What's on the mind of IBM's chief executive, Sam Palmisano? Probably how to make money off the growing market for sensors.
IBM Research recently provided its Global Technology Outlook to Palmisano, who makes few public speeches and gives almost no interviews. The GTO is essentially a seven- to eight-hour presentation in which scientists from IBM's research division discuss what they think will emerge as major technology trends over the next three to five, or even 10, years. Ideally, IBM then comes up with ways to capitalize on the trends.
"It's about 35 to 50 slides per topic," said Mahesh Viswanathan, a vice president of strategy at IBM Research.
This year's GTO encompassed five topics. They were:
Silicon manufacturing
Moore's Law will prevail for at least 10 years, IBM researchers
predict. Chip designers will have to incorporate new structures and
chemicals into their chips, but they won't have to swap the silicon
base with more radical materials for a decade or more.
Two years ago, IBM was less optimistic about the future of silicon, Viswanathan said, but the ability of engineers to keep shrinking transistors continues to surprise him.
Sensors
Governments, established corporations and start-ups have all shown
increasing interest in sensors that can more easily track the movement
of cargo, cars or even people. But what do you do with all of the data
collected by the sensors? IBM will likely start to look into ways of
combining sensor networks with data mining (developed originally by
Rakesh Agrawal at IBM). Conceivably, amassing the data from several
sensor networks could enable researchers to better understand traffic
patterns or the early warning signs of disease outbreaks.
Application processors
It is becoming more economical to produce chips, or cores within chips,
that perform specific functions. A significant market for mathematical
processors and other specialty chips existed years ago, but many
functions got absorbed into general-interest microprocessors. The
pendulum is now swinging the other way, because of the complexity of
workloads and the large transistor budgets available to today's
designers.
Server accelerator chips like those from Azul Systems and Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research are a type of application processor.
Everyone makes software
In the past, a few people inside corporations wrote code. "Now everyone
is a programmer," Viswanathan said. IBM and others will have to come up
with tools to make writing programs easier, but also tools to ensure
that these ad hoc applications can play well in existing corporate
environments.
Services 2.0
Everyone needs services, and IBM has tied its future to it. One of its
big aims is to more acutely study the way organisations behave. Some at
IBM acknowledge that it sounds like squishy science — but computer
science wasn't recognised as a discipline when it first emerged,
either. Stanford University's engineering school initially didn't teach
it.
