This week Intel Labs is partnering with the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) of Taiwan to establish the Intel and ITRI Research Collaboration (IIRC). Intel conducts collaborative research in many areas with industry partners to explore different technology approaches. The purpose of this collaboration is to drive innovations that will shape the future of Information Technology.

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This week Intel Labs achieved an impressive #6 placement on the Graph500ranking, a semi-annual listing of the highest performance machines for emerging “big data” supercomputing applications. The results were announced Tuesday at the Supercomputing 2011 conference in Seattle.

In computer science, “graphs” are a way to represent and explore the connections between things, such as all the stops in a subway system (pictured here for New York), all the links in a large computer network, or all the relationships between people on social networks like FaceBook. Graph computing is also used to discover meaningful correlations between events for applications such as medical informatics and cybersecurity.

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As the Program Director of the newly launched Intel Science and Technology Center for Pervasive Computing, I am awed at the amazing new possibilities of applying computing to improve our everyday lives. The first wave of sensing-based computing has made possible many useful devices and services, like GPS, calorie counters, and gaming devices. These require active human input, and this first generation of pervasive computing is aptly described as the push, touch and click generation of sensor-augmented computing devices. Now a second wave is starting to emerge where computing will get integrated into our lives seamlessly and perform many tasks without active intervention. Sensing and computing infrastructure in our environment will detect, analyze, relate and learn human intent without the need for constant poking. Truly pervasive computing blended in our environs, holds the promise to facilitate important services such as health and well-being, provide smart task-spaces, and improve family life coordination. And don’t worry, security and privacy will be part of system design, and not an afterthought.

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PhD Fellowship Program winners announced!

As part of the ongoing commitment in supporting research at Universities, Intel has contributed over $1M to support top PhD students across the nation for 1 year of their research. The Intel PhD Fellowship Program is a very competitive process where students must first be pre-selected by their universities to be able to apply for the fellowship. Each selected student submits a thorough application which is reviewed by Intel Fellows and senior technologists who choose the winners. This is a very prestigious award, and winning students are all leaders in their field and come very highly recommended by their university and/or industry partners.

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Today, Intel CTO Justin Rattner is demonstratingthe Hybrid Memory Cube, the fastest and most efficient Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) ever built. I want to give you some background on how and why we collaborated with Micron on this new memory technology. One of my research passions is helping to design computers to be faster and more energy efficient. A portion of my creative energy over my career has been to improve the interconnect within computer systems so that communication between the microprocessor, DRAM, storage and peripherals is faster and lower power with each successive generation. In other words, I’m an I/O guy. One of the biggest impediments to scaling the performance of servers and data centers is the available bandwidth to memory and the associated cost. As the number of individual processing units (“cores”) on a microprocessor increases, the need to feed the cores with more memory data expands proportionally. Legacy DDR-style of DRAM main memory isn’t going to cut it for much of the future high-end systems. Being an I/O researcher, my initial efforts to solve the memory bandwidth problem were focused exclusively on the I/O to improve the circuits, connectors and wires that help to form the connection between the microprocessor and memory. In the past our research team has demonstrated very low-power I/O connecting multiple microprocessors together at high rates. However, the process technology used to implement a CPU is dramatically different than that used for a DRAM and it quickly became clear that there were severe limitations to achieving high-speed and low-power using a commodity DRAM process.

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Today Intel CTO Justin Rattner is demonstratingone of our latest research achievements – an experimental IA microprocessor capable of unprecedented low-power operation. This technology, which we call the Near Threshold Voltage Processor (codenamed Claremont), is a concept IA processor core that can tune power use so low that it can be powered off a small solar cell. This could lead to “greener” computing, more always-on devices, longer battery lives, and energy-efficient powerful many-core processors for use in everything from handhelds to servers and even supercomputers.

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I live online. I store all my email, documents and pictures in the cloud. Except for work, the only application I regularly use on my computer is a web browser. It gives me access to everything I need. Nearly everything: Although those days when web browsers were only designed for light weight tasks are gone, some compute intensive applications, like photo editing, still force me to leave my browser environment and use a native application instead.

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The next logical step in the evolution of the Web is to fully integrate 3D content and thereby provide a fully immersive user experience. Today,

several plugins are available that will display 3D in a Web browser. But, these solutions are not universally available across platforms, and they do not integrate in a transparent way with the existing Web 2.x model, tools and infrastructure. At the Intel Visual Computing Institute (IVCI) at Saarbrücken, Germany, we are developing ways to easily include 3D objects, scenes into Web pages, and render them on all compute devices, operating systems/browsers, and to integrate them with today’s Web content creation and programming methods. If you’re interested in the full range of research done at IVCI, the Web site at http://www.intel-vci.uni-saarland.de has all the latest information. We have already shown our initial results at Research at Intel Day 2011.

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Rapid growth in mobile traffic demand from smart phones, tablets and from bandwidth-hungry video applications have strained today’s networks. This significant challenge especially affects networks with licensed spectrum, which is costly scarce and technology for its efficient use is nearly reaching its theoretical limits. From the user’s perspective, network congestion leads to negative experience especially for video applications.

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Another IDF has started and we are excited to show our latest progress. Since previous demos we enhanced our cloud-based setup that was using four Knights Ferry cards as the (Intel MIC) as the “cloud” to now run Wolfenstein: Ray Traced at even eight cards in a single machine. In order to utilize the huge amount of horse power we are now running our demo for the first time in 1080p.

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