Hybrid technology degrees emerging

As demand for college graduates with technical degrees soars, new majors are emerging that are hybrids of computer science, information systems and computer engineering.

Penn State University, for example, created the College of Information Science and Technology a decade ago as an interdisciplinary program that combines engineering and business courses. The college offers three bachelor's degrees: a B.S. and a B.A. in Information Sciences and Technology (IST) and a B.S. in Security and Risk Analysis (SRA).

[TECH MAJORS: Which tech degrees pay the most from day one?]

Demand for students who complete the more rigorous B.S. degrees is high.

"Around 78% of last year's graduates were placed in May 2012," says Mary Beth Rosson, associate dean for undergraduate studies at Penn State's College of Information Science and Technology. "Starting salaries for IST majors averaged $60,500 and $59,200 for SRA majors. The placement rate for students who did the dual major - IST and SRA, which is easy to do - was 91.6%, definitely giving them a high value. Around 40% of our students did get a signing bonus."

Rosson sees less demand for the B.A. program both from students and recruiters.

"It's an experimental program. We have had it for a few years, but we haven't gotten much uptake on it," Rosson says. "We designed it to be flexible, so you could double major in biology or history and IST. But it's been difficult to get it going."

Recruiting for Penn State's IST grads is strong this year, with 50 companies trekking out to the main University Park campus for interviews. Altogether, Penn State has about 800 undergraduates pursuing IST and SRA degrees.

"Our top companies in terms of numbers of hires are Price Waterhouse Coopers, Delloitte, Booz Allen Hamilton, Capital One, Cognizant, Freddie Mac and Northrup Grumman," Rosson says. "A lot of our students go into consulting type of positions. Our students are very business savvy because they have two or three internships."

Rosson says techie teens who love math, algorithms and mastering computer processes should focus on computer science, while those who like working with people should consider a major like information sciences and technology.

"If you want to work with computing technology in the context of people and problems, that's why you want to come here," Rosson says. "Our programs emphasize the human, social and cultural context of computing....Recruiters love our students because they are ready to work. They're problem solvers, they're good in groups, and they have good communications skills."

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Seagate upgrades hybrid drive family, adds desktop model

Seagate today announced upgrades to its 2.5-in. laptop hybrid drives and released its first 3.5-in. desktop hybrid drive.

Hybrid drives combine a relatively small amount of NAND flash with traditional spinning disks along with firmware that determines where data resides on the disk based on application performance requirements.

Because the hybrid drives use spinning disk, they can provide terabyte-plus capacities, but because of the NAND flash, they can offer performance similar to solid-state drives (SSDs) with price points approaching traditional hard disk drives.

As part of today's release, Seagate also announced it will no longer sell its hybrid drives under the Momentus XT name and will now use the brand SSHD (solid-state hybrid drives) to better reflect the technology.

Seagate's SSHD hybrid drive family.

The drives represent Seagate's third generation of 2.5-in. hybrid drives. The release includes a new version of its standard laptop hybrid drive and 7mm-high "Thin" SSHD, designed to fit smaller laptops, such as ultrathin notebooks.

One notable change to the 2.5-in. line is that Seagate is now using 5400 rpm spinning disk, versus the 7200 rpm spindles of its previous generation drives. But, even with the slower spindle speeds, the new Seagate Laptop and Laptop Thin SSHDs boast performance that's as much as 40% faster than previous generations, and can add as much as 30% to total system performance -- regardless of the processor inside the system, according to David Burks, Seagate's director of global marketing.

To boost performance in the slower spindle speed drives, Seagate deployed a new NAND flash subsystem, using upgraded write caching algorithms that automatically write all high-priority data directly to flash. In past generations, all data was initially written to spinning disk and then migrated to flash as performance metrics required, Burks said.

"[The firmware] constantly monitors every block of data and evaluates it as to whether it's boot information or data frequently used by the operating system or an application. At the same time, we also evaluate the data based on what its impact is on system performance if it's stored on hard disks versus the SSD portion of the drive," Burks said.

For example, Burks said, if the data consists of long, sequential blocks, there is no benefit in storing it on the NAND flash, whereas random data consisting of short -- 4KB and 8KB -- blocks can benefit from the low search latency of the solid-state memory.

The new Seagate Laptop and Laptop Thin SSHDs come with 8GB of NAND flash. The drives come in single-platter 500GB or dual-platter 1TB capacities.

Burks said Seagate is working with Intel, which created the specifications for ultrabooks, in order to get their hybrid drives into more models of the ultrathin laptops. Currently, some ultrabooks contain separate NAND flash and hard disk drives in order to achieve Intel's low threshholds for fast boot-up and data sleep-to-active-mode times.

Seagate's new 3.5-in. desktop SSHD

Seagate's first desktop hybrid drives will come in 1TB and 2TB capacities and will use a 7200rpm spindle speed. Other than size, everything else about the Desktop SSHD line is the same as Seagate's notebook SSHDs.

"What we're trying to do here is simplify the number of platforms we have to engineer and support," Burks said.

As with the 2.5-in laptop drives, the new Desktop SSHD line will use Seagate's Adaptive Memory software to identify and store only the most critical data a system needs to go fast. The Desktop SSHD serves up high performance without a high price tag.

Seagate's 2.5-in. laptops will mainly be sold to system manufacturers, with some sales coming from channel distributors. In contrast, the 3.5-in. Desktop SSHDs will be sold exclusively through channel distribution partners, Burks said.

Desktop system manufacturers like to see a new technology proved out in the market before incorporating the technology into their computers, an issue that affected Segate's first and second-generation hybrid drives, Burks said.

"We expect a similar reaction with our desktop hybrid drives, and because we'll be the only ones with them for at least a year, we believe the channel is probably the best venue for them, and a lot of healthy business exists in channel for desktops," Burks said.

"Our customers want the highest storage capacity with the ability to access their data easily and quickly," Fredrik Hamberger, vice president of Hewlett-Packard's consumer PC business, said in a statement. "Integrating Seagate's SSHD solution into our rapidly growing portfolio of industry-leading PCs will offer our customers a superior experience while running multiple applications."

Without releasing pricing, Burks said the SSHDs would carry a $15 to $20 price premium over standard hard drives of similar capacity. For some idea of pricing, Seagate's second generation Momentus XT hybrid drive with 750GB of capacity retailed for $245.

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at @lucasmearian, or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed. His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

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Academy Cube aims to tackle IT skills shortage with online learning platform

Software vendors, academic institutions and government agencies united on Tuesday to tackle European youth unemployment and the IT skills shortage with a new online education platform.

Academy Cube, developed by SAP with the support of the European Commission, will focus on teaching IT skills and matching students with job vacancies. It runs on a learning management system developed by SuccessFactors, a company SAP acquired last year.

"The real issue we have to tackle is not the financial crisis, but youth unemployment," said Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, at a launch event for the platform at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany. In some European Union member states, the youth unemployment rate is almost 60 percent, she said.

Paradoxically, at the same time there are between 700,000 and 1 million job vacancies in Europe, estimated SAP co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe. They can't be filled because young people lack the required IT skills, he said.

"We are creating, with partners, a digital learning system so they can become more skilled," he said. "This is open to all companies."

Initial partners include Microsoft, LinkedIn, Software AG, ThyssenKrupp, Robert Bosch, the German Federal Employment Agency and a number of academic institutions and training providers.

Students who create an account on the platform will see a range of courses and the job opportunities they open up, or they can consult job vacancies and see which courses they need to follow in order to apply. They can follow the courses at their own pace, returning automatically to where they left off the next time they log in.

The website is now live, and a handful of students are already enrolled, Snabe said.

SAP has invested "a few million euros to get the platform up and running," said Snabe. "The costs now will be adding the content and recruiting people."

Those costs will mostly be borne by the companies contributing training or seeking skilled employees: At least at first, the enrollment and training will be free for students. Snabe did not rule out a fee later, but did say the platform's purpose is not to make a profit.

Kroes said she thought the platform could be a win-win proposition for students and industry, a sentiment echoed by Snabe.

"We will never compete on price for an hour of labor here in Europe, but with the right training we might compete on the productivity of an hour of labor," he said.

Although countries such as Greece and Spain have the highest youth unemployment, and German companies are building the platform, the training will be provided in English.

"English gives global access to IT," Snabe said.

Peter Sayer covers open source software, European intellectual property legislation and general technology breaking news for IDG News Service. Send comments and news tips to Peter atpeter_sayer@idg.com.

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NASA Mars rover Curiosity on road to recovery

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity is out of safe mode and back on active status after computer trouble hadsidelined the vehicle for nearly a week.

The space agency reported that Curiosity is now running on its backup computer system, known as its B-side. It's been taken out of its minimal-activity safe mode and ready to return to full operation.

"We are making good progress in the recovery," said Mars Science Laboratory Project Manager Richard Cook in a statement.

"One path of progress is evaluating the A-side with intent to recover it as a backup. Also, we need to go through a series of steps with the B-side, such as informing the computer about the state of the rover -- the position of the arm, the position of the mast, that kind of information," he said.

Jim Erickson, Curiosity's deputy project manager, told Computerworld on Monday that engineers watching the rover's telemetry last week noticed certain applications would terminate mid-sequence. The cause, he noted, appears to be a file corruption.

"We are doing multiple things at the same time," said Erickson. "All we know is the vehicle is telling us that there are multiple errors in the memory. We think it's a hardware error of one type or another but the software did not handle it gracefully. We'd like to have our vehicles withstand hardware trouble and continue to function."

Now that NASA's computer specialists have fully switched the rover over onto its redundant, onboard computer system, they are trying to repair the problem on the main system. They also are attempting to shore up the rover's software so it can better withstand hardware glitches.

At this point, NASA engineers are looking to keep Curiosity running on the B-side system, while repairing the A-side so it can be on stand-by as the new backup.

NASA is on a deadline to get the rover fully functional before April 4, when communication with all Mars rovers and orbiters will end for about a month.

A solar conjunction -- when the Sun will be in the path between the Earth and Mars -- is fast approaching and will keep NASA engineers from sending daily instructions to the rover, or from receiving data and images in return.

NASA will have to send all operational instructions for that month-long span to Curiosity before the solar conjunction begins.

The rover will remain stationary in order to keep it safe while out of contact with Earth.

Curiosity, which landed on the Red Planet last August, is on a two-year mission to find out if Mars has ever had an environment that could support life, even in a microbial form.

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at @sgaudin, or subscribe to Sharon's RSS feed . Her e-mail address is sgaudin@computerworld.com.

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EBay develops 'miles per gallon' metric for data centers

There's a maxim in the data center business that you can't manage what you can't measure, and eBay has come up with the mother of all measurement systems for calculating data center efficiency.

The online auction giant has devised a methodology that looks at the cost of its IT operations in dollars, kilowatt hours and carbon emissions, and ties those costs back to a single performance metric -- in eBay's case, the number of buy and sell transactions its customers make at eBay.com.

The result is a set of data that provides the equivalent of a "miles per gallon" metric for data centers, which organizations can use as a baseline to improve on over time, said Dean Nelson, head of eBay's Global Foundation Services, which manages its data centers worldwide.

"EBay is a single system, it's the sum of a million parts, and we needed a way to measure and convey the efficiency of this system," he said Tuesday at the Green Grid Forum, a data center efficiency conference in Santa Clara, California.

EBay has published the methodology in the hope that other companies will adopt it too, much as the industry rallied around Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE, as a general metric for data center efficiency.

EBay's system, which it calls the Digital Service Efficiency (DSE) dashboard, goes further than PUE, measuring its IT infrastructure and relating it to the four metrics its top executives care about most -- revenue, performance, environmental impact and cost.

In the process of sharing its method, eBay took the unusual step of releasing a wealth of data about its own data centers. It operated 52,075 physical servers at the end of last year, and generated 740 metric tons of carbon per million users, or 1.6 tons per server.

It set itself a target of reducing its cost per transaction and carbon emissions per transaction by 10 percent this year, and of increasing its transactions per kilowatt hour by the same amount, Nelson said. It shared those figures too -- apart from the costs in dollar terms, which it views as competitive data.

"We're not going to show our detailed profit and loss numbers to everyone; we're devising a metric to show how much we're improving efficiency each year," said Rohini Jain, finance lead for eBay's technology infrastructure.

Still, it's more data than most other companies provide. For instance, Google doesn't disclose how many servers it operates or how much power its data centers consume, though it does publishefficiency data.

It may not be easy for other companies to replicate eBay's methodology. EBay has a straightforward metric against which to measure performance -- the number of transactions its customers make, which it measures in URLs -- while many other firms have more complex business models.

It also helps that it is a technology-driven company willing to invest in energy-saving ideas. It brought its first solar farm online in December, generating 650 kilowatts of power, and it plans to install Bloom fuel cells later this year that will provide up to 6 megawatts of power.

The software, hardware, operations and finance teams at eBay are working together on the project, Nelson said. In one experiment, its software developers adjusted the memory utilization for a pool of servers, allowing it to eliminate 400 machines and save a megawatt of power, he said.

PUE was controversial when it was introduced by the Green Grid Forum six years ago, Nelson said, but it has since been adopted widely.

Like PUE, the "miles per gallon" data isn't necessarily useful in and of itself, but it could give companies a benchmark to measure progress moving forward.

"We averaged 46,000 transactions per kilowatt hour last year. Was that good? We don't know, we have nothing to baseline it against," Nelson said.

This year, eBay -- and everyone else -- will be able to see how it's doing.

James Niccolai covers data centers and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow James on Twitter at @jniccolai. James's e-mail address is james_niccolai@idg.com

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Computer History Museum to induct Pixar co-founder not named Steve Jobs into Hall of Fellows

The Computer History Museum on Monday announced its Class of 2013 includes Ed Catmull, a computer scientist and Pixar co-founder, along with two PC pioneers: Harry Huskey and Robert W. Taylor.

These accomplished technology industry professionals will be inducted into the museum's Hall of Fellows on April 27 in Mountain View. While their names might not be household ones, they join a roster of technology bigwigs from Web creator Tim Berners-Lee to Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf and Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe.

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Catmull not only started up Pixar, along with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Alvy Ray Smith, but is currently president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios. The museum officially recognizes Catmull for: "His pioneering work in computer graphics, animation and filmmaking." Catmull is one of the architects of the RenderMan rendering software, which has been used in 44 of the last 47 films nominated for an Academy Award in the Visual Effects category, according to the museum. Catmull has received five Academy Awards.

Huskey earned his entry into the Hall of Fellows "for his seminal work on early and important computing systems, and a lifetime of service to computer education." Huskey's claims to fame include working on the famed ENIAC computer, working alongside computer industry legend Alan Turing, and as a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, developing the G15, called by some the first true personal computer.

The third new fellow, Taylor, enters the Hall of Fellows "For his leadership in the development of computer networking, online information and communications systems, and modern personal computing." 

His career included working closely with Doug Engelbart ("father of the computer mouse"), leading the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and founding the Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where Ethernet, the laser printer and other important network and computer technologies arose.

"The Fellows program recognizes the leading figures of the information age -- men and women who have shaped the computing revolution and changed the world forever," said John Hollar, museum president and CEO. "Catmull, Huskey and Taylor are a tremendously distinguished group, and we are honored to celebrate their work and achievements." 

Bob Brown tracks network research in his Alpha Doggs blog and Facebook page, as well on Twitter and Google +. 

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