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.

The Canary Labs Enterprise Historian Means No Tunneling Software Needed

Canary Labs Enterprise Historian is an excellent tool for use as a local or centralized historian. The Canary Historian incorporates functions that allow data to be transferred securely and reliably through networks, internet firewalls, or satellite communications. No extra tunneling software is needed which can incur additional costs, licensing and reliability issues.

Third Party Software

The Canary Labs historian provides easy network management and enhanced security.  The advantages of the Canary system eliminates the need for VPN connections and messy DCOM configurations. The Canary historian also provides the options of encryption and data compression if required. Tools are also provided to throttle data throughput to allow other critical applications the necessary bandwidth for real-time operations. The Canary Labs Enterprise historians allow for remote connectivity in two ways. First, at the data collection side with store and forward capabilities built into the Canary logger or collector software, and second, with the Canary Labs Mirroring service to replicate local historian data to centralized locations in either a scheduled mode or in real-time depending on what is preferred. All these features are included at no extra charge. 

When introducing third party tunneling software, the user runs the risks of increased costs, increased configuration connection issues, increased licensing issues and risk of maintainability and reliability. Canary Labs expertise has always been able to provide easy to use software to exceed customer expectations. Customers say “It just works!” and can focus on their job rather than wasting time with data issues.

Remote Connection with Canary Labs Historian

In conclusion, if you are burdened with poor network setups, unreliable network infrastructures such as satellite or wireless networks, or have multiple remote sites to manage, then the Canary Labs Enterprise Historian may be a solution for you. Make your process data easily available to the necessary people and remove guess work from decisions while increasing your company’s efficiency and profitability.

Benefits:

   ·         Allows data to be transferred securely and reliably through firewalls

   ·         Remote connectivity

   ·         Ease of use and maintainability

   ·         No VPN connections

   ·         Eliminate DCOM

   ·         Easy network and throughput data management

   ·         Encryption and data compression if desired

   ·         Enhanced Security

   ·         Increased reliability with no loss of data 

Are You Taking Advantage of Your Historical Process Data?

Many companies do not realize the advantage that historical process data can have in saving companies time and money. Do they really know the value of the data? Ed Stern, Vice President of Canary Labs, discusses his experience in the matter:

"Over the past 29 years at Canary, I have been observing how many companies are obtaining great value from their historical data. There are many ways to utilize this data depending on what is important to monitor for the customers’ needs and areas of responsibility. Usually it is unique for each client and in some cases, the client keeps these KPI's (key performance indicators) secret as they can be game changers for their companies.

The first decision to be made is the commitment to collect historical data. Collecting reliable and continuous data requires an investment in a true historian. Often companies try solutions that are not very effective. Utilizing the historical data collection mechanism of any HMI will not give you the results you need. With these systems, a user would be lucky to get 1 to 3 months of data online before the need to dump data due to the typical reading and writing performance problems that appear. Also typical problems that would appear, would be “holes” in the data stream due to the starting and stopping of the HMI for routine system changes and updates. Canary has also evaluated different DCS systems (distributed control system) and have found their historical data collection solutions to be very weak. Many times the user cannot get access to the data needed without monumental and days of work to round up some data that should take minutes in a true historian. Other factors are the availability of easy to use tools for your data analysis of trends over time and easy access to put the data into Microsoft Excel quickly.  Other tools to assist the user would be data management tools for data files, file verification, reporting tools and possibly alarm notification of certain variables.

The value from their historical data that companies can achieve will quickly equate to great returns on their historian investment. By giving employees access to this data, people will start to understand what is going on in their manufacturing process instead of 'gut guesses'. The data doesn’t lie. Was the incident an equipment failure or operator error? Could it have been prevented? Did the equipment show signs of failure over time and could proactive action been taken to prevent an unscheduled shutdown? Can your trend tools provide ad hoc building of charts to show the root cause of problems? How do variables react to one another, or are their relationships between these variables that were never realized before? Can you provide real historical data for studies instead of months of research time for studies and reports that are best guesses?  

These are some typical questions that get answered. It is usually a process that leads to asking other questions and finding the data and answers. This promotes ideas to ask other questions to increase further efficiencies and pro-active ways to increase profit margins.  Learning and software are never done. The question is what is the next step?

Take the next step and talk to a solution provider at Canary Labs. Start making your data sing like a Canary!"

Before Things Go Out of Control

Solutions Consultant, Don Mast, talks about providing more safety in oil refineries across the country. One way to do this is through the tools Canary Labs provides:

"With increased focus on the booming oil and gas industry by the media, the government, groups against anything gas, and health & safety industrial organizations, more needs to be done to prevent accidents upstream, midstream and downstream. 

Refineries convert raw materials into usable product.

Fact: Workers at American oil refineries die on the job about three times as often as their counterparts in other countries.  One example of this is Tesoro, a Washington state refinery that exploded in 2010, killing seven people. Recently the U.S. Chemical Safety board who investigates our nation’s worst industrial accidents says, that on average, across the nation there’s a significant accident at an oil refinery once every three days.  Companies’ report all the time that they are missing data or chunks of time and when that data is gone, bad things can happen including injuries, downtime and massive fines.  With all the technology available, this can be reduced and prevented. The answer is data.

Canary Labs, a leader in information solutions for the oil and gas industry, is working with global oil and gas companies, pipelines, drillers, and refining companies to protect workers and equipment, reduce production and exploration costs, improve process and production metrics while providing the data needed to drive crucial decisions before things at the job site go out of control.

Utilizing the latest technology, Canary Labs open, flexible and high performance enterprise software runs around the clock to monitor equipment and process metrics by collecting data via the Canary Historian and presenting both real-time and historical data trends, allowing operators to have a good understanding of the current plant / job site conditions. Similarly, Canary Labs software tools provide operators access to invisible variables that are not easily detected; providing early warning alerts to problems that can be resolved before they become a disaster. Solutions are deployed as a simple single site solution or as a complex distributed enterprise resource. 

Driving innovation in the data industry, Canary Labs technology allows operators to collect data from distributed or remote sites and safeguards that the data are sent to the historian in event of a communication outage. Furthermore Canary’s Axiom trending solution, AxiomTrend, is an intuitive and easy to use data analysis tool. It visually transforms process data into knowledge. It empowers operators, engineers, and managers to stay connected while using a common analytical tool for viewing data anywhere at any time via mobile devices. With increased scrutiny on the industry by governments and anti-gas groups, Canary Labs provides streamlined detailed reporting for regulatory compliance. 

“Canary Trending is an invaluable tool in our refinery. It runs around the clock, 24/7. Over the last 14+ years, Canary has provided quality products that utilize the latest technology.” Kevin Moran, System Engineer, Delaware City Refinery “As a trending tool, we like the flexibility in how it’s configured and the ease of use. Users can drag and drop to add trends to the chart and save charts for later recall. The speed is a big plus, allowing users to quickly scan and find historical data they want to see. Users can access overview charts and then quickly drill down to see detailed data. The user doesn’t have to be a genius to figure things out.”

Randy Walker, Control Systems Engineer says, “Canary is a valuable tool allowing us to graphically review archived data for maintenance issues and performance. Templates can be saved of commonly reviewed trends for quick future access. The export utility is used to generate viewed trends into reports for distribution. This trending software has proven to be a valuable asset in our day to day operations.” 

For nearly 30 years, Canary Labs has been a game-changer in the oil and gas, industrial automation, energy production and distribution sectors delivering world-class, real-time data historian and trending tools with a focus on safety and solutions."