Inventing the Future of Computing

In a windowless room deep inside IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, scientists are teaching a computer chip to learn from what it sees, much like a human. The effort is paying off, if performance at Pong is any measure.

When the chip, part of a project called SyNAPSE, first learned to play the classic videogame in March, it did poorly. Weeks later, the company reports, it was nearly unbeatable.

The SyNAPSE chip was designed to learn through experience, find correlations, create hypotheses, and remember outcomes. As chips such as the one from SyNAPSE become smarter and smaller, it will be possible to embed them in everyday objects. That portends a future in which the interaction between computer and user is far more natural and ubiquitous. “Computers were originally designed to solve math problems and that’s what they’re really good at—symbolic computation,” says Steve Esser, one of three scientists teaching the SyNAPSE chip. “Anything that involves visual processing, auditory processing, or speech processing—they can do it, but they’re just not very good at it.”

IBM is the third-biggest spender on research and development among US tech companies, having invested $6.28 billion in the past 12 months, according to Bloomberg data. Along with Microsoft, the top spender at $9.18 billion, and Intel, at $7.71 billion, these technology bellwethers are investing in what they see as computing’s next wave.

MORE INNOVATION THAN EVER

“Computing is undergoing the most remarkable transformation since the invention of the PC,” said Intel Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini during his company’s developer conference in September. “The innovation of the next decade is going to outstrip the innovation of the past three combined.”
At Microsoft, researchers are looking at the ways in which users will interact with computers in 3D spaces. In September the company announced a project reminiscent of Star Trek‘s Holodeck, a simulated reality room where people could interact naturally with virtual objects and other individuals.
Microsoft’s effort, called Holodesk, is a like a mini-Holodeck for the office desk, which lets workers interact and manipulate virtual 3D images.
It uses an Xbox Kinect camera and an optical transparent display to give people the illusion that they’re interacting with 3D graphics. For example, a user can juggle virtual balls or hold a virtual prototype of a smartphone. The Holodesk is part of Microsoft’s pioneering work in what it calls natural user interfaces.

It looks at how people will interact with computers when computing power is everywhere and not limited to a PC. “There is this real sense that this is a dramatic new trend for the industry and for Microsoft,” said Steve Clayton, who writes about internal research for the company blog, “Next at Microsoft.” “We’ve been investing a lot over this vision.”

At Intel, the world’s biggest chipmaker, Brian David Johnson spends quite a bit of time thinking about the future—the year 2020, to be precise. In fact, the futurist recently participated in a conference call about building Intel’s 2020 CPU.

As chips become embedded in many different devices, the company has realised that it needs to change.


ALGORITHMS THAT GRASP HUMANITY

“Fast and less-expensive and smaller isn’t enough anymore; we really need
to have an understanding of what we’re going to do with it,” says Johnson, who travels the world talking to people about how they envision the future.
“To be a human in 2020, it will begin to feel like data is taking on a life of its own,” he says. The proliferation of computing into everyday objects will generate massive quantities of sensor and other data, with algorithms talking to algorithms and machines talking to machines, he adds. “That algorithm—that thing that processes that massive amount of data—will need to have an understanding of what it means to be human.”

Future of cloud computing … more clouds. Seriously.

The next big leap in both technology and business models around sharing elastic compute resources might be bidding for those resources at auction or acquiring them through a broker, according to a report issued Thursday from Forrester. The report argues that while the technologies aren’t here today, a business built on aggregating clouds from public and private networks and delivering capacity and services in an automated, on-demand fashion to companies will emerge by the end of this year, and standards will start appearing in 2012.

Forrester believes that today we have a simple cloud broker model where companies can buy access to infrastructure as a service on demand, things such as Enomaly’s SpotCloud fit this mold. However, in the future, it expects a”full broker” to emerge that automatically spans all clouds and acts as a “fixer” for companies seeking to deploy new apps or handle busy times of year. The fixers don’t just do this for compute resources, but also will one day do it for people, making the idea of hiring seasonal workers something the full cloud broker could do — providing both the IT resources to support those people but also the people themselves.

That’s a bit of a stretch for the cloud, seeing it as this universal resource provider, but the report takes us back to the earth’s stratosphere by pointing out that for this full broker model to develop, the tech industry will have to build some tools: namely, those that will make so-called “cloudbursting” a reality. Cloudbursting as a concept refers to moving data and applications instantly from one cloud to another. The number of reasons this doesn’t happen today begins with a lack of interoperability between clouds and ends with issues tied to moving virtual machines from one data center to another.

But once a vendor pulls all this together, it will be on the cutting edge of the next generation of cloud services and reap a “healthy 5-percent margin” in the process. If that doesn’t strike anyone as particularly healthy, consider that Forrester believes cloud computing margins will drop to commodity levels … eventually. From the report:

Although cloud computing is probably still two decades away from being a commoditized utility, the underlying delivery models will follow those of other utility business models. For example, high standardization in electricity grids has moved the entire industry away from flat, volume-based pricing for industrial consumers to the spot pricing of today’s smart grids.

My Take: I respect that Forrester is trying to predict the future here, and aspects of this model are clearly coming. However, it also posits that sophisticated private cloud builders will link their private clouds with public ones and even make their private clouds available. This could allow a broker to “offer a ‘virtual virtual’ machine at an even lower price point than a commoditized IaaS offering.” Forrester notes this would take deep trust, and I think it may not happen at all, especially since many sophisticated CIOs are also in heavily regulated industries.

The idea that sharing human resources as well as IT and linking them together is pretty bold prediction and would create a dichotomy in employment experience between professionals and middle-class call center or service workers that would have implications for society and public policy that boggle my mind. Anyhow, that’s the future as Forrester sees it — the cloud becomes more pervasive and more nebulous.