Sun open source acquisition

VentureBeat reports that Sun has acquired Innotek, a company developing an open source desktop virtualization software called VirtualBox. Sun move follows the acquisition of MySQL and other open source companies such as StarOffice.

There are now at least three different offers to run virtual machines: Parallels, VMWare and VirtualBox. This acquisition marks the definitive commoditization of computer hardware. Today you can run any of the major OSes (MacOS, Windows, Linux) on the two major consumer machine: Mac and PC hardware are in facts completely compatible (through Bootcamp or a virtual machine product) and Intel-compatible Linux servers are replacing older HP and Sparc hardware in the corporate world.

One can't say proprietary architectures have been very successful over the last 10 years. DEC (acquired by Compaq), HP, IBM, SGI, Sun and Apple have all converged towards an Intel-compatible platform. Ironically, this represents the best time for consumers to consider alternatives to Windows-only machines. Microsoft is now put under pressure from both the convergence towards a common platform (thus making the OS less relevant) and the Internet. The old proprietary OS model is fading out, as are other parts of the enterprise infrastructure.


Technorati Tags: open source

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Multicore virtual platforms

I had never heard of multicore virtual platforms before. This article from EE Times claims multi-core debugging issues can be resolved with the use of virtual platforms:

Even a parallel compiler does not address all the challenges posed when processors overwrite each other's memory areas, lock each other out of shared memory and race to complete tasks sooner (or later) than expected. The debugging capabilities of a physical prototype can typically handle freezing only one processor at a time, leaving the others running, and likely writing over memory locations needed for debugging.

Virtual platforms overcome this challenge by freezing all the processors simultaneously (including all IPC hardware and peripheral clocks) at breakpoints, giving complete visibility into all system states. To help achieve this complete hardware visibility, peripheral functionality can be captured in a graphical finite-state machine (FSM) language that combines graphical flowchart constructs with the execution power of ANSI C. This type of graphical language simplifies descriptions of concurrent hardware interactions and dramatically increases the MC visibility and controllability.

Technorati Tags: distributed computing, multicore

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