IDF, Fall 2005: A glimpse into the future

 

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Posted on 26 Aug 2005 at 00:17

The final keynote of IDF Fall 2005 provided a fascinating glimpse into Intel's vision of the future. In charge of proceedings was Justin Rattner, director of Intel's Corporate Technology Group, dedicated to research and development. He presented a vision of systems that were self aware, self healing and dedicated to protecting users from harm. But before attendees began to worry we were entering a world inspired by Terminator, Rattner reassured us that the reality would be far closer to Forbidden Planet.

'A user-aware platform is one that is able to take care of itself, as I remember Robby the robot doing in Forbidden Planet,' said Rattner. 'It also has to be able to conserve its resources, to anticipate what we want done, and to be planning the next action on the part of the user. It needs to be able to sense its environment - how else can it understand our needs? And finally and most importantly it needs to learn and adapt to those needs.'

When you translate the phrase self awareness into corporate speak, however, you get Autonomic Computing. 'Autonomic is about building intelligence into every level of the system,' said Alan Ganek, vice president of Autonomic Computing, IBM, who joined Rattner on stage. 'Then you can build intelligent behaviour on top of that.'

To demonstrate this, the duo simulated the failure of an air conditioning unit in a server room. Intelligent sensors called motes then detected the rising heat in one area of the 'room', and switched the load to a server in a different area - preserving the data, and preventing the server from overheating.

Intel has also developed technology to protect networks from worm and virus attacks. 'The "witty worm" infected systems within five minutes of its release,' said Rattner. 'That isn't enough time for administrators to react. If we can create systems with the ability to do no harm then the benefit to the users will be enormous. We've run over 8,000 hours of worm attacks and we got absolutely no false positives and no escaped worms.'

Perhaps the most far-reaching developments come from Intel's work on location awareness. 'If a system knows where I am, there's a whole selection of applications it opens up to me. Where's the nearest parking location? Where can I get a pizza? Where's the friend who I'm meant to be meeting?'

Rattner demonstrated a potential security use too. Rather than rely on technologies like WEP, if your notebook knows that it's outside a secure area - in the home, this could be as soon as you step out of the front door - then it could block off Internet access. This also stops people from stealing your bandwidth.

None of these technologies will be released today. For instance, the location awareness technology will be put forward to the IEEE committee for possible inclusion in a future standard, and then have to go through the ratification process - just as 802.11n is now. But together they certainly offer a tempting glimpse into a better future. Quite why a 50-year old movie has proved the inspiration is more difficult to say.

Author: Tim Danton in San Francisco