US to put Intel motes on planet Mars

THE PR BUNNIES TOLD us that there would be a surprise visitor at Pat Gelsinger's keynote this morning. So we were expecting not William Shatner but perhaps the lady in Pat's favourite episode of Star Trek. He couldn't remember her name, we recall.

She's called Joan Collins, Pat.

However, in 1973 Pat was a young shaver and he could possibly only dream of Joan Collins. Vint Cerf helped start the Internet by mistake back in 1973 by developing the TCP/IP protocol.

He and his partner were working for the US government then. Probably they were as surprised as Microsoft was in the 1990s when TCP/IP started to blossom out of defence establishments and universities.

Said Cerf, we're in the stone age when it comes to networking. Cerf said there's a great deal more that has to be done. He thinks the limitations are truly architectural.

Gelsinger showed off a little polastic device that Intel labs are doing. But Cerf said there were implications of having such devices. The network has to accommodate a lot more people. Billions are excluded. Gelsinger said Intel calls such people the next five billion.

Cerf said that the US government intends to put radio sensors, or so called motes on Mars. Sounds like space pollution to us.

Gelsinger said that Intel had started to install intelligent sensors in its fab, fully radio enabled.

Next Pat showed a video about British Petroleum and we must never forget that Lord Browne, the ebullient Scot who is the CEO of BP is also director on the Intel board.

But BP has installed sensor nets, just like Intel, and the firm is collecting tremors and vibrations to see if there are places they can exploit in the future, and find out if empty tanks are in fact half full, by getting sensor nets to send data back to Lord Browne.

Browne is in the audience but he's not allowed to smoke his customary cigars because this is California.

Cerf said that BP's application isn't nearly as good as the sensor net he's got in his wine cellar which alerts him of the humidity he has wherever he is in the world. Although if something goes terribly wrong and he's in Antarctica, it might be too late to stop the bottles getting corked.

Gelsinger said governments had to weigh in but Cerf said taxation and crime on the net needed to be governed on an intergovernmental basis.

Cerf said we can't modify what's already there and change the Internet overnight.

After Cerf went, Gelsinger said the Internet is still a 1973 Buick, but everything needs to change because the Internet is growing so fast. So we suspect what Pat is trying to say is that we need need kit, new silicon and new everything. Wouldn't that be nice?

But that's too easy and flip. Gelsinger said we can't throw out all that old Buick stuff, we have to overlay the net and improve it. IPV6 is wonderful but it could be years or decades before it arrives.

Computational services overlay is the answer, said Pat, because it abstracts problems at a higher layer.

He said Intel's ideas are on www.planet-lab.org. Once INTC had the sufficient resources, it had established the ideas at universities worldwide. There's 150 of them worldwide. HP, NEC and France Telecom are in there, naturally.

He showed a PHI Planet Lab Intel project which can track viral and other attacks worldwide. Most of the activity comes from the US, particularly the East Coast. PHI could block dynamically the top 10 by alerting corporate firewalls worldwide.

Intel and HP will commercialise the PlanetLab idea, said Gelsinger, after showing a demonstration of future technology and uttering the words: The man behind the curtain is turning on the PlanetLab node. The Wizard of Oz.