Microsoft Research Offers Glimpse Of Tomorrow's Computing Technologies

At the ongoing Microsoft Research TechFest 2009, visitors immersed themselves in technologies that promise to change the way people interact with computers, take advantage of new computing power from many-core processors and make data centres more energy efficient. The TechFest provided a glimpse of what tomorrow’s computing technologies will make possible.

This year the projects ranged from natural user interface technologies that respond to speech, touch and gesture for the automobile, home and office to important new data centre technologies intended to greatly reduce the costs of data centres.

A new research organisation called ‘Cloud Computing Futures’ was announced with an aim to reduce data centre costs by fourfold or greater, while accelerating deployment and increasing adaptability and resilience to failures. “Our cloud computing research begins with a key concept: the data centre is a computer, and it must be designed and programmed as an integrated system,” said Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research.

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The group, led by Dan Reed, director of scalable and multicore systems, will target lowering hardware costs and power consumption, as well as reducing the environmental impact of operations, particularly in carbon emissions. The group will partner with others across the broader industry to explore hardware innovations while simultaneously building the software stack to exploit new hardware designs.

Two particular data centre projects were on display:

• Closed-Loop Control Systems for the Data Centre, a project aimed at improving the energy efficiency of data centres by selectively putting idle servers into a low-power state while maintaining service response times

• Low-Power Processors for Data Centres, an experiment to build a server from low-power processors and evaluate how well it runs some of the tasks typically performed in a data centre, such as processing a large number of independent requests or running databases for a website.