The Linux Foundation launches Linux-based Civil Infrastructure Platform

By -

Summary: There's the Internet of Things -- DVRs, refrigerators, and cars -- and then there's the Internet of civic things -- electrical power grids, oil and gas production facilities, and highway traffic management. Linux has a role to play in both.


The Linux Foundation
SAN DIEGO -- The Linux Foundation announced today at the Embedded Linux Conference & OpenIoT Summit a new project: The Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP). This, an open-source framework, is meant to provide the foundation needed to deliver essential services for civil infrastructure and economic development on a global scale.

And what, you ask, is a Civil Infrastructure Platform? According to the CIP FAQ, it's "Any technical systems responsible for supervision, control, and management of infrastructure supporting human activities, including, for example, electric power generation and energy distribution, oil and gas, water and wastewater, healthcare, communications, transportation, and community management. These systems deliver essential services, provide shelter, and support social interactions and economic development. They are society's lifelines."

This is a big -- with an emphasis on the word "big" -- business. A 2014 PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) report estimated the annual global infrastructure demand is $4 trillion and will climb to nearly $9 trillion by 2025 due to the rapid growth of emerging markets. Countries such as Brazil, China, and Japan, for example, are experiencing accelerated rates of growth in civil infrastructure projects. Open source promises to bring to these massive projects the same virtues it does to much smaller projects: no duplication of effort, no waste of development time, and unity instead of fragmentation and interoperability issues over civil infrastructure systems.
"Linux and open source software can accelerate innovation, enable interoperability, and transform technology and business economics for an industry. The Civil Infrastructure Platform is a great example of this opportunity," said Jim Zemlin, The Linux Foundation's executive director, in a statement. "Through collaboration and open-source development, developers will be able to build the common framework that will support some of society's most important functions for decades to come."
Specifically, CIP aims to work upstream with the Linux kernel and other open-source projects to establish a "base layer" of industrial-grade software. This base layer will enable the use of software building blocks that meet industrial and civil infrastructure safety, security, and reliability requirements. As an open-source software project built collaboratively across industries, the platform aims to address the major challenges civil infrastructure projects face:
  • Fill the gaps: Between existing open-source software and industrial and infrastructure requirements, addressing technical needs such as real-time and functional safety support, as well as long-term availability and compatibility and security.
  • Speed: As an open-source solution, CIP enables engineers to save time building foundational elements shared across civil infrastructure projects both small and large.
  • Cost: By developing CIP as an open-source project, the development costs are shared and controlled by thousands of developers.
  • Interoperability: CIP provides an open framework that integrates existing standards to support plug and play-based system designs.
  • Reliability: Based on Linux, CIP will provide a robust software base for system designs.
  • Security and safety: CIP will provide a software foundation that enables secure and safe delivery of critical services like power, gas, and water, even in times of disaster.
  • Sustainability: The initial focus of CIP will help establish a long-term maintenance infrastructure for selected open source components, accounting for product life cycles of 10-60 years. To achieve this, CIP members will collaborate on agreed-upon areas required to meet civil infrastructure systems' requirements.
These are not small goals, but the companies that have first joined the CIP include Hitachi, Siemens, and Toshiba. They're used to big challenges.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Hacker steals data of millions of Bulgarians, emails it to local media

By -
Image
  Source of the data breach appears to be the country's National Revenue Agency A mysterious hacker has stolen the personal details of millions of Bulgarians and has emailed download links to the stolen data to local news publications. The data's origin is believed to be the country's National Revenue Agency (NRA), a department of the Bulgarian Ministry of Finance. In a  message posted on its website  on Monday, the NRA said it was working with the Ministry of the Interior and the State Agency for National Security (SANS) to investigate the hack. "We are currently verifying whether the data is real," said the NRA. Hours after this article's publication, the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior  confirmed the hack . HACKER STOLE 110 DATABASES, LEAKED 57 According to reports from local media [ 1 ,  2 ,  3 ,  4 ,  5 ], who received part of the data, the hacker said they stole the personal details of over five million Bulgarians, of the country's total ...
Read more

​Linux totally dominates supercomputers

By -
Image
It finally happened. Today, all 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputers are running Linux. Linux rules supercomputing. This day has been coming since 1998, when Linux first appeared on the TOP500 Supercomputer list . Today it finally happened:  All 500 of the world's fastest supercomputers are running Linux . The last two non-Linux systems, a pair of Chinese IBM POWER computers running AIX, dropped off the  November 2017 TOP500 Supercomputer list . Overall, China now leads the supercomputing race with 202 computers to the US' 144. China also leads the US in aggregate performance. China's supercomputers represent 35.4 percent of the Top500's flops, while the US trails with 29.6 percent. With an anti-science regime in charge of the government, America will only continue to see its technological lead decline. When the  first Top500 supercomputer list was compiled in June 1993 , Linux was barely more than a toy. It hadn't even adopted Tux as its masc...
Read more

Microsoft tries to stem its self-made collaboration-tool confusion

By -
Image
Microsoft is using this week's Ignite conference to try to help clarify its collaboration-tool strategy. Here's how SharePoint, Teams and Yammer figure in the mix. Choice is good. But too much choice, especially when it comes to collaboration tools, has been a problem for Microsoft. This isn't news to customers, partners or Microsoft execs themselves. But at the company's Ignite IT Pro conference in Orlando this week, Microsoft execs took a step to try to clarify the company's strategy and messaging in this area. Microsoft Office 365 Marketing chief Ron Markezich kicked off the conference this week with a slide entitled "Microsoft 365 Teamwork: Where to Start a Conversation." That slide attempts to do what  Microsoft initially attempted with a 60-plus-page whitepaper : Clarify which collaboration tools customers should use when. The slide, which features SharePoint -- and its files, sites and content storage at the center -- is broken down into t...
Read more