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The value of excess

Dr. Raman Srinivasan

A SOFTWARE product company, especially in the high-end enterprise space, makes long-term commitments to its customers and users. This is because software is the very soul of its business. Also, users appreciate an occasion to meet their product-support s taff (interactions are through e-mail most of the year) in person.

Besides, customers and users want to be reassured that their enterprise solution provider is not only doing well, but also has a sound technology roadmap for the future. Naturally, the CIOs, and IT managers of our users love to return to their offices wi th enhanced confidence in the vitality of the software product. Our engineers too look forward to an opportunity to meet the people they serve.

And so we asked ourselves, paraphrasing Thomas Mann in Death in Venice, ``Where would one go, if one wanted to travel overnight to somewhere incomparable, to a fantastic mutation of normal reality?'' The answer for the IT industry is, of course, Las Vega s.

One evening, as I stood admiring the vast lake (large enough to fit nearly four thousand Olympic-size swimming pools) at the Hotel Bellagio, fountains came alive in front of us. Water danced as sensuously as the nymphs in the casinos. The lake itself see med to gyrate gracefully to the music of Frank Sinatra. A passerby pointed out the ironic pleasure of standing in front of the world's largest fountain in the driest metropolis. One of our product-support engineers from Chennai asked rather enviously, `` Where do they get all this water?''

Nothing in Vegas is natural. The real Bellagio, the one that inspired entrepreneur Steve Wynn to build this high-tech imitation in Vegas, is a romantic little village on a promontory in the Italian Piedmont. The Rockefeller Foundation was gifted a magnif icent mansion in Bellagio, the Villa Serbelloni, perched on the very edge of the promontory dividing one of Italy's largest lakes in two branches -- Lago di Como and Lago di Lecco.

While Las Vegas itself is less than a hundred years old, the real Bellagio is a village of great antiquity. On the site where the Villa Serbelloni is situated, Pliny the Younger owned his famous Villa Tragoedia. The foundation regularly invites outstandi ng scholars and artists to work at the Villa. It is truly an extraordinarily beautiful spot. The view prompted poet Ben Bennani to write:

Calm Como below us

Swallows the gorgeous grounds

Between its legs,

Gorges a fifty-acre tapestry

Of anachronisms in no time.

Imagination overtakes reality

Unlike the original Bellagio, Vegas is a city not of anachronisms but of spatial incongruities. Nothing is natural in Las Vegas. Not even rain and water. The lake at Hotel Bellagio is entirely artificial. Over two million litres of water is extracted fro m privately-owned underground aquifers every single day. As Vegas is in the middle of the Nevada desert, much of this water evaporates almost as quickly as your money at the gambling tables.

The secret of Vegas is excess. Its excessive excess defines its beauty. And technology makes such indiscriminate excess possible. So at the Bellagio, the public is enthralled by a massive fountain choreographed by computer code. Millions of gallons of wa ter are pumped out from deep bore-wells and thoroughly purified. A custom-designed, reverse osmosis water purification system large enough to cater to the needs of Chennai, keeps the man-made lake brimming.

Fine so far but why ultra-pure water for an artificial lake?

To find out, I followed a group of young men in fluorescent yellow wetsuits and scuba gear, paddling inflatable rafts into a tunnel. A few of the divers jump into the water. Who are they? No, they are not actors on the sets of a Bond film but engineers a nd technicians servicing the world's largest fountain. They dive under the lake to check on the nozzles and driver-motors of the fountain.

Beneath the lake's surface, pigmented black to be ``invisible,'' are two thousand tonnes of pultruded isopolyester structural shapes and grating. They make up fixed and floating platforms that hold the fountain equipment and lights, as well as an underwa ter maintenance catwalk. The entire structure is over 2,000 ft long, 12 ft wide, and 11 ft tall. On this massive underwater skeleton are mounted 1,200 specially designed fountain nozzles that shoot out laser-beam like waterspouts. Plus, there are nearly 5,500 computerised lights underwater, over a thousand speakers, and a state-of-the-art device that blankets the lake with fog.

Every single one of these 1,200 individually programmed fountains is a networked device that can be controlled from an Internet browser. (It works on the same technology used to monitor and safeguard nuclear weapons facilities.)

The control network for the fountains has numerous routers and includes a 1.25-megabit fibre optic ring that encircles the lake. A star-wired, free topology twisted-pair connection links each underwater unit to the appropriate equipment vault and control room on shore. Voltage, current, temperature, and water leak sensors transmit data through the network to the corresponding equipment vault. This information is then distributed along the fibre optic connection to the data logging and alarm system withi n the main control room. Audible alarms alert the staff to problems within the fountain. The diagnostic capabilities of the network reduce downtime of the fountain.

The entire fountain took three years and almost $75 million to complete. But it wasn't easy. The technical undertaking that made the intricate choreographic sequences possible was first visualised through computer animation. A system called Virtual WET a llows the choreographer to study and model the fountain's movement. Highly skilled individuals who understood the unique and idiosyncratic nature of the technologies involved in programming the fountain implemented the vision of the choreographers.

The software has been tested repeatedly to ensure that the 1,200 fountains all dance in harmony to a romantic repertoire of music -- including Frank Sinatra, Luciano Pavaroti and Madonna. Sometimes, during the music's legato passages, the fountains' inte rpretive movement is smooth and continuous. Other times, when the music is staccato, the water jets pulsate rapidly. The technology is so transparent and unobtrusive that people feel the fountain is alive, and that it has a heart and soul. It is not unco mmon to see adults welling up in tears as the fountain sways to the music of Mozart.

Once again, why is the water purified for a dancing fountain? The water from the wells contains high levels of dissolved minerals and salts. As the fountain leaps into the sky, desert winds direct fine water spray on the hotel windows.

And, in the dry heat of Vegas, mineral deposits could cover the windows very quickly. The ultra-pure water is necessary to keep the guest room windows free of water spots and streaks.

It is this kind of passion for quality, commitment to creativity, and concern for the end-user experience that our engineers learnt in Las Vegas.

To be continued

The author works for Ramco Systems and can be reached at ramansrinivasan@rsi.ramco.com

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