Storage California - you can Check Out but you can Never Leave...

Regarding your point about backups, you don;t back up huge amounts of data in a big store like that.

You keep two (or more) copies, hopefully in distinct locations.

Sorry if that is me appearing to be aggressive - I run an HSM system, and backups consist of backing up the 'stub' files on disk. you then keep two copies of the data on the slower tiers.

Re: The board has rounded corners

Rounded corners are so it fits into an Altoid mints tin.

http://www.walyou.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/mint_tin_pocket_guitaramp.jpg

Those tins are the traditional case for US breadboard electronic projects.

Re: Hands up, who's not heard of HL7 (another set of standards from the 1980s)

Completely agree.

Look at the history of HTML and the Web - at the time there were office systems and information retrieval systems which ran on individual platforms (IBM Profs for instance).

Berners Lee developed the standard for exchanging the information - and produced DEMONSTRATION web browser and web server instances. You DIDN'T have to buy a NeXT computer to use the Web - allt you needed was something which parsed and displayed HTML.

Re: Whats the I/o?

SirDigalot, your comment about a power station is right on the money.

There is a lto of discussion on supercomputing lists re. the push to exascale - not because the compute power is impossible but because of the power requirements.

Re: Can't wait for the software!

Yes. but the problem is getting that retail sales data/industrial sensor data into and out of the GPUs.

You still have to have a very capable system which can read the data from disk and display the results.

Just throwing lots of flops at a problem isn't the stotal solution.

Re: And how do we get at the existing stuff that's buried in various sealed sites?

Well then - why not build the new molten salt reactors on these same sites?

The sites are already there, and have experienced staff nearby, plus the waste does not have to be transported over a long distance. Existing sites will also have the high voltage generator sets and transmission transformers/wires too.

"And the business based in High Holborn London. "

"Recruitment is a challenge"

Well there's a surprise - everything OK for those at the top who are drawing large slaries and can afford that nice place in Clapham?Notting Hill.

But you want recent graduates to work for you in central London - are you paying them a decent enough wage to be able to afford to rent a place and afford a Travelcard?

Or are you jsut whining that they won't work for peanuts and live in a shed.

Re: A few things

"All you have done is spout about your nuclear imaging (a claim that cannot be verified)"

Errr... it is a claim that certainly can be verified.

Damned if I'm going to bother to name the company on here, but its on my CV.

And I worked in the medical physics department at a London teaching hospital for several years, and was the computer manager at a brain imaging unit it the same hospital.

If you think thats unverifaible, so be it.

Re: Medical equipment, don't make me start...

"As regards test results (ie images etc). These are transient because it's generally not the result that's important, it's the interpretation of the result, in conjunction with other diagnostic information that gives your doctor the information he/she needs to direct your healthcare."

Absolutely agree. Very well put.

What we're missing here is the process - a scan is ordered by a clinician, patient turns up at department, and a lot of digital data is gathered. That dat is kept on disk (in this case on a MO disk, if I remember the capacity being a whopping 80 Megabytes).

The data is kept in digital fomat so that a consultant can view it, and interpret it. The consultant will dictate a report with his/her findings. And remember it takes years to train as a radiologist.

It is the report which is the important part, and this should be what you think of as your "medical records" - and should be kept.

I don't see what the fuss is about keeping all that raw data - there isn't the storage room for it, or the need.

The data IS kept for a reasonable amount of time - after all you might be in hospital for months, or be undergoing (say) a cancer treatment. It is useful to compare the tumour size pre-and-post treatment (I'm sure there are many more examples). But eight years later? No.

Re: A few things

Easy for you to say that Anonymopus coward.

" This is why one should never use proprietary formats for data."

Have you ever read data off a brain scanner?

I have - I have worked in medical imaging departments, and for a nuclear medicine company which maintained scanners.

I ahve worked with Siemens and Philips gear, and with GE probably but I forget that.

So you buy a million pound brain scanner, dig out your basement, install it, install a cyclotron next door.

So you're then going to say to the doctors that they can't see the data off it because CTI Siemens provide the data in their own format?

Of course, hat you do is translate that data into other formats.

there is a standard for nuclear medicine images, which I worked with.

Similarly DICOM for other imaging modalities.

Re: Why do we have records then?

Yes indeed.

Medical images are routinely stored digitally in systems called PACS. You can take X-rays directly on digital plates, and CT and MRI data are of course digital anyway.

HOWEVER if we restrict ourselves to patient notes for this discussion, have you ever SEEN a patient records department? I have. Do you know what a Lloyd-George envelope is?

When I worked at a leadign London teaching hospital well over ten eyars ago, the head of medical physics asked me to get involved in a project some bright spark had to scan int he entire hospitals medical records.

I ran a mile.

I doubt a project like that has ever successfully been done.

Re: @ Film .... there is only one copy of it

I'm sure copying X-rays is possible. Remember however that you would need a high resolution scanner, with a good dynamic range - these things are used to look for subtle changes for diagnostic purposes. Such as spotting breast cancer.

However, having worked in a hospital in medical imaging I have never seen X-rays being copied.

I could be wrong - this may be routine these days.

This is one of the arguments for PACS - in a hospital if you are running a clinic a request is made for patients notes and X-ray films which are brought up on a trolley.

Notes and X-rays quite often go missing, and what happens if a patient is attending two clinics on the same day?

with a digital PACS system the images are available in multiple locations.

Re: Why do we have recrods then?

You are slightly confusing patient records and imaging data.

I'm not sure about patient records, but there is no requirement to keep medical images since birth.

If I recall correctly, for children images have to be kept till they are eighteen.

For adults it is something like ten years.

I'm not sure of the exact number of years - as I said it is some time sonce I worked in medical imaging.

Think about it - do you REALLY expect hospitals to maintain warehouses with the X-ray films your eighty year old granny had taken when she was a child?

Conventional X-ray films were reoutinely recycled for their silver content.

Re: This is down to...

Are you SURE this was a proprietary format which needed IE5 to view them?

It is highly likely that they were in DICOM format, which is pretty universal for medical images.

Re: :Never mind the birds

As a child I lived in the town in Scotland where the huge Singer factory had its own power station.

The station discharged warm water into the canal, which had monster goldfish as a result.

I now work in a building which has a massive lake used as a cooling pond - and yes we do keep fish in it!

Re: Wow, another company inventing the thin client. (again).

And indeed it would. The Vmware View client is available for Linux.

Look at the Raspberry Pi Thin Client Project http://rpitc.blogspot.co.uk/

Re: Is it me??????

I don't agree with you.

The techniques used to build, manage and run jobs on beasts like this filter down to the HPC machines used by 'normal' business and academia.

Re: Turning off servers at 6:30?

Turning off the email servers at 6:30? What a clod this guy is.

I work for a company which has a global presence - we send teams of engineers and technicians all over the world, complete with racks of servers and data comms.

We also have branch offices and dealerships all over the globe, which means we are a 24/7 operation.

I also am very glad to say I work with a team of dedicated, hard working people. I guarantee my office will have people in and working hard at 8pm tonight, same as any other night.

Turn the email servers off at 6:30? Ha ha ha ha. In what time zone?

Re: Effluent temperature

I was a boy in the town in Scotland which had the huge Singer plant. They had their own power station for the factory, which discharged warm water into the Forth and Clyde Canal. The canal was populated with enormous foot long (and larger) goldfish.

Re: True believers

Yes - but the discharge is HOTTER

If you took an intake from downstream of your outtake you would end up heating the same water again and again. There has to be a temperature difference between the hot water which comes from your server room pipe loops and the water which you are using for cooling - too close a difference and you aren't able to transfer much heat into the cooling water. Identical temperatures of course and you can't transfer any.

Re: Units

Talking about VAXes, at CERN years ago the standard unit of comparison was a VUP - Vax Unit of Performance

I THINK a VAX 750 was one VUP, might have been a 780

I'm surprised that an IBM PC is measured in milliVAXes - I thought they would be roughly comparable.

Re: "an open-source clinical image and object management system."

John Smith,

this is not (as far as I know) a medical records project like the NHS project - it is a PACS project, ie allowing remote access to medical images.

You should not confuse the two.

The reply from Sporkinum confuses the compression applied to the image on disk (which may or may nto be lossy - I don't know).

Anonymous coward asked about PCOIP compression - which is the compression used by the remote desktop protocol. Read up about PCOIP - it is pretty smart. It will 'build to lossless' - ie you might see some loss when an image is rotating, depending on how much bandwidth you have.

HOWEVER when the image is stationary - ie like an X-ray image - you will have a perfect image.

Speaking as someone who worked on the first PACS system in the UK, this is really interesting stuff and a good use for PCOIP.

Rather strangely I am a particle physicist who worked at CERN and I now with a Formula 1 racing team.

What do you mean? If you're talking about using the LHC tunnel to race vehicles through, then sorry to say it is (a) too small (b) probably not ventilated enough.

OSX based on BSD

Actually, OS X is not bad, based as it is on BSD

Indeed. Someone please remind Mr Watmore that OSX is based on BSD - which is - errrrr..... open source, no? And therefore easily hacked. Ah well.

UV hardware fault tolerance

Re. UV coping with RAM failures, it has the rather neat trick of detecting DIMM errors then marking those pages as unusable.

Dose meters

"that a few more people have (access to) geiger counters than back in 1986."

Err... well no not really. 1986 was not that primitive a year.

Ionizing radiation detectors have been around for over a hundred years, beginning with gold leaf electrometers and cloud chambers.

"Geiger" counters as you term them are pretty standard bits of kit in any physics lab, or health physics setup, and were certainly common in 1986.

In 1986 I was a student at university, working at a CERN experiment.

My PhD is in experimental particle physics - so I know a thing or two about radiation detection devices - and I have also worked for several years in a medical physics department.

I really don't like the term "Geiger counters" being used by the media - there are many, many types of radiation detectors, which are relevant to the type and energy of the radiation you are tyring to measure (spark tubes, scintillators, ionisation chambers, Geiger counters, filem dose badges, calorimeters, semiconductor detectors, drift chambers)

What you see on TV are dose meters - which are likely to be ionization detectors.