I'm right now in Sun Labs at the Sun Labs intern visit, part of the Summer Intern Research Series, a collaboration with HP Labs, Microsoft Research, PARC, Google and Sun Labs. The location of Sun Labs is 16 Network Circle, which apparently is very close to where I live off of Willow Road. Sun Labs has a bunch of innovators, one is Jim Waldo who was one of the original developers of Java along with James Gosling. Ivan Sutherland is one of the founding fathers of computer graphics. Sun is a very open lab. I got a tech report by Ivan Sutherland called Technology and Courage as part of the intern package. The director of Sun Labs is talking about Sun Labs and their structure and he mentioned how interns make the world go around (laughter from the intern audience).
The agenda for the Sun visit is here. The Sun Labs portfolio consists of System Sciences, Hardware, Software, Media and Content and Sensors and Clients. The Sun Labs showed us a Sun SPOT, which is a sensor-based device that has accelerometers, a processor, sensors and can run Java. There are 2 technical talks, the first one is Our Work, Our Philosophies, and the Art of the Possible by Randy Smith and Rob Tow. In this talk, they are talking about how the media has changed, how computers have consumed TV. How does this relate with sensor networks? They say that sensor networks short circuit the human, and connect the computer with the environment. They showed a Sun SPOT where by shaking it, you can display digitally a phrase on the screen. The Sun SPOT kind of reminds me of HP Labs' work on SPEC where you can attach these sensors to you and to your environment for environmental monitoring. The Sun SPOT, according to the Sun Labs people, is a perceptual recognition device. They're now showing a demo of running a program on a Sun SPOT deployed wirelessly where the Java program is dragged and dropped to the image of the selected SPOT in the GUI. So, there is this new medium where older technologies are being swallowed.
The second talk is on Moore's Law and the Future of Microprocessors by Ron Ho. Moore's Law says nothing about performance but that CPU speeds will double every 2 years. Gordon Moore was talking about the number of transistors on a silicon die. Performance is equal to # of instructions * # of cycles per instruction * # of seconds per cycle (ah, this is ECE222 hardware architecture undergrad course deja vu). As a processor architect, we want to use ILP, instruction level parallelism to improve performance by executing multiple instructions at once and using pipelining and speculative parallelism. Sun has a new processor called Niagara that makes use of parallelism. In the labs, Sun is pushing around Moore's Law but eventually there will come a time when Moore's Law will end.
The best part of the Sun visit were the demos. It's interesting to see that Sun is really pushing their SPOTS platform for sensors, the majority of the projects that were in the demos used SPOTS. One interesting project was using SPOTS for real-time applications for sensing changes in the car direction with sensors. There was a toy car track with the toy car having a SPOT and sensors on the track that monitor the car and help the car to remain on the track. Another interesting project had to do with searching the space for music, where the delivery of music is done not through ID3 tags but through actual audio spaces and clustering of musical genres is done by analyzing waveforms of the music. There was also a demo of the digital home with digital broadband IPTV technologies.
Thanks Sun for a great event, especially the demos and food!
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