[cadynce] Re: Pre-telecon Rant

[Gautam Thaker]

Joe,

I did not want to go over the overall goals that we presented on March 14th, or at least to severely minimize the repeat of *any* 
slides from last time and to try to show incremental progress on the tool chain. (As you have said youself, if we don't have any 
thing new to tell her let us not waste her time.) I agree w/ you that proper framing may be needed here and proper audio. perhaps 
we should generate a slide that bulletizes the points you make below and have it as the first or 2nd slide. I can take cut at that 
by not by 3:45. Actually, my thinking was that we may have 2-3 separate set of slides, one would be the points you make here, 2-3 
slides, than my set of slides (possibly greated edited/redacted) on technical progress if any, and then similar other sets. I 
think it may be a bit early for a lot of SKOLL results yet but may be Adam can report what he has beyond March 14th, and we have 
yet to fully have lots of formal work on "equivalently-certifiable configurations" though we are going there as well. We have been 
working hard, I think, to more fully define what is meant by "certification evidence", and work is partially completed at best.

In the past Carol has, perhaps because she is merely polite, been quite effusive in her praise of our technical material. By 
properly packaging and underplaying what I had we may yet reach that goal again for April 19th. So we will hopefully sort it all 
out at in a few minutes on the teleconf.

Gautam

Cross, Joseph wrote:
> Gentledudes -
> 
> Anybody read the comic strip Sherman's Lagoon? In it, Sherman the shark
> counsels his young nephew that only two questions need be asked of
> everything he encounters: "Can I eat this thing?" and "Can this thing
> eat me?" If the answer is no to both, then the thing is irrelevant.
> 
> Regarding the draft presentation, for every bullet on every slide, Carol
> will want to know "Can this thing help me?" (i.e., can it make my job
> easier or expand my empire), and "Can this thing hurt me?" (i.e., can it
> decrease my empire or make me look stupid.)
> 
> For many bullets in the draft presentation, the answer is no to both.
> E.g., on slide 6, "A multi-dimensional binpacker capable of constraint
> satisfaction is at V0.8." Or the beautiful graph of NTP performance on
> slide 14. Or on slide 9, we announce an upcoming report that describes
> possible paths to solution of the Generalized Sporadic Arrival Model
> problem (surely Carol has a long list of problems, but she probably
> doesn't have one with that name.)
> 
> If we want Carol to back us up in our presentation to RADM Frick, we'll
> need to show her crisply what the goal program will deliver that will
> help her, and then show seedling results that make it credible that
> those deliverables will actually appear.
> 
> I recommend focusing on the head of the octopus rather than on its
> tentacles. I.e., we should say explicitly that the goal program will
> deliver:
> 
> 1) Design-time tools that generate allocations, estimate their
> certifiability by model checking,  automatically test those that pass,
> and present the test data to the certification board; 
> 2) Rules that define equivalently-certifiable configurations, such as
> interchanging apps in two blades with the same number of cores on the
> same shelf;
> 3) Run-time tools that will select a certified configuration from the
> list that 
>    a) Fits on available hardware
>    b) Optimally supports currently desired missions
>    c) Minimizes configuration-transition costs such as shutdowns and
> startups.
> 
> Then for each item, we should give whatever evidence we have that the
> goal program will get there. E.g., the multi-dimensional bin-packer
> progress lends credence that we will be able to generate a lot of
> potentially certifiable configurations, and the NTP data lends credence
> to the idea that we'll get good test data.
> 
> Doubtless Carol is smarter than I am, and she'd be able to draw the
> lines from what's in the presentation to the benefits to her. But just
> to be safe, we should make those connections blazingly obvious.
> 
> - Joe