Eight of the best projects at Intel’s Research Day

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

I’ve just got back from one of Intel’s occasional research days. The last one I went to – in Santa Clara, California last June – showcased some fascinating projects, including wireless power, a processor with 48 cores and a home energy sensor that could automatically identify when particular devices were switched on and off.

None of them has so far become a real product (though there are definite similarities between the 48-core Rock Creek CPU and the 50-core Knights Corner architecture). But it’s always fascinating to see what the chip giant’s boffins are working on. This week’s event – held at the company’s offices in Leixlip, near Dublin, and opened by Irish business minister Richard Bruton (above) – showcased several intriguing new ideas – as well as one eerily familiar one. Below the cut are some of the highlights. (more…)

Wanted: IT orchestrator for private cloud deployment

Monday, February 7th, 2011

Reza Malekzadeh is a trooper. I don’t mean he’s in the military or anything: I mean, he fought his way through a rotten cold in the depths of winter, to talk to me a few weeks ago about Nimbula.

Take a look at the site if you want to but I’m about to gloss fairly rapidly over what it does in pursuit of a couple of points that dropped out of the conversation. Here’s that rapid gloss: this is the dev team who built Amazon EC2, and it wants you to have your own EC2-alike (a whole lot alike, even though it is not Amazon) cloud, inside your organisation.

That’s a short sentence that tends to leave Cloud sceptics and fanatics alike a bit like a goldfish. It takes time to sink in, during which you can see the cogs moving: I ‘m sure Reza could see mine doing that because when I asked him for a case in point, he dived back into the example-giver’s favourite territory of banking.

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IT Expert Syndrome: is your data at risk?

Thursday, December 16th, 2010

I don’t consider myself an IT expert. I consider myself to be an enthusiastic user of technology who just happens to know a thing or two about specific IT subjects and has an ability to communicate that knowledge to others. Not everyone is so shy in stepping forward to don the ‘expert’ hat though, and that is causing problems for businesses.

The Urban Dictionary definition of Expert Syndrome is an ailment that is characterised by “the need to expound on a given topic beyond actual knowledge” and that advanced sufferers are “often unaware of the condition, losing the ability to distinguish opinion from fact”. Before you dismiss this right now as being just another of the many somewhat jovial opinion pieces fuelled by an excess of seasonal cheer, there is actually a rather serious side to IT Expert Syndrome. To grasp the seriousness of the problem you first have to appreciate the duality of the learning theory concept of transfer.

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Calculating the real cost of cloud computing

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

This week I have been getting unpleasantly confused by a pre-Christmas present of cloud computing hype. Take the CEBR 2011 Cloud Dividend report, commissioned by EMC, which joyfully predicts that the cloud will benefit the European economy by as much as £148.9 billion per year by 2015. Other highlights include the creation of 289,000 jobs in the same timeframe, although the UK could apparently lag behind the rest of Europe courtesy of our relatively poor broadband infrastructure.

As regular PC Pro blog readers will know, I’ve already suggested that there is such a thing as free cloud computing for the small business. OK, the free lunch option is restricted to the very small end of the small business scale, and even then we are talking more Google Mail than a fully blown data centre in the cloud, but it’s a start. The smaller your business, the bigger the benefits of the free cloud rings true as far as I am concerned. What’s more, I would contend that it’s a damn site more relevant to most small businesses than reports of some notional global economic value of cloud computing sponsored by a company pushing the cloud as hard as it can.

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Chrome and the multi-core cloud

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

The constantly-evolving nature of technology is, for me, a source of endless fascination — and frequent amusement when it catches us off guard.

Just last night, our own Dear Leader was on the radio talking about Microsoft’s latest salvo in the browser wars. This morning, the battlefield has changed completely, thanks to the surprise arrival of Google Chrome.

To be precise, Chrome isn’t here quite yet: the beta is due out later today. For now, I’ve had to content myself with reading the product notes, which Google has oddly elected to release in cartoon form. Cute, but hardly practical.

Still, it looks like a lot of good ideas have gone into Chrome, and there’s one idea that excites me in particular:

As I say, we’re still waiting for the beta, so we don’t yet know how this works in practice. But running each tab, and each extension, as an independent process should, in theory, enable Chrome to make very effective use of multiple CPU cores.

Thus, not only is Google set to shake up the browser wars; it could actually make “cloud” computing as stable, efficient and responsive as local software – or more so in many scenarios. That would set the scene for a revolution in our very model of personal computing.

Of course, for now this is all just speculation. But even without seeing the software, I can confidently say this much: Google hasn’t lost its knack for disrupting the market.