Government Computer News
DOD wants apps up to speed
Despite hardware advances, complex code and heavy traffic put a drag on systems
Despite hardware advances, complex code and heavy traffic put a drag on systems Bloated operating systems and applications are preventing military organizations from getting sufficient speed from their information technology systems, according to several speakers at a recent Navy IT Day in Washington.
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“We have achieved the promises of Moore’s Law,” the decades-old axiom that processing power would roughly double every 18 to 24 months, said Chris Miller, the Navy’s domain lead for command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (C4I).
“Much more pervasive now is the problem with software.”
“Software is getting bigger and more complex,” Miller said. “The Windows Vista operating system is so much bigger than its predecessors, [but] it is not any faster, even though processing speeds have increased.”
Elizabeth Sedlacek, director of information systems and infrastructure at the Marine Corps Systems Command, echoed Miller’s complaint. “Windows 95 required 50M of hard drive space,” she said. “Vista requires 15G.”
Part of the problem is that Moore’s Law isn’t the only one in the IT universe.
Sedlacek said increased resource requirements from the multiplication of software code illustrate an adaptation of Parkinson’s Law: software will expand to fill the resources available to it. The original Parkinson’s Law states that work would expand to fill the time available. A corollary to Parkinson’s Law states that software eventually reaches a coefficient of inefficiency, meaning that it gets so large that it no longer processes data effectively.
Sedlacek summarized her conundrum by citing yet another law. “Wirth’s Law states that software gets faster slower than hardware gets faster,” she said. According to Wirth’s law, then, software will always lag behind processing capacity.
But it wasn’t always so. “In the 1970s and 1980s, hardware processing power was wanting, and programmers had to code effectively and efficiently in order to get done what we needed to get done,” Sedlacek said. “Now that capacity has increased and the software industry is much larger, developers want to put lots of features on software and to do it quickly in order to gain a competitive advantage. Efficiency of coding is no longer a priority.”
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