Cloud Computing: Pilot Results

In an earlier blog, I discussed how cloud computing may be a good option for help converting paper publications to searchable digital files. We embarked on a pilot test of cloud computing to evaluate this option.

The cloud was used to convert uncompressed TIFF images into searchable PDFs, requiring an optical character recognition (OCR) engine and a PDF distiller. This is a computationally intensive operation typical of image processing and therefore seemed to be a good application for distributed cloud computing.

Our pilot at the Government Printing Office consisted of processing nearly 20,000 pages of the Statutes at Large collection that had been scanned to our specifications. To assess the cloud capabilities, samples of the collection were processed with four different instance types; small, large, high-CPU medium storage, and high-CPU, large storage. The characteristics of these instances are outlined in this table:

Virtual instance details

Results were developed to assess the cost of processing a 100 page publication, which is roughly a 90MB package of TIFFs. Calculated costs included the upload/download transmission cost and the computing cost.The results were very interesting, indicating additional processing capability (virtual cores) improves the performance, to a point.

The transmission costs actually turned out to be higher than the processing costs, but it was clear that the high-CPU, medium storage processing solution was the most cost effective. Licensing costs for the OCR tool were not included in this evaluation.

Pilot cost summary

Special thanks to our to our awesome engineering co-op student, Isaac Jones for developing the test plan and collecting to data for this evaluation.

References:
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
FDsys Operational Specification for Converted Content

Printed Electronics

In late 2007 silicon ink and inkjet printers were used to print a transistor with respectable performance. And now, a year later, there have been good advancements in demonstrating a product using this technology -- RFID tags using printed ICs (PICs). The past year has boosted nFET thin-film transistor (TFT) performance from electron mobilities of 80 cm2/Vs to nearly 100 cm2/Vs and full CMOS functionality has been achieved.

This is extremely cool. It was not too long ago that printed electronics was used for conductors as a part of an assembly. Now, printed electronics is moving into an area where effective active electronics can be built using low-cost printing technology. The flexibility and scalability enabled with printing technologies in the electronics market is mind-boggling, making the production of billions of devices seem reasonable.

One key market for this technology is for supply chain item inventory marking using RFID tags. Once a cost effective solution for individual RFID tags is available, this technology will quickly move to the mass market making inventory control and consumer transactions nearly painless. These low-cost RFID tags are expected to become increasingly common as a means of identifying every type of consumer product. Some device cost ~20 cents today, with a gaols to achieve a sub 1 cent cost.

References:
RFID Tags Using Printed Electronics
First Printed Silicon RFID Platform for Item-Level Intelligence

Crunch time

It seems like all projects experience a big crunch at the end. This is certainly the case with GPO's Federal Digital System (FDsys). This ambitious program to develop and launch a world-class information management system for Federal publications has been underway for some time now and has experienced a number of difficulties over the past few years. But since March of this year, the team has achieved traction and has been making terrific progress. Nonetheless, as the promised launch date approaches, knuckles are starting to turn white and some folks are starting a nasty habit of gritting their teeth.

I think things will turn out fine for this project despite the end-of-year vacations and holidays -- this team is focused and dedicated to getting this complex information system launched.

I was rummaging through some old files recently and came across a drawing that fit the FDsys situation well. Needing only a few Photoshop edits, this drawing was customized to fit bill perfectly.



To learn more about FDsys, check out the website -- www.gpo.gov/fdsys