>> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in downtown San Francisco at the Mission Bay Convention Center at Node Summit 2017. We've been coming to Node Summit off and on for a number of years. And it's pretty amazing, the growth of this application for development. It really seems to take off. There's about 800 or 900 people here. It's kind of the limits of the facility here at Mission Bay. But we're really excited to be here. And it's not surprising to have me see Intel is here in full force. Our first guest is Monica Ene-Pietrosanu. And she is the Director of Software Engineering for Intel, welcome. >> Thank you, hello, and thank you very much for inviting me. It's definitely exciting to be here. Node is this dynamic community that grows in one year, like others can. So it's always exciting to be part one of these events. And present about the work we are doing for Node. >> So you're on a panel later on Taking Benchmarking to the Next Level. So what is that all about? >> That is part of the work we are doing for Node. And I want to mention here the word stewardship. Intel is a long time contributor in the open source communities. And has assumed a performance leadership in many of these communities. We are doing the same for Node. We are driving, we are trying to be a steward for the performance in OJS. And what this means, is we are watching to make sure that every check in that happens, doesn't impact performance. We are also optimizing Nodes, so it give the best of the hardware, Node runs best on the newest hardware that we have. And also, we are developing, right now new measures, new benchmarks which better reflect the reality of the data center use cases. The way your Node is getting used in the Cloud. The way Node is getting used in the data center. There are very few ways to measure that today. And with this fast development of the ecosystem, my team has also taken this role of working with the industry partners and coming up with realistic measures for the performance. >> Right, so these new benchmarks that you're defining around the capabilities of Node. Or are you using old benchmarks? Or how are you kind of addressing that challenge? >> We started by running what was available. And most of the benchmarks were quite, let's say, isolated. They were focused on single Node, one operation, not realistic in terms of what the measurements were being done for the data center. Especially, in the data center everything is evolving. So nothing is just running with one single computer. Everything is impacted by network latencies. We have a significant number of servers out there. We have multiple software components interacting. So it's way more complex. And then you have containers coming into the picture. And everything makes it harder and harder to evaluate from the performance perspective. And I think Node is doing a pretty good job from the performance perspective. But who's watching that it stays the same? I think performance is one of those things that you value when you don't have it, right? Otherwise you just take it as granted, like it's there. So, my team at Intel is focused on top tier scripting languages. We are part of this larger software organization called Software and Services Group. And we are, right now, optimizing and writing the performance for Python, No-gs, PHP HHVM, and for some of the top tier languages used in the data centers. So Node is actually our interesting story in terms of evolution. Because we've seen, also, an extraordinary growth. We've seen, it's probably the one who's doubled for the past three years. The community has doubled. Everything has doubled for Node, right? Even, the number of commits, it depends on which statuses you look-- >> They're all up and to the right, very steep. >> Yeah, so then it's a very fast progress which we need to keep pace with. And one thing that is important for us is to make sure that we expose the best of our hardware to the software. With Node that is taking an interesting approach. Because Node is one of, what we called CPU front end bounce. It's having a large footprint. It's one of the largest footprint applications that we've seen. And for this we want to make sure that the newest CPUs we bring to market are able to handle it. >> I was just going to say, they have Trevor Livingston on it from HomeAway. Kicked off things today. We're talking about the growth. He said a year ago, they had one Node JS project. And this is a big site that competes with, like, Air B&B. That's now owned by Expedia. Now they say, he said, they had, "15 projects in production. "22 almost in production, and 75 other internal projects." In one year, from one. So that shows pretty amazing growth and the power of the application. And from Intel's point of view, you guys are all in on cloud. You're all in on data centers. You've all seen all the adds. So you guys are really, aggressively taking on the optimization, for the unique challenges and special environment that is Cloud. Which is computing everywhere, computing nowhere. But at the end of the day, it's got to sit on somebody's servers. And there's got to be a CPU in the background. So you look at all these different languages. Why do you think Node has gone so crazy? >> I think there are several reasons. And my background is a C++ developer, coming and security. So coming into the Node space, one thing amazed me. Like, only 2% of the code is yours, when you write an application. So that is like-- >> Jeff: 2%? >> So where is the other 98% coming from? Or it's already pre developed. It's an ecosystem, you just pull in those libraries. So that's what brings, in addition to the security risks you have. It brings a fantastic time to market. So it enables you as the developer to launch an application in a matter of days, instead of months or a year. So time to market is an unbeatable proposition. And I think that's what drives this space. When you need to launch new applications faster and faster, and upgrade. For us, that's also an interesting challenge. Because we have, our super road maps are not days, right? Are years? So what we want to make sure is that we feed back into the CPU road map the developments we are seeing into this space. I have on my team, I have several principal engineers who are working with the CPU architects to make sure that we are continuously providing this information back. One thing I wanted to mention is, as you probably know, since you've been talking to other Intel people, we've been launching recently, the latest generation server, Skylake. And on this latest generation Nodes. So all the Node workloads we've been optimizing and measuring. So one point five x performance improvement, from the prior generation. So this is a fantastic boost. And this doesn't happen only from hardware. It happens from a combination of hardware and software. And we are continuing to work now with the CPU architects to make sure that the future generation also keeps space with the developments. >> It's interesting, kind of the three horsemen of computing, if you will, right? There's compute, there's store, and there's IO. And now we're working, and it's interesting that Ryan Dahl, it's funny, they brought up Ryan Dahl. We interviewed him back at the Node JS, I think back in 2011? Still one of our most popular segments on theCUBE. We do thousands of interviews a year. He's still one of the most popular. But to really rethink the IO problem, in this asynchronous form, seems to be just another real breakthrough that opens up all types of capacity in compute and store. When you don't have to sit and wait. So that must be another thing that you guys have addressed from coming from the hardware and the software perspective? >> You are right on spot, because I think Node, comparing to other scripting languages brings more into the picture, the whole platform. So it's not only a CPU. It's also a networking. It's also related to storage. Also, it makes the entire platform to shine if it's optimized to the right capability. And we've been investing a lot into this. We have all our work is made available is open source. All our contributions are up-streamed back into the mainstream. We also started an effort to work with the industry in developing these new workloads. So last year at Node Interactive, we launched one new workload, benchmark, for Node. Which we called Node DC. With his first use case, which is an employee information system, simulating what a large data center distributed application will be doing. This year, now at Node Summit, we will be presenting the updated version of that, one point zero, this time. It was version zero point nine, last time. Where we added support for containers. We included several capabilities to be able to run, in a configural manner, in as many configurations as needed. And we are also contributing this back. We submitted it to the Node Foundation. So it becomes an official benchmark for the Node Foundation. Which means, every night, after the build system runs, this will be run as part of the regressions. To make sure that the performance doesn't degrade. So that's part of our work. And that's also continuing an effort we started with what we call the languages performance portal. If you go to languagesperformance.intel.com we have an entire lab behind that portal, in which every night we build this top tier scripting languages. Including Python, including Node, including PHP, and we run performance regressions on the latest Intel architecture. So we are contributing the results back into the open source community, to make sure that the community is aware if any regression happens. And we have a team of engineers who jumps on those regression center root causes and analyzes it. So to figure it out. >> So Monica, but we're almost out of time. But before I let you go, we talked before we got started, I love Kim Stevenson, I've interviewed her a bunch of times. And one of the conversations that we had was about Moore's Law. And that Moore's Law's really an attitude. And it's kind of a way to do things more than hitting the physical limitations on chips, which I think is a silly conversation. You're in a constantly, the role of constantly optimizing. And making things better, faster, cheaper. As you sit back and look at, kind of, what you've done to date, and looking forward, do you see any slowdown in this ability to continue to tweak, optimize, tweak, optimize? And just get more and more performance out of some of these new technologies? >> I wouldn't see slow down. At least from where I sit on the software side. I'm seeing only acceleration. So, the hardware brings a 30%, 40% improvement. We add, on top of that, the software optimizations. Which bring 10%, 20% improvements as well. So that continuously is going on. And I am not seeing it improving. I'm seeing it becoming more, there is a need for customization. So that's where when we design the workloads, we need to make them customizable. Because there are different use cases across the data center customers. So they are used differently. And we want to make sure that we reflect the reality. That's how they're in the world. And that's how our customers, our partners can also leverage them, to measure something that's meaningful for them. So in terms of speed, now, we want to make sure that we fully utilize our CPU. And we grow to more and more cores and increase frequency. We also grow to more capabilities. And our focus is also to make the entire platform to shine. And when we talk about platform we talk about networking. We talk about non volatile memory. We talk about storage as well as CPU. >> So Gordon's safe. You're safe, Gordon Moore. Your law's still solid. Monica, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day and good luck on your panel later this afternoon. >> Thank you very much for having me here. It was pleasure. >> Absolutely, all right, Jeff Frick checking in from Node Summit 2017 in San Francisco. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)