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.

The Personal Energy Cloud

The Personal Energy Cloud is Intel’s jargon for the halo of power consumption that follows you around – the wattage of the light bulbs you use, for example, and the intermittent drain of the television.

It’s a concept that neatly expresses what CEO Paul Otellini has described as Intel’s “long-standing obsession” with power consumption; but as yet it’s ill defined. Officially the aim is to help individuals “navigate the sea of energy data”; Eve Schooler from Intel Labs demonstrated how this might be accomplished using a sort of “Marauder’s Map” of electronic devices, which could be centrally managed, to help reduce power wastage and determine which individuals could access which resources when. For now though the energy cloud appears to be more a notion than a focused project.

The Personal Office Energy Monitor

Next to the airy energy cloud concept, the POEM system, demonstrated by Intel Labs’ Sylvain Sauty and Milan Milenkovic, seems almost prosaically practical. Designed primarily for large workplaces, it works by equipping every PC with a simple USB sensor unit which measures ambient temperature, light, pressure and humidity levels, as well as recording the power consumption of the computer itself.

By feeding this information back to a environmental management system, it becomes possible to minutely manage electrical services such as air conditioning and lighting, to ensure that each employee has what they need without any wastage. A friendly PC-based interface also allows employees to monitor their own power usage, and to send feedback via simple buttons with labels such as “I’m too cold”. Though Intel didn’t explicitly suggest it, one imagines that feedback like this could even permit a building to “learn” the perfect settings for each section of a building throughout a day.

Simple Energy Sensing

Simple Energy Sensing is a neat idea – a home energy monitor that can identify individual appliances from their characteristic electrical signatures – but there’s no escaping the fact that the demonstration system on display at Leixlip was the very same one I had already seen 16 months ago in California.

Intel’s James Song had the good grace to look slightly sheepish when I pointed this out, but directed me to research manager Charlie Sheridan, who assured me that the project is moving forward through domestic testing.

“We’re trialling the system in 15 employee homes in the US,” he told me, “and we’re preparing for our first aggressive push, into 200 homes in Texas. We’re also partnering with local utilities, in Ireland and the US.”

Did this mean Intel would be relying on electricity suppliers to monitor power consumption, after the manner of the now-defunct Google PowerMeter service?

“The involvement of the utility companies is purely to validate the technology,” Sheridan explained. “We’ll try to keep as much data within the consumer’s home as possible.”

Crowd & Sensor Sourced Services

Like the POEM system, Intel’s experiments in crowd-sourcing are unapologetically down-to-earth, but they could open up as yet unimagined possibilities. Simply put, the idea is to maintain a vast, anonymised database of sensor and GPS data, to “gather, process and share data securely” – and make it available to real-time applications.

One obvious use for the technology is for collating GPS data into real-time traffic reports, as already seen in services such as Vodafone Sat Nav. A prototype system, offering both laptop- and tablet-style interfaces, was on display (see photo).

But as Intel’s Ahmed Mohamed explained, by incorporating additional sensor data, more sophisticated services could be implemented within the same framework. For example, if large numbers of cars started sharing shock absorber data, it would be easy for councils to locate potholes in roads. The potential applications would be limited only by people’s willingness and ability to share data – and by the imagination of the developers.

The Dependable Cloud

Many businesses operate as hosted services, but there’s currently no simple framework for ensuring a particular set of legal obligations or policies is met by the host.

The Dependable Cloud – the brainchild of Intel’s Michael Nolan – is a framework which makes it easy for hosting customers to specify various policies, and for hosts to provide them. For example, for legal reasons a company might wish its virtual machines to run only on servers in certain geographical locations. Or, for reasons of security, it might want them to run only on hardware capable of enforcing trusted execution. The system can also help hosts manage SLAs in cases of reduced capacity, by automatically allocating resources according to service-level policies.

The Dependable Cloud concept hasn’t yet reached the likes of Amazon, but it’s already attracted support and funding from the EU’s SLA@SOI consortium.

DDR3 and Hyper Graphics

Intel engineers are always talking about optimising performance, so it’s no surprise to see some of their research projects focus on hardware metrics. The DDR3 analysis project, demonstrated by Matthias Grees, uses an interposer card that sits between the motherboard and DIMMs in a standard PC and measures bandwidth and power consumption in real time while applications are running. The data enables software engineers to keep track of how hard their programs hit memory, and helps hardware engineers develop better performing, more efficient memory controllers.

“Right now we use this internally,” commented Grees, “but if we wanted to we could productise this in about a year.”

The Hyper Graphics project has a similar aim, namely to monitor the use of L1, L2 and L3 cache in a running system. But rather than using hardware, this research, headed by Qiong Cai of Intel Labs Barcelona, runs applications and games inside a virtual machine that’s been modified to monitor cache requests. At present the project focuses specifically on the cache usage of integrated GPU, and has accordingly been dubbed “Hyper Graphics”.

The system is particularly useful for its ability to track “cache misses” – requests for data that isn’t in the local cache, which can cause significant performance degradation. With this information, developers can see exactly which parts of their software could be optimised to make better use of caching. And, since the system can simulate caches of arbitrary sizes, engineers can experiment with different cache arrangements to see precisely how larger or smaller caches would affect the performance of real applications.

Multi-Reality Interfaces

The name may sound like science-fiction, but the Multi-Reality Interface is another project with a solid real-world purpose. The idea is simple: the interface shows both a live video feed and a real-time digital representation of the same environment.

Though it wasn’t immediately obvious to me why this would be useful, Jochen Grün from the Universität des Saarlandes explained: the manufacturing industry is moving to a modular factory model, where a single building can be rapidly retooled to make different items with different equipment. This means onsite personnel may be unfamiliar with the machinery they’re using, and unqualified to carry out repairs in the case of a problem.

A multi-reality view allows a remote expert to give immediate guidance. The live video view (which can optionally be presented in stereoscopic 3D) shows the situation on the ground, while the digital representation can show sensor data and other necessary details. With this information, one expert can provide instant instructions and advice to staff across multiple sites, keeping maintenance costs to a minimum. And because the system is built on web standards, the onsite staff can follow along on any portable device.

Lego Digital Box

Intel’s joint venture with Metaio Software and Lego was demonstrated at IDF last month, but for most Research Day attendees today was their first encounter with the Digital Box system – and it’s safe to say this playful take on augmented reality stole the show.

Though nominally a research project, the system’s already being rolled out to toy shops worldwide. You activate it by simply holding a box of Lego up to a camera. As soon as the software recognises the box, it superimposes a 3D representation of the assembled kit onto the top of it, so you can see what it looks like. If you want to see from the other side, simply rotate the box: the 3D image is anchored to the box and follows its motion in real time. And just to liven things up, the generated image is populated with animated Lego characters.

The system relies on nothing more than a simple webcam, a standard mobile Sandy Bridge platform and custom software. But the impression is something special – as you can see for yourselves in this demonstration video provided by Metaio:

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.

Lots of big banks have an obsession with a thing called a Monte Carlo simulation, and it’s a CPU hog. Nimbula allows banks to devote racks of kit to the sisyphean task of Monte Carlo overnight, and then flip them over to less intense workloads during the day. That’s a nice simple example of a resource-sharing situation which previously would have tested the patience of a wide variety of Banking IT skills.

You have to draw together so many threads, said Reza, that a private cloud deployment is something you don’t project manage: you orchestrate it

That’s the Nimbula promise – the EC2 -alike platform offers a curiously familiar place to work on defining and then pushing around a load of VMs, while the underlying platform has had the odd bit of large-scale testing. (Two technosnippets: did you know that EC2, internally, doesn’t use TCP/IP to talk between hosts? Or that the lamentably widespread Facebook addon, FarmVille, consumes 12,000 EC2 VM guests?).

But that’s not what I want to talk about. Neither is the fact that Diane Greene, who left VMware a couple of years ago, has popped up on the board of Numbula (Reza is ex-VMware, too). What I want to get you thinking about was the word Reza dropped in once I realised he had a cold and put him mercilessly under pressure.

He wanted to convey the job of being a private cloud deployment manager: how that demands all kinds of skills, with a footprint inside the typical private cloud customer which is pretty much guaranteed to raise empire-builder hackles in every meeting. You have to draw together so many threads, said Reza, that a private cloud deployment is something you don’t project manage: you orchestrate it.

A lovely word, that. It means “(to) arrange or direct the elements of (a situation) to produce a desired effect, esp. surreptitiously” according to Dictionary.com, and just how far is that from the normal definition of a business process?

I know what a lot of my readers in small businesses will be saying: that there’s just no time to be all surreptitious, and if cloud enablement is that difficult why on earth should anyone be bothering with it? Those who sit in bigger companies, however, will get Reza’s point immediately. Moving one bit of work up to Amazon EC2 can be as simple as abusing your company credit card (assuming you have a complete virtual machine rolled up and ready to go), but altering an entire organisation’s way of thinking about server counts running into the hundreds, crossing budgetary boundaries (always the most jealously guarded, those) and demonstrating that you’ve saved money or speeded up response – that won’t fit into one episode of The Apprentice.

It’s not even arranging things  (small jazz bands play “arrangements” – half a dozen people who can all see and hear each other. Easy stuff). We are certainly here dealing with products that trip off major outbreaks of organised, directed change – and that requires a new role. I’m not sure “conductor” is quite the right term, but I could be persuaded by “orchestrator”.

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.

Transfer is taking a newly taught skill set and transferring it from the theoretical into the real world, or putting what you have read about or been taught and putting it into a hands-on, practical and appropriate context. The problems really start when you consider negative transfer, or taking what you have learned in one context and applying it totally incorrectly in another, where it hinders advancement.

Hands up if someone where you work thinks they know more about IT than the IT department? Hands up if you are a junior IT support worker and think you know better than the IT admin guy? Hands up if you are the IT admin guy and think you know better than the IT director? OK, that last one was a bit of a red herring as you probably do, but the point remains that IT Expert Syndrome is not only infectious, but in danger of reaching epidemic proportions in many businesses.

When independent research firm Dynamic Markets, commissioned by Informatica Corporation, surveyed 300 sales and marketing managers and 301 IT professionals, the results suggested that UK business employees are increasingly taking on the role of DIY IT expert in order to get quicker or more convenient access to the company data they require. The research reveals that IT Experts Syndrome most often reveals itself in the sufferer making use of unauthorised online applications and cloud computing services, so as to better manager their data access requirements.

What this outbreak of IT Expert Syndrome highlights most is the battle over ownership of data

As Mark Seager, vice president of technology at Informatica says “the rise of new models such as cloud computing will create a headache for IT departments if they are not integrated in an overall IT strategy. Business users now think it should take hours not weeks to implement new technologies. When they perceive IT to be behind the curve, they’re going off under their own steam and purchasing software without realising the implications this has on their company”.

According to Informatica, 39% of those who admitted to buying, installing or using their own software in this way did so because of a perceived sluggish response from the IT department. If your temperature is now rising, your cheeks are getting a little flushed and you are experiencing an overwhelming feeling of ‘quite bloody right as well’ then I’m afraid you are also displaying signs of the infection.

The real IT experts (and, as far as the average business is concerned, that definition has to apply solely to the IT department) are finding themselves drowning in a veritable tidal wave of data created by new applications and software flooding the corporate infrastructure.

Before I go any further, yes, I have to agree that perhaps the ‘expert’ tag is misplaced if the IT department has not put measures in place to prevent the installation or use of unauthorised software. It’s not exactly difficult, after all, and to not do so is leaving the business wide open to potential security breaches. But that, perhaps, is something for another blog entry.

What this outbreak of IT Expert Syndrome highlights most is the battle over ownership of data. I’ve always thought that data ownership is pretty clear cut: corporate data belongs to the company in terms of both the physical possession of it and responsibility for that information as well. Yet 56% of the business users asked in that Informatica study believed that data ownership should rest with the employees that use it. Unsurprisingly, IT managers didn’t share this view with more than half insisting that the IT department was the right place for data ownership to fall.

The trouble is, quite apart from the administration overhead that this data ownership uncertainty introduces, that a fragmentation over who has first dibs on data is likely to replicate itself as a fragmentation of that data itself. Without full access to all business-critical data it becomes impossible to maximise revenue for the business.

And it doesn’t take an expert, self-proclaimed or not, to appreciate that.

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.

And yet more so when the methodology behind that value is about as clear as mud to anyone without an economics degree. I’m sure that the Centre for Economics and Business Research knows what it is doing, but I’m not so sure that too many people out here in the real world really care.

Seriously, does “the Cloud Dividend report identified the cost savings (CAPEX and OPEX) made by companies adopting cloud computing services and measured these against macro and business variables such as business development opportunities; business creation; indirect gross value added (GVA); tax contributions; as well expenditure on cloud services to determine the Euro value of the technology in each country” make sense to anyone out there?

Back in the real world, I would venture to suggest most small businesses couldn’t give a rat’s arse about predictions of how much the cloud will add to the national, European or global economy, regardless of how that prediction was arrived at.

What your average small business (heck, any business at the end of the day) is really interested in is the bottom line: what will investing in the cloud cost the business, what return will it bring on that investment, and how long will it take to realise it?

The questions I hear being asked include, for example, why should I buy into cloud data storage when storage hardware is so cheap I can have all the onsite and offsite data backup I want, for a sum that is not only a fraction of the yearly cost but a one-off investment at that?

Most small businesses couldn’t give a rat’s arse about predictions of how much the cloud will add to the national, European or global economy

It’s a bloody good question when you come to think about it, and if all you are looking at is the plain vanilla value-for-money equation (and forget the data security, access, ease of use, outsourcing all that jazz arguments), one that is very hard to counter with a cloud-based response.

Or how about questions relating to cost savings on power (servers are cheaper to run if someone else is paying the electricity bill) and support (ditto) which need to be worked out before any move into the cloud is considered? How does the balance sheet compare between purchasing and maintaining an IT asset such a server compare to the ongoing cost of outsourcing that requirement to a cloud provider?

The cost of securing cloud data is often ignored, especially at the small business end of the scale, but that’s definitely a false economy as the Data Protection Act doesn’t care too much how big your business is, just how you protect customer data. Push it out into the cloud and your worries are not necessarily transferred to the cloud service provider, it all depends upon the exact wording of your service agreements.

So I guess what I am saying here is that small business needs to get its calculator out and do some very real world sums before jumping into the cloud with both feet and all associated data, to ensure that it’s not just throwing money into the ether.

No matter how much those who would extoll the virtues of cloud computing as the future of IT try and bombard and befuddle us with macro-economic predictions on a global scale, it’s the here and now that is of concern to the average small business which has its feet planted firmly on the ground.

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.