• Datacenter of the future: Scoble visits the HP Labs data center and finds that, unlike most, it isn't freezing inside, thanks to HP Labs cooling and power-management technologies that dramatically reduce energy demands.  He also gets to meet our data center robot. interviews HP Fellow Chandrakant Patel, who is director of the Sustainable IT Ecosystem Lab and has lead research into energy-efficient computing for more than a decade.
• Bill and Dave's offices: Scoble sees the offices of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett, located in the HP Labs building, which have been preserved as the company founders left them. I've worked in this building nine years, and I still think those offices are cool.
• Social computing lab: Scoble meets very briefly with Senior HP Fellow Bernardo Huberman, director of the Social Computing Lab and captures the video on his cell phone. He's filming a "real" video that will be posted in a few weeks. (If I were you, I'd wait for the feature).

Datacenter of the future

Bill and Dave's offices

Social computing lab

The calculator has nine color "buttons" and a larger square. It works like sort of an electronic artist's palette, and the square is where the colors get mixed. You start out with grey and the calculator shows the RGB (red-green-blue) and hex codes for that color. But when I clicked on one of the color buttons – say, yellow – the square turned more and more yellow and the RGB and hex numbers changed.

When I added pink, I got a golden-orangish sunset color. Then I added some blue and the square turned carmel-y. It's little like finger-painting. If you keep adding colors you get a dark and nondescript mess. (To reset it, hit "refresh.")

Nathan's earlier work had very much to do with words and using a color thesaurus he created to develop a common language for color (to avoid the need for RGB or Hex codes). This takes that in a very different direction.

The calculator is one of several fun Web-based experiments Nathan devised for his color research. This work recently earned Nathan the honor of being named a Fellow of the IS&T, the main professional group for the science and practice of image assessment).

You can see more fun tools on the Mostly Color Perception blog Nathan co-authors with Giordano Beretta.

One possible solution would be to replace the copper connections among blades, boards and chips with light. Why replace copper? It's not energy-efficient, is increasingly scare and expensive, and mining it can create environmental problems.

By contrast, photonic interconnects can improve performance, solve bandwidth problems, and also operate at much lower power than conventional electrical switches.

HP recently hosted its first annual Photonic Interconnect Forum to combine forces with scientists from universities and businesses to bring this technology to market, possibly even by next year. Potential partners include Intel, Avago, Lightwire and Corning.

This work could have tremendous impact, especially on the ongoing problem of IT energy consumption. HP Fellow Terry Morris says that shifting to servers using optical connections could cut power use annually by 40 percent worldwide by 2016 or 2017.

"We can make a substantial and measurable reduction to the amount of power consumed by servers as a result of our work on photonic interconnects," Morris says. "Rarely do you get an opportunity to speed up computers and save energy at the same time."

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend, but there's an excellent article in EE Times. Scott Jordan also has posted an interesting blog, with a particular emphasis on the importance of collaboration.

This is a key point for two reasons: As HP Labs Director Prith Banerjee says, "Not all the smart people work at HP." Why not partner with the best?

But for me, there's an even stronger argument for teamwork. If technology is going to benefit society – and isn't that what we should be doing? The only way we're all going to be successful is to work together. Goodness knows there are enough problems to solve.

The 3D Streaming technology developed by Comverse® and Intel computes and renders the MMOG content on a powerful backend server, then smartly compresses and streams the graphics onto a client. A network gateway designed by Comverse allows streaming over both WiMAX and 3G cellular networks. With advanced software optimizations including SSE usage, a single Xeon 5400 backend system can serve simultaneously up to 14 clients.

What does this mean for users of Intel platforms? In fact, the Comverse 3D Streaming capability offers a great user experience across all Intel platforms. On the backend, it’s the opportunity to offer the power of visual computing on high-end IA multicore platforms. On the client, it’s a chance to drive the demand for MIDs over non-IA smartphones by offering content better suited for larger screens and more sophisticated UI offered by MIDs. Overall, it’s a chance for telecom operators and content providers to offer a completely new service – running on the infrastructure that’s optimized for IA end-to-end.

Alexander Sterkin, Sr. SW Application Engineer in Intel’s Software & Solutions Group is based in Israel. The main focus of his work is providing technical training, consultation, and hands-on assistance to SW developers in areas of architecturing, technologies, support and influence of leading ISVs helping them deliver to the market product optimized for IA. Alexander holds Ph.D. degree from Weizmann Institute (Israel) in the field of Brain Research.

In today’s parallel programming models, we have a variety of approaches that work now but they all have shortcomings and limitations. This isn’t so much an intrinsic problem in these languages or tools, in most cases, but a shortcoming in their implementation. Rather, it was a shortcoming in our vision; for the most part, as we invented these models, they weren’t envisioned or implemented to work together.

Getting them to work together isn’t trivial, but is do-able in most cases. (For example, we’ll often find that the underlying threading runtimes weren’t designed well to play together with others, but this can be fixed.) The real problem is that of these many choices, some will need to be mutated and many combinations will need to be tried. These models can and will be combined in thousands of interesting ways, with many different semantic implications. Each of these efforts will be risky, all being more likely to fail than succeed on the way to perfecting the model(s) and language(s) that will ultimately be used for large-scale parallel programming. Though we take risks at big companies, they are fairly risk-averse for the most part. Moreover, we tend to try to leverage our existing investments in development as much as possible. This means that a fatally flawed bet (product) is not likely to be readily tossed out as sound technical “natural selection” would require.

The experimental substrate for this evolutionary churn must be real applications, but again, we run into the risks that any (sensible) large software company must be aware of. When developing new major version of products, it is highly unlikely that the code base is completely rewritten or even significantly turned over. Estimates vary, but let’s assume that major version revisions change (often much) less than 30% of the source base. Given this, how likely is it that a major, risk-averse software developer would rewrite substantial portions (>50%) of an important application to use a combination of parallel programming models? Especially when the initial value of parallel programming (increased performance, versus longer term feature differentiation) is of limited value to the typical application? How about several such models that have never been used together?

This is the great challenge facing us and it is a daunting one. For example, in the research labs, we develop a pretty wide range of multi-core related programming technologies around data parallelism, implicit parallelism, functional programming languages, transactional memory, and speculative multithreading. We have barely begun to think about how these different models interact (we’re starting with the Pillar project).

So what is the answer? I have a strong intuition that the answer lies in the open source community, with it’s iconoclastic brilliance, unabashed bravado, fearless experimentation, enormous energy and (growing) size, and commitment to quality software development. The open source community may well be the only place where parallel programming constructs, models, libraries and compilers can be deconstructed and recombined at the scale and pace required in the coming years (see The Cathedral and the Bazaar). For recent evidence of this, look at the amazing pace of innovation in web application frameworks (Ruby on Rails is a favorite example).

Does this mean we’re abandoning differentiation in our bread-and-butter products? Hardly. There are so many other components of a platform on which companies can differentiate and compete. For chip companies, we ultimately live and die by leading with our architecture and manufacturing technologies. Programming tools are critical to delivering the value to programmers, but they are limited to the extent that access is limited.

Rather than trying to address all the issues related to the wireless display area, I’d like to focus this discussion on compression for short-range wireless applications. Depending on who you talk to and what their background is, there appears to be a number of different opinions on whether compression can meet the quality demands for this application (in short, trying to replace the HDMI or video cable via a wireless link). Clearly, replacing a wire with the same quality over wireless is not a trivial task, and the goal would be to have ‘visually lossless quality’ (i.e., the end user cannot see the difference between the wire and wireless). So, can compression (any kind of compression) meet this strict requirement?

Let’s first ask the question, ‘Why not send video and display content uncompressed’? As an example, a 1080p resolution screen requires approximately a 3 Gbps link. Existing radios (UWB and WiFi based) clearly can’t meet these rates today and so some form of compression would be needed, but future 60 GHz radios might. So, assuming I had a 3+ Gbps radio, is it still best to send video streams uncompressed? What if I had other devices that wanted to share that bandwidth (for large file transfers, for example)? What if I wanted to support more than one screen? What happens as the screen resolutions increase over time, and what happens to my wireless bandwidth needs (will radio throughput be able to keep up with display resolutions)? And finally, aren’t you burning a lot of power continuously transmitting at a constant 3 Gbps rate or higher? Hopefully, these questions suggest that the answer of sending video content uncompressed is not obvious even if the radio is capable of doing so, and there are a number of engineering trade-offs that have to be explored.

So, what if we were able to achieve comparable quality (where a consumer can’t tell the difference between compressed and uncompressed) with just a fraction of the throughput (say, 1/10 or 1/20 or even less)? Why wouldn’t we want to do that? I agree that this will require some complex circuits to achieve, but process scaling should keep this impact relatively small. If this were possible, what can I do with it? I can reduce my radio usage by, say, 1/10, and save roughly 90% of my radio power (you won’t be able to turn off all radio circuits, but this is just for explanation). I can increase my range by a factor of 3, or I can better go through a cabinet or wall. For some applications, like PC displays, very little is changing on the screen at any one time, and so I can achieve an overall reduction in average throughput (and power consumption) by a factor of 100 or even a 1,000. For the last example, this could be done while even maintaining mathematically lossless quality by implementing simple temporal compression and a lossless codec. So, aren’t these benefits worth exploring, even if we had a multi-Gbps radio? Of course, my opinion is yes. Also, it seems that some of these advantages could also benefit wired displays…at least is should be worth exploring for future generation HDMI and DisplayPort interfaces.

The first hurdle to overcome with compression is quality, and whether or not it can meet consumer demands. Recognize that virtually all video content is compressed at one stage or another before a person sees it. So, we’re already viewing compressed content, which should give hope that it’s possible. Clearly, there are cases where we don’t have access to compressed content (like a PC display, or video game), and so we would need to be able to compress in real-time. In order to be convinced, people really have to see it to believe it. I have spoken to several skeptics and have found that people are genuinely surprised at the quality that can be achieved even with a fairly low compression ratio (1/20 and smaller) using some of the current state-of-the-art codecs like H.264. So, I would encourage people to explore for themselves first (for example, see some of the demos at IDF in April in China and others shown at CES), and then consider the benefits that could be possible if compression can satisfy consumer demands in quality. Of course, we also have to keep overall latency, cost, and power low as well, which should be part of the evolution of the technology.

I recognize that compression is just one piece of the puzzle to enable wireless displays. Clearly, the performance has to be proven over a wireless channel (error recovery mechanisms needed), content protection must be addressed to protect the premium content, audio/video synchronization must be wire equivalent, etc. These are the kinds of problem engineers love to attack, and I have no doubt novel solutions for these can be achieved. So, I think we should take a fresh look at compression technology for short-range video and display transport (for both wireless and wired), and see what new benefits and usage models can be enabled by it.

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]]>Jerry Bowleshttp://www.socialmediatoday.com/CES/39502#0Sat, 05 Jul 2008 19:48:00 GMThttp://www.socialmediatoday.com/CES/39502http://www.socialmediatoday.com/CES/39497Imagine a day when a single device small enough to fit in your pocket has the power of a laptop and can deliver a rich computing, telephony, media, gaming, and Internet experience. Imagine a day when this device knows your tendencies and preferences and can adapt and optimize its interfaces to match what you are doing at any point any time. Imagine a day when this device is not constrained as a standalone unit, but can dynamically become a hybrid combination of other computing and multimedia devices in close proximity. In the labs at Intel, we have been looking at what makes sense for mobility in the future – a vision we refer to as Carry Small, Live Large.

The first component of the Carry Small, Live Large vision – Carry Small – is focused on enabling users to carry essential and convenient computing resources in powerful, small, pocket-sized devices. Today, many of us frequently carry laptops, PDAs, cellular phones, mp3 players, and other mobile devices. This mishmash of technologies is disconnected and in many cases limited in functionality. Devices are locked into specific networks and operating modes and most cannot communicate with each other. With the exception of laptops, few mobile devices deliver a true, full Internet experience. As we use different mobile devices, we have come to expect a bifurcated experience with different views of applications and Internet websites on different devices. We have conditioned ourselves to live with a suboptimal experience on small form factor devices based on what we expect the device to be capable of rather than what we really want the experience to be.

The research and development behind Carry Small technologies will produce small, powerful mobile devices, which offer multifaceted functionality. They will offer more powerful processors, allowing them to overcome shortcomings of the small form factor by supporting more natural forms of human interfaces such as voice and gesture recognition. They will be more energy efficient, and feature longer battery lives than most mobile devices today. Tomorrow’s mobile device will have ubiquitous connectivity, able to automatically recognize and connect to WiFi, WiMAX, and 3G networks, among others. Beyond improvements to the standalone device, we also believe there are also significant opportunities to improve the mobile experience through seamless connectivity and interactions with devices around you.

The second component of the Carry Small, Live Large vision – Live Large – is focused on amplifying and enhancing the utility of the small mobile device by detecting, connecting, and sharing functionality with a variety of computing, storage, and multimedia devices in their vicinity. When you walk into your office, your small mobile device should automatically and wirelessly dock with your mouse, keyboard, and display monitor, or even with the larger interfaces of a notebook PC, providing a better experience by eliminating dependency on the tiny keyboard and screen when more convenient interface devices are available. While travelling on a long flight, the mobile device should be able to utilize the screen on the back of the seat in front of you to extend battery life by powering down the small mobile screen. This vision requires technologies to discover relevant devices and allow easy, secure wireless connections to be established between them. Technologies such as near-field communication (NFC) will enable secure introductions by simply touching one device to another – an intuitive approach for end-users that is analogous to a handshake between humans.

Living Large also means that your experiences are relevant to your current context. For instance, when travelling in a foreign country, integrated sensors such as GPS, accelerometers, and a compass will allow a device to infer where you are and what you are doing. If you are looking at an interesting historic building, the device could use its built-in camera to capture what you are looking at, synthesize with contextual data such as your location and direction you are facing, and download and present historic and tourist information to you via the mobile broadband Internet connection. All of these components are available in devices as standalone functions today, but enormous opportunities are at our doorstep if we connect them together in a meaningful way.

At Intel, research is already underway to make mobile devices, smaller, smarter, and context-aware. And work is being done to ensure these devices can take advantage of other resources around them. However, we can’t fully realize this vision by working on our own. Many companies are striving to make mobile technologies smaller and more functional, and many incompatible proprietary solutions for aspects of this vision have been demonstrated at industry forums such as the Consumer Electronic Show. Standards and cooperation across both the PC and CE industries are essential to ensure a seamless experience for end-users without burdening them with the need to determine which devices are compatible and which protocol should be used for one application versus another.

It is at the intersection of Carry Small and Live Large where composable and context-aware computing capabilities become real. And it is at this intersection where our everyday experiences are greatly amplified and enriched. Help us to enable the new mobility of the future.

Dr. Kahn is an Intel Senior Fellow, the corporation’s highest technical position, and currently the Director of the Communications Technology Lab, a corporate advanced development and research lab responsible for radio, optical, and copper physical layer technologies, as well as higher level protocol work. Additionally, he helps drive communications strategies and policy for the corporation. Some of his primary current focuses are broadband access to the home, wireless LANs and PANs, spectrum policy, and related Internet issues. He currently serves on the Commerce Spectrum Advisory Committee, the FCC Technological Advisory Council, the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council, and on various academic advisory committees. Throughout his 30-year career with Intel, he has worked in system software development, operating systems, processor architecture, and various strategic planning roles. He has held both management and senior individual contributor roles. He holds a B.Sc. in Mathematics from Manhattan College, and M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University.

The key ingredients enabling this revolution are high-performance low-power processors, high-density memory, and standardized wireless communication. The latter isn’t a requirement for mobile computing per se but has become an essential ingredient of a computer’s everyday use; after all, a computer without a networking capability is no longer an interesting proposition.

Despite technical progress in designing and building true palm-sized computers, their use has tended to be limited in scope. Most people would probably agree that for any kind of serious computing task, certainly in the realm of enterprise applications, a notebook computer’s form factor is close to the bare minimum needed for effective HCI. We can conclude that one of the main barriers for effective work on a smart phone is the tiny display and keyboard and the poor user experience that results from the size-limited interaction. The form factor of a modern day laptop design has been honed over time, shaped by the design principle that form follows function. We might one day experience a revolution in GUI design, but I doubt this will radically change the baseline laptop’s size requirements. Many people have tried to improve the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointing devices) interface for many years with only minor success. As a result, for now, the best bet we have for improving the mobile computing experience is to augment the I/O peripherals to provide scaled-up interaction.

My Intel colleague Natalie Nielsen recently summed up this notion with the phrase “Carry Small, Live Large.” This embodies the idea that for mobility, small computers are attractive; they fit in a pocket and can be carried without encumbering their owner. “Live large” speaks to the idea that we have high expectations for our interactions with computers, and we expect them to positively impact our lives.

Carry Small

Since the early ’90s, I’ve been researching ways to overcome the limitations of small mobile computers, and I’ve helped build several prototypes that address different aspects of the problem. An idea for implementing the Carry Small, Live Large ideal became apparent to me after the first short-range wireless standards were realized in the late ’90s—a turning point for mobile computing. We no longer needed to interact with a mobile device directly; instead, much larger and more convenient nearby computers could provide the interface.

My research group’s Personal Server project embodied this concept[1]. Our goal was to extend the established paradigm of the personal computer and change how we think about using it. We aimed to design a personal server that you could carry in your pocket or purse and that you wouldn’t need to physically access. Instead, using wireless discovery and connection, you could interact with the server through another device across a wireless link.

Our initial prototypes used a client/server Web metaphor, and we based our first implementation on an XScale microprocessor running the Linux OS and a Web server. The device included enough solid state memory to store gigabytes worth of movies, music, photographs, and office documents—all accessible from a Web browser client running in the nearby computer infrastructure over an optimized wireless Bluetooth link.

Later, our Personal Server design was ported to a commercial cell phone based on the next-generation XScale processor. This gave users direct access to X-applications running on the device, all accessible using a Remote Frame Buffer protocol in communication with a remote client. The cell phone market continues to enjoy tremendous growth—selling over one billion units in 2006[2] —which shows the potential for a personal-server-integrated cell phone to impact mobile computing across the globe.

Remaining barriers

What barriers must we overcome for the Carry Small, Live Large model to flourish?

First, currently only a few smart-phone products can provide the computational resources that applications need for effective operation. The capabilities of inexpensive low-power mobile processors will certainly increase with time, so in the future we’re sure to see more cell phones with the potential to support enterprise-quality applications. Processing and memory capabilities continue to grow exponentially, so it won’t be long before the gap closes.

Second, there’s a lack of infrastructure. Any PC could in fact be a client to support this use model, but when users have access to a desktop PC, they should also be able to use the desktop for their actual work. The compelling new value proposition for a small mobile computer comes from the opportunity to serendipitously use displays and keyboards found nearby in unfamiliar locations.

Live large

An opportunity to solve this problem may result from the revolution we’re now seeing around large LCD displays—in part driven by the consumer electronics market and the digital home. Digital high-quality LCD displays are in a booming market as a result of attractive pricing and the FCC’s mandate that broadcast TV switch from analog to digital by 17 February 2009. So we’re likely to see a flurry of new TV purchases between now and then, which represents a market that all the big consumer electronics manufacturers will be keen to be part of. This will further drive down prices as the competition mounts. In fact, it has already resulted in considerable price reductions for large plasma and LCD TVs, now as low as one-fifth of the original introductory price.

These TVs come with built-in computing capabilities, and manufacturers will see the opportunity to use computation to differentiate their products. This year’s Consumer Electronics Show introduced flat-panel TVs with built-in Digital Media Adapters (DMAs) and the ability to connect to a network using Wi-Fi to access media stored on a home PC. With several companies actively making plans for digital movie download services to the home in the near future, the challenge will be how to enable a living-room TV—rather than the office or den PC—to show these movies. A DMA built into a TV can solve this problem while opening up a resource for mainstream use of the Carry Small, Live Large device interaction model. Once it’s available for the consumer electronics market, this technology, driven by the associated reduction in pricing, stands a good chance of becoming ubiquitous.

Going Urban

The applications for large high-quality displays aren’t limited to the home and are in fact widespread and equally applicable to the office and other shared spaces—in particular, urban public spaces. I’m continuously amazed by how many flat-panel screens are popping up around our towns and cities to display mundane information—restaurant menus, signs, corporate logos, transport schedules, and so forth. Even supermarkets are being fitted with multiple screens to display special offers as we walk through the aisles. Each of these venues has the potential to support a Carry Small, Live Large experience.

Urban computing today is mainly associated with direct interaction using the devices we carry and with the data that service-provider networks deliver. In the future, this could be a far richer experience, involving close coupling of the computation you carry with the displays and keyboards that you find around you.

Technology trends that will further support this use model are high-bandwidth short range radio, such as UltraWideBand, a standard now being introduced to support Wireless USB with speeds of up to 480 Mbps. At some point in the near future, we’ll cross a processing threshold, and our smart phones will be capable of running most of the high-end applications we’re interested in using. Furthermore, the short-range wireless bandwidth will be high enough for us to effectively connect to large wireless displays. At that point, urban computing will take on a whole new experience, and we’ll move closer to the pervasive computing vision, and the Carry Small, Live Large use model.

* * *

This blog originally appeared as Roy’s Editor-in-chief Introduction for IEEE Pervasive Computing, Issue 3, 2007.

If you would like to read more about this topic, or subscribe to the publication, please visit http://www.computer.org/pervasive

References

1. R. Want et al., “The Personal Server: Changing the Way We Think about Ubiquitous Computing,” Proc. Ubicomp 2002: 4th Int’l Conf. Ubiquitous Computing, LNCS 2498, Springer, 2002, pp. 194–209.

2. “Worldwide Mobile Phone 2007–2011 Forecast and Analysis,” IDC, May 2007; www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=206583.