Topic: Computer Hardware

Data centers are becoming more costly and complicated, and that rate is only going to continue increasing. In the presentation from the O'Reilly Velocity conference, Bill Coleman describes the unsustainable path data centers are on and the ways that they can be managed in the future.

Intel has built its business by creating new markets with advanced technology. In this talk from the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Conference, Paul Otellini talks about Intel's plans for the next few years. He says that two major businesses that will be created are enterprise collaboration and the personal internet.

New Web software applications perform and are used differently. Consequently, the hardware and infrastructure of yesterday is insufficient. In this presentation from the O'Reilly Velocity Conference, John Fowler of Sun Microsystems discusses the new Web application architecture components that Sun is working on, and how they work with the latest Web software.

Peter Kogge of the University of Notre Dame discusses the obstacles to reaching exascale computing and the benefits of achieving it. He describes how supercomputing researchers have set a goal to increase computing power by one thousand times by 2015, but that won't be possible with current hardware architecture.

At the beginning of the new year, Phil, Dion, Ben and Scott discuss new products and projects, including business startups, new computers and computing devices, and other upcoming activities. Beginning with the problems with funding new companies, they move on to talk about some of the new CES and Macworld devices. Finally they review the upcoming digital TV changeover.

Luiz Barroso discusses the opportunities for improvement in energy efficiency in three areas of computer operations: data center efficiencies, server energy efficiencies, and computing efficiencies. What should we look at before energy cost in computing becomes a constraint? Based on his research into server efficiency at varying utilization levels, he focuses on an idea for energy-proportional machines that can exhibit a wide dynamic power range.

Just over 35 years ago, Carl Hewitt and his graduate students published a model for computation based on concurrent message-passing Actors. Now the demands of many-core computers and cloud-based software are thrusting that model to the forefront. In this conversation with host Jon Udell, Hewitt explores hardware-enforced cloud privacy, paraconsistent logic, and scalable semantic integration.

Hardware has not seen the same level of innovation and variety that software has, due to the high costs of manufacturing and distribution. In this presentation from the Emerging Communications Conference, Jeremy Toeman, Head of Marketing at Bug Labs discusses the emerging open source hardware movement and how it will impact the $10 billion consumer electronics industry.

The economic realities of hardware development often stifle innovation. Peter Semmelhack, CEO of Bug Labs, discusses a change in approach, similar to the open source software model, that will promote innovation in the hardware space. Based on the Lego model, Bug Labs is creating a set of tools they believe will eliminate some of the cost and creative prohibitions, and enable a community of users and developers to experiment with the creation of new gadgets.

If you think that Sun Microsystems is that Java company, then you've a lot of news to catch up on. Charles Nutter, co-lead on the JRuby project at Sun, gives a quick round-up of a plethora of initiatives that Sun is working on, for the individual open source developer and the little start-up guy, besides bringing Ruby to the enterprise.