What would it really take to communicate from a planet to the Starship Enterprise? Find out how Intel researchers and NASA are working to develop inter-planetary communication using Delay Tolerant Networking. Vint Cerf and Kevin Fall describe what the obstacles are and solutions they are researching in the latest episode of the Future Lab Radio podcast series.
Intel Fellow, Radia Perlman, has been awarded the highest honor from ACM’s Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM) for pioneering contributions to Internet routing and bridging protocols. I had the good fortune to meet with Radia to talk about her research contributions and find out what she is up to these days. It was an unexpected surprise to also have her recite a poem she wrote in her dissortation!
Today, Intel along with Nokia and the University of Oulu in Finland announced the establishment of the Intel and Nokia Joint Innovation Center. This lab will aim to revolutionize interactions with mobile devices by combining advanced mobile technology, 3D interfaces and user experience research. It will be based at the Center for Internet Excellence at the University of Oulu and as such will benefit from the research expertise at the University as well as the surrounding technical community.
DARPA, the legendary research arm of the US Department of Defense, recently announced that it had funded Intel, along with three other organizations, to develop ubiquitous high performance computing (UHPC) prototypes for completion by 2018. Intel's UHPC effort is unique in that DARPA and Intel are co-equal investors in the $49M research effort. The project will focus on new circuit topologies, new chip and system architectures, and new programming techniques to reduce the amount of energy required per computation by two to three orders of magnitude. In other words, from 100x to 1000x less energy per computation than what our most efficient computing systems consume today. Such dramatic reduction in power consumption will allow these extreme-scale systems to take full advantage of the increasing transistor budgets afforded by the steady advance of Moore's Law. First postulated by Gordon Moore, Intel's co-founder, the law observes that the number of transistors per chip roughly doubles every two years. If we fail to reduce the amount of energy per computation, we won't be able to use all the transistors we can build, or won't be able to operate all of them at anywhere close to their maximum speeds.
Fifty years ago, Ted Maiman built the first laser out of a ruby crystal rod, never expecting that this invention would revolutionize industries from medicine to communications. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine that Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby could have foreseen how their invention of the silicon Integrated Circuit (IC) - just one year earlier - would change the world.
Now in 2010, these two inventions are coming together with silicon photonics. We’ve been talking for many years about research to “siliconize” photonics, and until now all these breakthroughs have been at the device or component level. What we’ve announced today is for the first time we have an integrated silicon photonics transmitter using hybrid silicon lasers that’s capable of sending data at 50 gigabits per second (Gbps) across an optical fiber to an integrated silicon photonics receiver chip which converts the optical data back into electrical.
Researchers are having fun preparing for the 9th annual Research@Intel media event coming up this Wednesday, June 30th. Ever wonder how you’d get a vehicle on the 2nd story of a museum? Check out the time lapse video below, the Intel Labs team air lifts their version of the future Smart Car up into the Computer History Museum, and have some fun along the way.
The smart car will be on display Wednesday - showing off the labs version of virtuali in-car experience, that using netbooks and smart phones to connect to the vehicle over the Internet for remote engine start, adjust cabin temperature, access vehicle cameras for surveillance, lock/unlock doors and arm/disarm alarm. The futuristic car is also equipped with impact and proximity sensors, sends alerts to connected devices over the Internet when impact is sensed or an object is detected within surveillance zone. It can even detect other vehicles’ distance and objects in our blind spots to alert drivers and prevent accidents.
Intel’s annual press event to showcase the latest in innovation from our labs is coming up June 30th, Research@Intel Day. If you can’t make this event in person, definitely visit this blog - and watch the viewer where a few of the lab’s projects will be broadcasted live that day, including a futuristic electric car and computers that read minds.
“In my social circle, I would take pride in owning a computer. People would look at me with respect.” Sushma is an Indian woman who is part of the “emerging middle class” in Bangalore. As we sat in her family’s modest living room, she told me what would motivate her to buy a PC. She’s one of the many people I interviewed in India who told me that the PC could have a transformational effect on her life. Not only could it help her get a job someday, help her learn more skills, help her children, and enable her to aspire to a higher socioeconomic class status, but owning one could also earn her a new respect among her peers. So why isn’t a young woman like Sushma, who is part of the ‘next billion’ customers, a proud owner of a new PC?
Intel labs will soon be showing off some of the most exciting futuristic technology they are working on, at their annual Research @ Intel Day media event. Since not everyone will be able to make it in person, we’ll demonstrate the top projects live at this blog (on June 30th). Please mark your calendar and visit this link to catch a glimpse of the future through Intel labs “crystal ball”.
Today Intel formally announced the third in a series of joint research centers focused on driving high-performance computing systems to exascale levels. Exascale means performance surpassing a billion billion computations per second — enough to hypothetically scan through every word ever spoken by humanity in about the time it took you to read this sentence.
These research centers are all new members of the Intel Labs Europe network:
Reaching the next level of supercomputing performance is about more than just reaching an arbitrary milestone. It’s about crossing many different thresholds of possibility that reside in the Exa-scale domain, to provide scientists and doctors new tools to draw new insights from of massive amounts of data. It’s about, along the way, developing the technologies that will one day allow the cloud to scale to level where massive distributed computers can simulate reality and synthesize “holodeck” like science-fiction experiences. And, over the long term, high performance tecnhologies become personal technologies — your PC today probably has more computing capability than a supercomputer from 20 years ago. Reaching exascale is about shaping the coming decades of computing.
These labs begin research as Intel unveils new plans for the Intel® Many Integrated Core architecture, which build upon Intel’s history of many-core related research including Intel’s “Larrabee” program and Single-chip Cloud Computer. Taken together, this represents a major effort from Intel to work with industry and academic collaborators to break down the barriers to unlocking truly phenomenal computing capabilities for the future.
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