To improve on these data rates, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota (where I am an adjunct professor) undertook a project to design and build a shared file system for direct network-attached storage, called the Global File System (GFS). GFS was to have far less overhead than current file systems, so it could sustain much higher data rates, even for small file sizes.

GFS was first publicly demonstrated at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada, in April of 1997. Broadcasters and movie makers, especially those involved with computer-generated animation and special effects, are big users of network file systems to feed video from high-performance disk arrays to multiple high-performance Unix workstations. As a result, several vendors attended NAB to demonstrate their highest-performance systems to the broadcast industry.

At NAB, the GFS file system was installed on two very high-performance Silicon Graphics workstations. These workstations were selected because Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) had used similar workstations for the Jurassic Park sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park. This film opened the following month and represented the state of the art in computer-generated animation. The ILM digital artist team used the Silicon Graphics technology to create frighteningly lifelike and detailed dinosaurs, with more than four times the computer-generated imagery of the film’s predecessor.

The workstations were attached to several Ciprico Fibre Channel disk arrays, often used by the movie industry because they can support very high data-transfer rates. (Ciprico is a Minneapolis, Minnesota-based company that has worked with the University of Minnesota on numerous projects.) Ciprico’s new Fibre Channel-based array can transfer data at 85 MB/sec with burst transfer rates of 100 MB/sec. The GFS demonstration, held in the Ciprico booth at NAB, was the first demonstration of Fibre Channel-based, direct network-attached storage.

At the NAB trade show, the GFS was transferring files to and from the Silicon Graphics workstations at an amazing data rate of 60 MB/sec — 10 times faster than traditional network file systems and about 3 times faster than anything else being demonstrated at NAB. Needless to say, this demonstration generated a great deal of interest in the broadcast industry. Since the trade show, several other companies in businesses varying from medical imaging to Internet serving have shown an interest in GFS.

My own interest in GFS is very personal. My son Steven Soltis designed and developed GFS as a part of his Ph.D. research at the University of Minnesota. This particular file system is just the beginning. The concepts Steve developed for GFS will no doubt find their way into other systems to enable even higher-performance file systems. They may even find their way into the AS/400. Maybe the next generation of Star Wars movies could be developed using AS/400s — then again, maybe not.

User Interfaces

Another area receiving lots of attention is the user interface to the computer system. Yesterday’s graphical user interface (GUI) is rapidly giving way to a new network user interface (NUI). Several vendors, such as IBM, Lotus, Microsoft, Oracle, Netscape, and Sun, have introduced new NUIs for both PCs and NCs. These browser-like interfaces let a user seamlessly use the facilities of both local and remote systems. The goal is to make remote system facilities seem as familiar to end users as local desktop facilities.

There hasn’t been this much activity in user interfaces since GUIs were introduced in the middle 1980s. Each vendor who has introduced NUIs seems to have a slightly different idea of how a user interface should look. Some are following the Windows concept with task bars, drop-down menus, and overlapping windows on the screen. Others have taken the opportunity to break with these long-held concepts of a user interface and have introduced much simpler interfaces. For example, Sun introduced a NUI for its JavaStation that eliminates the need for users to open, close, save, or quit an application. Instead, all applications appear to be running all the time. A single click (Sun felt double-clicking was too complex) on an icon switches between applications that always run full-screen to eliminate the confusion of overlapping windows.

Many of the NUIs are being targeted at the majority of people in the world who have never seen either a Macintosh or a Windows interface. Netscape, for example, expects its NUI to also appear on home video-game machines and Internet-enabled TVs.

The initial NUI introduced for the IBM Network Station is far less radical. It is designed to preserve the look and feel of today’s systems rather than break new ground. You can use individual windows on the screen to run green-screen terminal emulators for 5250/3270 applications, Unix motif applications, a Web browser, and standard Windows applications. Look for this interface to be enhanced over time to support the specific NUIs AS/400 users need. It will probably take several years to sort out all the possibilities for the ultimate desktop — something no one interface will probably ever achieve.

Future increases in performance and bandwidth for all systems will enable even simpler, more humanly accessible interfaces such as speech and handwriting. Such advances will greatly increase the number of people who become computer users — there is even hope for those whose VCRs are still flashing 12:00 a.m.

Although the use of all these new interface technologies will vary based on cultural and geographic differences, by the year 2001, we will see a blurring of the boundaries between working in the office, working at home, working on the road, personal management, learning, and recreation. A synergy between entertainment, communications, computer, and consumer markets is rapidly evolving (the computer game Doom may even run natively on the AS/400).