I see many new features & things for this Palo Web 3.1 release ! I’m impatient and hope it will come soon.

And we’ll definitely leave Microsoft Excel for Palo Web !

Here are the answers:

“Does it work on a virtual Linux system via VMWare in a server environment?”

To achieve their high perfomance, our parallel algorithms designed for GPUs have to run on actual GPU hardware. Since usually a VM does not have (exclusive) control over the hardware it runs on, it cannot guarantee that the GPU is available for a specific programm.
So, no, even if the software may “work” on a virtual machine, you won’t get the GPU speedup.

“Does is work on an office PC with a low-end graphics card with passive cooling?”

In principle, yes. However, there are some minimum hardware requirements, depending in part on your OLAP model:
First of all, at present we only support Nvidia GPUs that are CUDA-capable (which sort of means that non-graphics algorithms run on them). They also need to have “compute capability 1.3″, which means they can handle double precision floating point arithmetics.
Finally, the total graphics memory on the card(s) needs to be large enough for the data to be processed. We do hold (part of) the cube data in graphics memory. Hence, the larger your cubes, the bigger your required GPU memory.
What does this mean in practice? — We are currently doing a lot of our own development and tests on cards of the GTX-2xx series, which come with up to 2 GB graphics memory and start as low as EUR 200,-. This may not be low-end, but it’s what most people nowadays have in their home computers. (You may have to beg to get it in your office desktop, though. So it’s a valid question.)

“Does it work on a terminal PC via web-interface, either virtual
desktop or browser-based?”

Yes, if you were asking about client machines. Since our current parallel algorithms are only part of the SERVER software, it does not matter what front-end you use to access the server, be it web-based, via Excel spreadsheet, or otherwise.

Thanks for remininding everyone that software patents stiffle innovation.

After all, the Nobel Prize of economy of 2007 just demonstrated that too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Maskin

Here:
http://www.researchoninnovation.org/

JPS.
TioLive CEO

Another point is that the smaller software developers are mostly relying on one single technology / architecture approach – here it is OLAP, the solutions with customers always will be OLAP solutions which will be OK in most of the cases in the beginning of the projects when everything is pretty clear and structured. But growing and changing demands during the times will need to over think the BI – architecture.A vendor relying on payback of the investments in devoloping his only database and having his complete consulting team educated in his own and only software will always do very hard to recommend a switch. On the other side a BIG Vendor having all technologies in his portfolio will generate income with any suggested architecture approach ( I am not saying that those suggestion are always the best).

Closing this already to long statement I will take a metaphor from a different branch

It is not about inventing faster cars anymore it is about transporting peaple and goods in a save, ecologic, economic way.

Some of the biggest effects are the new technologies that would never have come about if there were no economic incentive to invest in the necessary research and development.

This is the most common argument in favour of patent protection. However it is not the only benefit to society.

You probably know, but it is worth pointing out to your readers, that one of the requirements for an inventor to receive patent protection is for him to publish a detailed description of the patent subject matter. This is not a casual requirement. There muse be sufficient detail for the reader to be able to replicate the subject matter. When there are several possible applications of the subject matter, the inventor must also clearly state the “preferred embodiment”.

Placing this information in the public domain is a very valuable benefit to society.

Another benefit to society is that the publication means that other researchers can build on the knowledge and do not have to duplicate the original discovery effort. In this way, they avoid unnecessary frustration, expense and lost time.

It is true that the patent confers monopoly rights for a defined period. I agree with your assertion that certain monopolies have the potential to be harmful to society, but patents are not unilateral unconditional monopolies.

In excess of 140 countries have recognised the benefits to their citizens of giving this conditional monopoly that arises from patent protection and have enshrined it in their national laws and international treaties.

Raymond Hegarty
http://intellectualprofit.blogspot.com/

There is little doubt that GPU acceleration has many people in IT excited and every IT department should be alerted to this robust development, as it significantly improves any business case by providing significantly higher performance for less than traditional cost.

In larger organisations, the technology choice is left to the IT department, while managers are interested in ease of use, data control, process flows, and reasonable application speed. Getting your ETL and processes right are critical for success, but speed can become a major issue whether you are faced with waiting for an hour, or sometimes overnight, for Budget or Treasury models to recalculate.

Operational staff need tools that will work quickly, if they are to meet that working day 3 reporting deadline. Try telling a manager he will have to wait 33 hours for his reports, instead of 16 minutes, just because each one of those 1000 workstations takes 2 minutes per process instead of 1 second.

The world is full of large scale, process compliant installations, that have been abandoned because the process worked, but the technology didn’t.

The key is to ensure you address the technology issues as well as the process issues.

I really appreciate your comment and the fact that you take the challenge of this discussion.

Besides other points I have one important point in answering your comment. You say that my argument “has no scientific basis”. Since I am not a scientist that might be true. But actually this same argument also is the weakest part of the patent system itself. No scientist has ever been able to prove that patents have a positive effect on society at a whole.

What has been proven scientifically is the negative impact of monopolies on the society. Knowing that monopolies are bad and with no scientific prove that patents are positive, patents should have never been introduced in the first place.

The system was never supposed to guarantee “a fair and automatic reward” for inventors, but it does not mean that they should be forced to disclose their knowhow for free.

There is definitely a quid-pro-quo and from the start, it was assumed that there would be a potential economic advantage for the inverntor to reward the benefits society would get from disclosure.

While it is valid to argue that the market for modern technology includes a large proportion with short product life cycles, you do not give any objective evidence of a benefit to society that would accrue from reducing the patent=protection period.

Indeed, the developments in copyright law are all in the opposite direction, even though one could say that innovation and life cycles are even shorter there.

Graphs are always a convenient way to fool people. Your diagram is a useful conceptual tool to visually describe your argument but it has no scientific basis. It is not based on any objective market data, the vertical axis has no units of measurement, I suspect it is scaled to exaggerate the claimed advantage, it does not show any innovation arising from the publication of the patent, and the analysis does not extend on the horizontal axis to show the benefits that continue to society after the expiry of the patent protection.

I would like to congratulate you for opening a debate. But I think your argument would benefit from more balance.

I do not claim to be unbiassed. I am an evangelist for IP commercialization. I believe that there inventors should share their discoveries with the world and believe that they should be rewarded handsomely for that.

Raymond Hegarty
http://intellectualprofit.blogspot.com

A CFO might be ok to wait a few minutes for his report, the greater number of business users having to spend hours instead of minutes for entering data and doing detailed analysis will certainly not agree with their CFO’s speaking.

It is not a game controller, it is a processing card with hundreds of number crunching CPUs working in parallel.