2020: Advanced Computing
From Nature, a fascinating series on 2020 Computing, with short essays from eight different scientists and science journalists answering the question: What will the relationship between computing and science bring us over the next 15 years?
Our favorite is this one from Declan Butler on "Everything, Everywhere"...
In their current, mostly desktop, incarnation, computers used for science usually come into their own quite late in the process of inquiry. Questions are asked, the data that might answer them identified, that data gathered — and only then does the computer start to play a role. In the future, this set up could be reversed. Computers could go from being back-office number-crunchers to field operatives. Twenty-four hours a day, year-in, year-out, they could measure every conceivable variable of an ecosystem or a human body, at whatever scale might be appropriate, from the nanometric to the continental.
These new computers would take the form of networks of sensors with data-processing and transmission facilities built in. Millions or billions of tiny computers — called 'motes', 'nodes' or 'pods' — would be embedded into the fabric of the real world. They would act in concert, sharing the data that each of them gathers so as to process them into meaningful digital representations of the world. Researchers could tap into these 'sensor webs' to ask new questions or test hypotheses. Even when the scientists were busy elsewhere, the webs would go on analysing events autonomously, modifying their behaviour to suit their changing experience of the world.
If this scenario sounds far fetched, imagine the owner of a mainframe in the 1970s asking why it wasn't sitting on millions of desks and laps worldwide. An absurd question — to which the answer was "it's just a matter of time". The world's stock of computing power, and the number of devices over which it is distributed, has increased exponentially since then, as has the capacity of networking technology. These trends show no sign of slowing down, and that makes pervasive sensor nets not so much possible as inevitable. One does not need to be a visionary to see that soon, tiny devices with the power of today's desktops will be cheap enough to put everywhere.
Gaetano Borriello, a computer scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, argues that such widely distributed computing power will trigger a paradigm shift as great as that brought about by the development of experimental science itself. "We will be getting real-time data from the physical world for the first time on a large scale."
Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology ethics weblog blog
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