Computing Laws Part 1

Over the many years in the computing industry, I have been introduced to several “laws” of computing that seem to fight against computing every reaching its maximum potential. Unless you have a degree in computer science or have studied at least some introductory computer courses you have probably never heard of any of these “laws” of computing.

First, I would like to say that most of them are not really laws, like the law of gravity for instance, but more like observations of phenomenon that seem to guide the computing industry. Most of them are related primarily to computing hardware trends, parallel software performance and computing system efficiency. I will talk the next couple of weeks about various ones of these laws, and introduce a law of my own in the final week.

The first of these laws in Amdahl’s Law. Gene Amdahl observed a phenomenon in parallel computing that allowed him to predict the theoretical speedup of an application when using multiple processors. He summarized the law like this: “The speedup of a program using multiple processors is limited by the time needed for the sequential fraction of the program.” In other words, every computer program, just like every task you complete in a given day, has a serial part that can only be done in a particular order and cannot be split up. A great example is if you are mowing a lawn, you have to first fill the lawn mower up with gas and start the mower before you can mow the lawn. If you have a bunch of friends with a bunch of lawn mowers, you still cannot get any faster than the amount of time to fill the lawnmowers with gas. The mowing can be parallel up to the number of friends with mowers, but you still have the limiting factor of the sequential step. It is obvious from Amdahl’s law that if there is no limit to the number of processors that can complete a given task, you still hit a limit of maximum performance.

A related law to Amdahl’s Law is Gunther’s Law, also known as the Universal Scalability Law. In 1993 Neil Gunther observed and presented a conceptual framework for understanding and evaluating the maximum scalability of a computing system. He understood that for any given task, even one that can be done entirely in parallel, like many friends help mow your lawn, that you still reach a limit at which adding more friends can actually cause mowing your lawn to take longer. The same thing happens in computer algorithms. They all have a sweet spot where the number of processes running balance out with the size of the problem and the hardware available to give the best performance for the program. I have always liked to think of Gunther’s Law as the law of too many friends. If all your friends and their mower cover your entire lawn they get in each other’s way and your lawn never gets mowed.

In 1988 John L. Gustafson and Edwin Basis wrote an article “Reevaluating Amdahl’s Law” in which they show that you can retain scalability by increasing the problem size. In other words, you can overcome the impact of the serial part of a problem by making the problem significantly large, minimizing the impact of the serial component, and along the same lines also improve upon the predicted maximum performance of Gunther’s Law. In other words, if you have many friends with many lawn mowers and a small lawn you are limited to scaling to only a small number of friends, but if you increase the size of the lawn, the serial factor of filling the mowers with gas and starting them becomes significantly smaller than the task of mowing the lawn. You also are able to given all of your friends a significant amount of lawn to mow in order to avoid the problems caused by having too many mowers. 

50th anniversary of lunar landing

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing, I am dedicating this week’s column to rerunning the local news items covering the mission. I was disappointed to find that most of our area newspapers ran very little about the missions. I was able to find one article in the archives here at The Licking News.

This article came out of Huntsville, Ala. and appears to be a press release sent to the hometown of people connected with the Apollo 11 missions. I found it interesting to learn that a Licking High School graduate was among the engineers that helped to design the Saturn V rocket that powered the Apollo series of spacecraft.

The headline read, “Connected With Apollo 11 Mission” in the July 17, 1969 edition of The Licking News. The content of the article follows.

HUNTSVILLE, ALA. – Donald E. Routh son of A. C. Routh of R. R., Licking, Mo., is a member of the organization that has played a major role in the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission.

He is an aerospace engineer in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.

The huge Saturn V rocket that lifted Apollo 11 from earth was developed under the direction of the Marshall Center, NASA’s largest organization.

Routh, a graduate of Licking High School, received his B.S. of E.E. degree in 1960 from Washington University in St. Louis.

His wife, Marie, is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Howard Quick of R.R., Licking.

I had really hoped for more to share from the local archives, but it seems that only major city newspapers covered the event at any level of detail as it was very heavily covered by television and radio. 

One of the best archives I have been able to find came from the New York Daily News July 21, 1969. In a story written by Mark Bloom. 

“Two men landed on the moon today and for more than two hours walked its forbidding surface in mankind’s first exploration of an alien world.

In the most incredible adventure in human history, these men coolly established earth’s first outpost in the universe, sending back an amazing panorama of views to millions of awed TV viewers.”

It saddens me to realize that much of the history of the event has been lost due to instability of the media used to store video archives and our lack of foresight as a nation to preserve this history in print.  Being a technology guru, you might find it odd for me to state the importance of putting ink to paper.  However, as can be clearly seen though-out history, it is the written word that survives the test of time.

Apollo: giant leaps in technology

The Apollo lunar missions resulted in what I believe to be some of the giant leaps in technology over the last century. You might be surprised to find out all the everyday things that came out of landing man on the moon.

Gel pens, my favorite writing utensil, came out of the space program. , The astronauts needed a way of recording the events during the mission that would work in low gravity. The gel pens allowed the ink to flow in the low gravity of space. These pens are capable of writing on the ceiling for a reasonable period of time. Prior to the space program, pens only worked from gravity pulling the ink against the ball.

The materials used in the “Moon Boots” revolutionized athletic footwear. They improved shock absorption, provided more stability, and provided better motion control. Al Gross substituted DuPont’s Hytrel plastic for the foam used in the shoe’s midsole to eliminate the cushioning loss caused by body weight in the shoe. He also used the “blow-molding” techniques used to manufacture the space suits to improve the techniques used to manufacture shoes.  

The fabrics developed for the spacesuits was also used to create fabric roofs, like the one in Houston’s Reliant Stadium. The fabric is stronger and lighter than steel and only weighs less than five ounces per square foot. It is translucent, flexible and reflective, causing a reduction in lighting, cooling and maintenance costs. This fabric is also used in temporary military structures. The fabric lasts up to 20-years and is a cheap alternative to steel and concrete structures. You will see many of these dome-like structures in use by Missouri Department of Transportation to house the rock salt mixture used to treat our winter roads.

NASA, along with General Motors, developed technology for moving heavy equipment on cushions of air. Rolair Systems, Inc. commercialized on the technology and it is used today in stadiums around the world to move large equipment, stages, and even stadium seating. Hawaii’s Aloha Stadium uses this technology to rearrange the stadium, moving entire 7,000 seat sections.

After the 1967 Apollo fire disaster, NASA needed to find ways to protect the flight crew in the event of a fire. Monsanto Company developed a chemically treated fire-proof fabric called Durette. Firemen wear the same fabric and utilize the same air tanks to fight fires on Earth.

Along with these high-tech devices designed to protect and entertain, there were also many things invented to just make life easier such as cordless tools, Chlorine-free pools, heart monitors, Black & Decker’s Dustbuster, quartz clocks and watches, and precision medical syringes. The technologies developed by NASA during the Apollo missions crossed all boundaries of our lives. 

The most surprising area to see an impact from the Apollo missions to me is agriculture. Many do not know that the NASA missions helped to develop feeding technologies for pig farmers. Roughly 15-25 percent of piglets die before they are weaned, usually as a result of accidental crushing by the sow. Farmatic, Inc. used NASA miniature electronic heaters to warm the body of a synthetic sow. This synthetic sow can be used to replace the mother in events of over-sized litters, rejected piglets or physical disorders.

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Space travel pre-1969

This week, let’s look back at the rocketry technology that sent us to moon on July 20, 1969. The times were different then as nations all over the globe were racing to be first in the great space race, with people dreaming of reaching space since the turn of the twentieth century. The first realistic means of space travel was first documented by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in his famous work “The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices,” published in 1903.

It was 16 years later (1919) when Robert H. Goddard, published a paper, “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” where he applied the de Lavel nozzle to liquid fuel rockets, making interplanetary travel possible. His paper influenced the key men in space flight, Hermann Oberth and Wernher von Braun.

The first rocket to reach space and put Germany in the lead of the space race was launched in June, 1944. The German V-2 rocket was used to attempt sub-orbital space flight in the British “Operation Backfire,” but did not achieve the altitude necessary. The Backfire report remains to date the most extensive technical document of the V-2 rocket. This triggered the British Interplanetary Society to propose the Megaroc, a manned suborbital flight vehicle. The Megaroc successfully sent pilot Eric Brown on a sub-orbital flight in 1949.

Over a decade later true orbital space flight, both manned and unmanned, took place during the “Space Race,” a fierce competition during the Cold War between Russia and the United States. The race began in 1957 with both nations announcing plans to launch artificial satellites. The U.S. announced a planned launch of Vanguard by spring 1958 and Russia claimed to be able to launch by the fall of 1957.

Russia won the first round with the launch of three successful missions, Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957; Sputnik 2, the first to carry a living animal, a dog named Laika and Sputnik 3, May 15, 1958, carrying a large array of geophysical research instruments.

The U.S., on the other hand, faced a series of failures until its successful mission with Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite, on February 1, 1958. Explorer 1 carried instruments that detected the theorized Van Allen radiation belt. The shock over Sputnik 1 triggered the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and gave it responsibility for the nation’s civilian space programs, beginning the race for the first man in space.

Unfortunately the U.S. lost again on April 12, 1961. Yuri Gagarin made a 108-minute single orbit flight on board the Vostok. Between this first flight and June 16, 1962, the USSR launched a total of six men into space, two pairs flying concurrently, resulting in 260 orbits and just over 16-days in space.

The U.S was falling further behind in the race to space. They only had one successful manned flight by Alan Shepard, May 5, 1961, on the Freedom 7 capsule. However, Shepard fell short of reaching space and only achieved a sub-orbital flight. It was not until February 20, 1962, when John Glenn became the first U.S. orbital astronaut, making three orbits on Friendship 7. President John F. Kennedy announced a plan at this time to land a man on the moon by 1970, officially starting Project Apollo.

Not to be outdone, USSR put the first woman in space on June 16, 1963. Valentina Tereshkova flew aboard the Vostok 6. Tereshkova married fellow cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev and on June 8, 1964, gave birth to the first child conceived by two space travelers.

On July 20, 1969, the U.S. succeeded in achieving President Kennedy’s goal with the landing of Apollo 11. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to set foot on the moon. Six successful moon landings were achieved through 1972, with only one failure on Apollo 13.

Unfortunately, the USSR’s N1 rocket suffered the largest rocket explosion in history just weeks before the first U.S. moon landing. The N1 rocket booster was the most powerful single-stage rocket ever made. All four attempted launches resulted in failures. The largest, on July 3, 1969, destroyed the launch pad. These failures resulted in the USSR government officially ending its manned lunar program on June 24, 1974.