The State of Information Technology-Computing power will fade into the woodwork.

It’s no news flash to say that computers are going to
keep getting smaller, as they have for the past 50 years.
But even as they vanish from sight, computers will, in
an important sense, grow much larger.

By Wade Roush Technology Review

That’s because the time is coming when computing
devices connected in a wireless web will permeate our
entire physical environment, toiling behind the scenes
to monitor and manage our houses, factories, roads,
vehicles—even our bodies. But this lofty vision will be
realized only through a series of small improvements in
computing’s nuts and bolts. Some researchers, for
example, are developing ways to bring new capabilities
to the existing Internet, such as powerful network-based
services that can link a company’s inventory systems
with its accounting and customer databases. Others
are studying technologies to broaden the Web’s
physical reach—among them more power-efficient
microchips and high-quality broadband wireless systems.

In the world created by these converging trends, networked computing devices will
surround us—but we will no longer think of them as “computers.” They’ll simply be part
of the furniture. We’re already well down that road. “Your car has dozens of processors
that adjust all kinds of things, yet you just think of them as the heating system and the air
bags and the brakes,” says Richard Burton, who manages distributed-systems
research at the Palo Alto Research Center in the heart of Silicon Valley. “You’re not
aware of all the computation there.”

This movement—toward what’s variously known as “ubiquitous,” “pervasive” or
“embedded” computing—is hardly new. But it is gaining momentum. Thanks to recent
advances in underlying technologies such as semiconductor manufacturing and
networking software, proponents have moved beyond the stage of spinning gauzy
theories and started tackling the technical problems. “Ubiquitous computing will be the
dominant paradigm in information technology,” predicts TR100 judge Juzar Motiwalla, a
partner at Green Dot Capital in Singapore.

At first blush, it might seem that computing is already ubiquitous. After all, the World
Wide Web transformed the Internet from the province of academic scientists into
history’s biggest town library, village marketplace and sidewalk soapbox. Now, though,
software designers, including several members of this year’s TR100, are turning the
Internet and the Web into the media we’ll use to stay connected, share our favorite
content, tap into distant computing resources and run our businesses—and do it all
faster.

Justin Frankel of AOL Time Warner, for instance, is the originator of Gnutella, an
ingenious program that lets PC users link directly to each other’s hard drives through
the Internet. The result is a Napster-style file-sharing free-for-all, without a central
database or server that ticked-off copyright owners can shut down. But music sharing is
only the beginning of what these “peer-to-peer” programs could do. A computer
employing such software uses the Internet to locate a handful of other machines
running the same program; these machines are connected to even more machines,
and so on, eventually forming vast webs that can propagate search requests and files.
Gnutella’s power to easily copy and move documents around the network could make it
easier to store information wherever disk space is available, for example, as well as to
keep one step ahead of potential censors.

At the other end of the computing-power scale from Gnutella, researchers like Steve
Tuecke of the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois are writing software that unifies
supercomputers around the world into a single “grid.” Tuecke was the lead software
architect for Globus, open-source “middleware” that provides a common language for
accessing distant supercomputers, data-gathering instruments and scientific
databases. Globus includes tools for automatically locating the hardware and software
scientists need, authenticating legitimate grid users and parceling out parts of a
computational task to whatever facilities have spare processing cycles. While Globus is
now used mainly by research scientists, IBM, Microsoft and other companies have
adopted it as a step toward new and potentially lucrative network-based services.

Such services use newly standardized Web protocols to give users access to
e-business software running on any kind of computer on the Internet, taking over
data-intensive tasks like inventory management, scheduling and accounting. In addition
to the big firms already exploring this area, “A whole host of new companies will come
along to provide Web services,” predicts TR100 judge Anthony Sun, a general partner at
Venrock Associates, a Menlo Park, CA, venture capital firm.

Case in point: Bang Networks, a San Francisco startup founded by Tim Tuttle.
Recognizing that the performance of Internet-distributed software might suffer due to
network bottlenecks and lost data packets, Bang developed “intelligent routing” that
maintains secure communications. “In dollar terms, these business-to-business and
business-to-consumer services are going to remain the dominant aspects of
ubiquitous computing for the near future,” says TR100 judge Philippe Janson, who
works in IBM’s Zurich Research Laboratory on the kind of computer networking
hardware that forms the hidden “back end” enabling such services.

Making the computer networks we have faster and smarter makes good economic
sense. But technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing, grid computing and Web services
may only reach their full potential when we no longer have to stay riveted to our desktop
PCs to use them. “Until anybody can have access to broadband content anytime,
anywhere, we are not done with the infrastructure,” says Sun.

This challenge hasn’t escaped the attention of infotech researchers. MIT’s Vahid
Tarokh, for example, has invented a way to keep wireless signals strong long after
they’ve left a transmitter by broadcasting the same signal from multiple antennas. Such
technology, combined with emerging standards for packing more data into radio
transmissions, could extend bandwidth-hogging Web services to cell phones and
handheld computers.

Chip makers are betting that such technologies will unlock the Internet in a way that
businesses and consumers can’t resist. This spring, Intel announced plans to build
radio transceivers into all of its silicon chips by 2010. This development could reduce
the number of components in—and hence the cost of—mobile, connected devices. And
Sunnyvale, CA-based National Semiconductor has created an entire division dedicated
to building energy-efficient chips for devices like lightweight, tablet-sized Web terminals.
The company’s latest Geode chips, which feature a control processor that puts
components to sleep between bursts of activity, use about one-tenth the power of the
microprocessors inside today’s PCs. Such chips should fuel the development of
portable information appliances—as well as the networked sensors and controllers that
will extend our awareness into our surroundings.

These devices promise to help with the chore of running the technological infrastructure
and to bring us varieties of information never before available—for example, real-time
data on the structural integrity of bridges or buildings during earthquakes or terrorist
attacks. But to be practical, such highly distributed systems will need the ability to
diagnose and fix their own bugs and to reroute messages around lost nodes. The
software to accomplish this remains very much on the drawing board. “We have a lot of
work to do on the plumbing,” says Gaetano Borriello, head of an Intel-sponsored
ubiquitous-computing lab in Seattle.

Which is another way of saying that the TR100 and their information technology peers
will have to keep innovating—finding new ways to furnish the future with intelligent
machines that draw their power from their very invisibility.

Wade Roush is a Senior Editor at Technology Review.

http://www.techreview.com/articles/stateofinnov20602.asp