FAST 2010 Impressions: "Technology for Developing Regions"

The annual FAST conference is an excellent conference in file and storage system technologies.  I attend this conference every year and really like it.  I want to share with you the first key note on FAST 2010: " Technology for Developing Regions" by Professor Eric Brewer from UC Berkeley.

Professor Brewer and his team went to Africa and India and researched technologies to help local education, health care, and preserve culture.  Here are some interesting points from the talk.

The cell phone is a much bigger market than PC, and Africa is the fastest growing region of cell phones, although it has only 10% coverage.  Many ladies in Africa buy cell phones and rent the minutes out to local people since there are no land lines.  This is a very profitable business for them.  Interestingly, lots of money supporting the use of cell phones are money mailed into Africa from Africa people working outside of Africa.

There are 6000 languages in Africa, but sadly, most are dying, because there are no storage or technology to record them.  Their local radio stations also do not record their aired programs because they don't have enough storage.  Brewer's team provided storage technologies for them as well as recorded education materials for local schools.  They ship DVDs there and use SMS to apply small updates.  Shipping DVDs is still the cheapest way to transfer large amount of data with good bandwidth. They have TierStore, a mostly disconnected distributed file system as the storage technology for them.

Brewer's team was also helping rural India to build up infrastructure for telemedicine.  They used WiFi network as the long range communication method, which was the cheapest technology they found.  As long as one point could see another one, a WiFi connection of several Mbps throughput could be established.  They had made a world record length of WiFi transmission: 382km! One side of the network was on a mountain, because earth is round and you cannot see far enough on the rounded ground of earth.  These WiFi network was used to let the hospitals reach more patients.  The doctor interviewed the patients through the network.  This had worked quite well, and over 25,000 patients recovered sight through eye hospitals.

Without listening to his talk, I would never imagine that one of the biggest challenges to build such an infrastructure was -- Power Supply, such a 99.999% reliable and taken-for-granted thing in developed countries! Brewer's team found that the voltage of the power line could go from much lower than 220v to high spikes of 500-1000V.  As a result, they had lost over 50 power adapters and some equipments because of these spikes.  I wonder how could such high voltage ever reach the equipment without damaging equipments in the middle?!