Content about Pervasive computing

Opinion - Challenges to exascale computing

Irving Wladawsky-Berger retired in May 2007 after 37 years at IBM. Today he is a visiting lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Engineering Systems Division, a senior fellow at the Levin Institute of the State University of New York, and an adjunct professor in the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the Imperial College Business School.

Supercomputing has been a major part of my education and career, from the late 1960s when I was doing atomic and molecular calculations as a physics doctorate student at the University of Chicago, to the early 1990s when I was general manager of IBM's SP family of parallel supercomputers.
The performance advances of supercomputers in these past decades have been remarkable. The machines I used as a student in the 1960s probably had a peak performance of a few million calculations per second or megaflops. Gigaflops (billions) peak speeds were achieved in 1985, teraflops (trillions) in 1997,

Announcement - EC invests 2.5 billion in embedded computer systems Ninety-eight percent of computing devices are embedded electronic equipment and machines. Over four billion embedded processors were sold last year and the global market is worth € 60 billion with annual growth rates of 14 percent. Forecasts predict more than 16 billion embedded devices by 2010 and over 40 billion by 2020.Image courtesy of ArtemisThe European Commission last week launched a major Joint Technology Initiative as part of ARTEMIS. With an unprecedented investment of € 2.5 billion, this initiative addresses embedded or “pervasive” computer systems that—while running almost unnoticed by users—improve the performance of all kinds of machines: from cars, planes and phones, to factories, washing machines and televisions. “Invisible computers embedded in all devices of industrial application can have a tremendously positive impact on Europe’s economy,” said Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for Information Soc

  Opinion - Anticipating futures: engineering expectations of ubiquitous computing In a 1996 presentation Mark Weiser predicted computing would become increasingly ubiquitous, disappearing “into the fabric of everyday life.” But ubicomp still has a long way to grow before living up to the trends predicted in this graph.Image © Mark Weiser/PARC Around twenty-five years ago, in an article for Scientific American, Mark Weiser laid out a lucid vision of computing in the 21st century. Central to this vision was the concept of “ubiquitous computing”: a radical proposal for spreading computers throughout our everyday environment.Weiser’s ideas, and his work at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in California, U.S., have since spawned an academic research agenda, in turn influencing innovative commercial research and development strategies.  But where is this so-called “ubicomp”? And what does it aim to achieve? Pencils and light bulbs: beyond desktop computingWhere the &ldqu

  Announcement - One petaflop and a whole lot of PLAYSTATION Since PLAYSTATION joined Folding@home in March 2007, participation by the PS3 user community has been phenomenal, providing Folding@Home with immense computing power that is helping to fast forward its research and reach one petaflop. Image courtesy of Folding@home PLAYSTATION 3 and Stanford University’s Folding@home program recently announced their achievement of one petaflop, the first time such a milestone has been reached on a distributed computing network. A petaflop is the ability to do one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS), the equivalent of every person on the planet perform 75,000 calculations every second.“The recent inclusion of PS3 as part of the Folding@home program has afforded our research group with computing power that goes far beyond what we initially hoped,” said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead. “Thanks to PS3, we are now essential

Link of the week - SciVee: YouTube for scientists? Science publishing goes podcast: SciVee provides the chance for scientists to communicate their results via webcast video.Image courtesy of SciVeeYour moment of scientific pop-glory could be here!Your research results need no longer be hidden away in university libraries or relegated to inch-thick papers. Instead, you can tout your breakthroughs directly to the masses using what some are describing as a YouTube for scientists: SciVee. Using SciVee, scientists have the chance to upload short videos along with their papers, publish podcasts featuring their work, join science groups and create professional profiles.The videos and podcasts provide the opportunity for researchers to bypass any offputting jargon and technical dressing by communicating their results directly—person to person.In this way, visitors to SciVee can get a quick overview of a variety of scientific research, delivered by the researchers themselves, making it easier for fellow scientists and the general publi