An Intelligent IT Infrastructure for the Future

Abstract

The proliferation of new modes of communication and collaboration has resulted in an explosion of digital information. To turn this challenge into an opportunity, the IT industry will have to develop novel ways to acquire, store, process, and deliver information to customers - wherever, however, and whenever they need it. An ”Intelligent IT Infrastructure,” which can deliver extremely high performance, adaptability and security - will be the backbone of these developments. At HP Labs, the central research arm for Hewlett Packard, we are taking a multidisciplinary approach to this problem by spanning four areas: computing, storage, networking and nanotechnology. We are working on the design of an exascale data center that will provide 1000X performance while enhancing availability, manageability and reliability and reducing the power and cooling costs. We are working on helping the transition to effective parallel and distributed computing by developing the software tools to allow application developers to harness parallelism at various levels. We are building a cloud-scale, intelligent storage system that is massively scalable, resilient to failures, self-managed and enterprise-grade. We are designing an open, programmable wired and wireless network platform that will make the introduction of new features quick, easy and cost-effective. Finally, we are making fundamental breakthroughs in nanotechnology - memristors, photonic interconnects, and sensors - that will revolutionize the way data is collected, stored and transmitted. To support the design of such an intelligent IT infrastructure, we will have to develop sophisticated system-level design automation tools that will tradeoff system-level performance, power, cost and efficiency.