How Long is a Nanosecond?

Grace Murray Hopper was born in December 9, 1906. Grace became a very important part of the computer industry and had many accomplishments due to her uncommon way of thinking.

Grace completed a degree in mathematics at Vassar College and became a college professor, but continued to study at Yale. She later earned a PhD in Mathematics and was one of the very few women to gain that accomplishment.

When World War II came around, Grace felt compelled to join the Navy. Specifically the Navy because it had been the branch that her grandfather served in. Because of Grace's mathematical background, she was assigned to program the first computer in the United States, the Mark I. Even after the war, when she continued in the Navy, she was assigned to work with the Mark II and Mark III computers. In 1952, Grace helped create the first compiler which led to a common language for computers to understand, called COBOL. This language is still used today.

Hopper retired from the service in 1966, but was recalled to active duty because of her pioneering computer experience. Grace worked another 19 years, but then retired again as a rear admiral and was the oldest serving officer.

"Google Doodle" Image for Grace's 107th Birthday

As a professor, Grace would teach her students that they must learn how to communicate math to others and thus made her students write essays on mathematical formulas. Because she had learned how to communicate things so well, Grace was given the task of writing the manual for the Mark I.

Grace popularized the term "bug" and "debugging". A moth had been smashed in the electromechanical relay in the Mark II machine. When the bug was found, it was taken out and taped to the log book, written beside it, "first actual case of a bug being found".

Making terms easily understood was something Grace found highly important. She wanted a concrete way for others to understand how fast a nanosecond(a billionth of a second) was. The maximum speed that electricity can travel in a billionth of a second is almost 1 foot, 11.8 inches to be exact. When an admiral would complain that it took long to send a message by satellite, Grace would explain that there were a very large amount of nanoseconds between that place and the satellite. Although Grace Murray Hopper died in 1992, she is still an inspiration to many women in computing.

 She was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. 

Gary Stern, the President of Canary Labs and our most experienced engineer, had the opportunity to be an intern for Grace Hopper in the summer of 1976. He wrote code for mini-computers which were "cheaper" at that time, around $200,000 rather than a million for a regular computer. The mini computer was the size of a single equipment rack. Gary worked on a COBOL compiler for these mini computers. "She was a forward thinker and claimed that mini computers would be short-term. Grace had already moved on to microcomputers and networking. This was something that was 10 years ahead of us." said Stern, "Grace knew that things needed to get smaller and faster."

While working in the Pentagon, Grace would have office workers call her when there was open time on their mainframe. Gary Stern said, "Grace thought there was so many things wasted in the Pentagon, so she told us to find stuff that wasn't being used."

Something that Gary found odd while working for Grace was the type of questions that she would ask, she wouldn't ask how a project was going. She would ask how you were, followed by, 'have you done a crossword puzzle today?' "I don't think that I had ever done a crossword puzzle before in my life until I started working for Grace. A bunch of us would all work on a crossword puzzle together with Grace at lunch." Gary told me. He never knew why the crossword puzzles were so important to her. That goes to show that Grace was one-of-a-kind, she had a unique and rare mind.

"That summer I valued getting to know Grace and it opened many doors for me in the future."

“People have an enormous tendency to resist change. They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that.” -Grace Murray Hopper

Citations:
1. McCann, Allison. "The Queen of Code." FiveThirtyEightLife. 28 Jan. 2015. Web. 13 Mar. 2015. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-queen-of-code.
2. Isaacson, Walter. "Grace Hopper, computing pioneer." Harvard Gazette. 3 Dec. 2014. Web. 13 Mar. 2015. http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/12/grace-hopper-computing-pioneer.
3. "Grace Hopper ." Biography.com. Web. 13 Mar. 2015. http://www.biography.com/people/grace-hopper-21406809.
4. "Grace Hopper." Wikipedia. Web. 13 Mar. 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper.

What Should You Be Looking for in a Historian?

So you see your need for a historian. Where do you go from there? A false assumption is that all historians are the same. The proof is in the results. Here are some things to look for:

Stores Long-term Data
A main essential to having a historian is being able to store years' worth of data. If your maximum storage capacity is 6 months to 1 year worth of data before having to offload or archive data, you may want to reconsider what you believe a true historian to be. If your trend or client tools cannot access years of available data in a quick manner, you will face problems. This may seem to be more of a luxury, but it is an huge part of having a historian.

Easy Access to the Data you Need
The purpose of the historian is having quick and easy access to process data. You should not have to rely on IT to take days to find the data requested. Having chronological data is fundamental to finding automation, control and equipment problems.

The Ability to Quickly Identify Issues
When you already have the qualities mentioned above, you will be using this historical information and easy to use off the shelf tools to learn about the interaction between process and equipment data that had not been apparent in the past. This also helps in identifying other problems, including maintenance issues. This should be an on-going process, as the users learn more, there are more questions to research and may require additional data to be collected. The data doesn't lie.

Reliable
Are you dealing with:

-Holes in your data?
-Unreliable systems?
-Disk or file limitations?
-Limiting your data?
-Slowing your scan rates to accommodate for length of data?

These all point to one thing: trouble. It may be time to rethink your choice of your historian. These problematic issues can be avoidable, but only if you have the right product.

Monitoring Tools
Are you able to find out information like: The CPU and memory usage for different programs? Does your historian inform you of your update rates and throughput? How many clients and data loggers or collectors are attached? Your historian should also be able to compare other products and processes if anyone wants to evaluate performance parameters. Your historian should provide these answers with monitoring tools for the management of the system and health of the PC or server. If you don’t measure it, you don’t have peace of mind.

Ease of Use- without weeks of training

The definition of “ease of use” is not the same between different companies. Your historian is NOT easy to use if you have to go to 1 week or multiple weeks of training. The software should be intuitive for the majority of users and able to learn by use after 2-4 hours of instruction. Why over-complicate the situation for the users?

Up to Date Software

If your supplier is not constantly making product improvements, they will be left behind quickly. Is the maker of your current Historian concerned about staying up to date and fixing current problems? Users should have flexibility in arranging the display layout and formatting. The user interface must follow standard conventions. It must be simple, obvious and easy to learn. Users should not be required to press a refresh button to see accurate data after changing a display setting.

Not all historians are the same, Canary Labs proves that. Canary Labs Enterprise Historian is set apart from the others, all of these problems that you may face with other historians are eliminated. The Canary Labs Enterprise Historian provides you with each of the above mentioned essentials, to better your company's process, enabling you to work more efficiently. 

Canary Labs Integrity

A company’s values start at the top and trickle down through the whole organization. The leadership at Canary Labs has always focused on providing value and quality products to the end-user. Emphasis has always been on long term growth, not short term profits, this is why the terms 'high performance' and 'small footprint' are significant. 

Programming and designing software products is an art. Canary Labs senior programmers were trained in a time when memory and CPU hardware resources were very limited. 30 years ago, programmers had to spend days at a time organizing and optimizing their code. With today’s tools, the philosophy is productivity and there is always more powerful processors and unlimited memory to make your program run faster. Canary Labs engineers focus on effective engineering practices, knowing when to optimize the code versus the productivity of turning out code.

"People may doubt what you say, but they will believe what you do." - Lewis Cass

Efficiency is highly important when dealing with time-series data. The design of the database determines the speed to write data, read data, and the space in which to store the data. Canary Labs has specialized in the management of time-series data since the beginning of the company. Historian and trending tools provide users easy access to the data needed, in order to make informed decisions.
  

Another saying here at Canary Labs is that software is never done. As soon as our engineers think they have added all the necessary features, it is probably time to do a major redesign to the software to take advantage of the latest technologies available. We typically see this occurring every 7-10 years with minor improvements throughout the life of a product. If your supplier is not constantly making product improvements, they will be left behind quickly. Another advantage we practice at Canary Labs is examining how the customer uses the product daily, searching for how to make the product more efficient according to customers. Also, if the same recurring questions come up in customer support, the software should be redesigned to eliminate those questions.

We appreciate positive feedback from our customers and often are told that our product provides value many times over while exceeding their expectations. This also means that our work is never done.