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Techno
Page - By Harendra Alwis
Project 'Oxygen'
- The world beyond 2005
Devices
in 'Oxygen'
Devices in 'Oxygen' are compared to batteries and power outlets
with the analogy that irrespective of whether they are mobile or
stationary devices they too will be universal and anonymous. These
devices will not store any user specific information but will customize
themselves according to any user. Like batteries and power outlets,
they will differ from one another only in the amount of computational
and communication power that they have.
E21s
Groups of devices embedded in the environment, called E21s,
will create intelligent spaces inside offices, buildings, homes,
and vehicles. They will provide large amounts of computational power,
while acting as interfaces to camera and microphone arrays, large
area displays, and other such devices. Users will be able to communicate
naturally in the spaces created by the E21s, using speech and vision.
H21s
Handheld devices, called H21s will provide mobile access
to users both within and without the intelligent spaces controlled
by E21s. H21s too will accept speech and visual input, and they
will be able to reconfigure themselves to support multiple communication
protocols or to perform a wide variety of useful functions by serving
as cellular phones, beepers, radios, televisions, geographical positioning
systems, cameras, or personal digital assistants. H21s will be capable
of conserving power by offloading communication and computation
onto nearby E21s whenever possible.
'Oxygen'
software technologies
Fulfilling one of the fundamental purposes of the project,
the 'Oxygen' software environment is built to support change, which
will be inevitable over time.
They will provide
a system that is, over time, adaptable to changes caused by anonymous
devices customizing to users, changing operating conditions, new
software and upgrades, and recovering from failures. 'Oxygen's software
architecture would rely on control and planning abstractions that
provide mechanisms for change.
Communication
technologies
Speech and vision will replace keyboards and mice, as the main
modes of interaction in 'Oxygen'. The use of multimedia will increases
the effectiveness of these technologies, for example, by using vision
to augment speech understanding by recognizing facial expressions.
Perceptual technologies will be part of the core of 'Oxygen'.
Networks
'Oxygen' s networks which are known as N21s will be decentralized
and would offer great flexibility by being able to adapt to dynamically
varying configurations and they will accommodate multiple protocols
used by self-identifying devices that are mobile as well as those
which are stationary and embedded to the environment. These networks
will employ multiple mediums for transmission by integrating wireless,
terrestrial, and satellite networks into one seamless inter-network.
They themselves will employ highly adaptive algorithms, protocols,
and middleware (both hardware and software devices) for this purpose
and they will configure collaborative regions within the network
automatically, creating topologies and adapting them to mobility
and change. They will provide automatic resource and location discovery,
without the necessity of manual configuration and administration,
and will also provide secure, authenticated, and private or public
access to networked resources as specified or needed, and adapt
to changing network conditions, by balancing bandwidth, latency,
energy consumption, and application requirements. This will be achieved
by dynamically adjusting the bandwidth allocation for each device
according to the applications used and the frequency of use, without
dedicating predetermined amounts of resources to any node by virtue
of protocol.
Collaborative
regions
Computers and devices that share some degree of trust will
form 'collaborative regions'. These computers and devices may belong
to several regions at the same time but membership will be dynamic
as mobile devices may enter and leave different regions as they
move around. Collaborative regions will employ different protocols
for communication because of the need to maintain trust and authenticity.
Resource
allocation and location
N21 networks will enable applications to use intentional names,
not just location-based names, to describe the information and functionality
they are looking for. This will mark one of the key differences
between 'Oxygen' and conventional networks that are in use today.
These intentional
names will support resource discovery by providing access to entities
that cannot be named statically such as 'The computer that I was
using yesterday' or 'The camera I used to take pictures of goats'.
N21 networks will integrate name resolution and routing capabilities.
Routing protocols will perform address resolution and communication
forwarding based on queries that express the characteristics of
the desired data or resources in a collaborative region.
Late binding
between names and addresses will support mobility and multicasting.
N21 networks will support location identification through the approximate
distance to a named physical object.
For example,
you could simply ask your handheld device to print a certain document
at the 'nearest printer' and the device will be capable of carrying
out your request without you having to specify the address of a
printer on the network. Prototypes testing of 'Oxygen' systems are
scheduled to start in 2005.
Techno Page
will feature more about such practical implications of Project Oxygen
in the following weeks, meanwhile you are welcome to read more about
the technical aspects of 'Oxygen' at http://oxygen.lcs.mit.edu/
and write in with your views to technopage_lk
@yahoo.com
News lines
36 GB Rewritable AO Disk!
Toshiba Corporation will soon be presenting a paper on its
development of a dual layer 36-Gbyte rewritable disk for the Advanced
Optical Disk (AOD) system. The dual-layer disk is an effort to realize
a 40-Gbyte capacity on each side using technologies similar to that
of DVD. The AOD system uses an objective lens with the same disk
structure as DVD disks (two 0.6mm thick platters bonded together).
But the competitive Blue-ray Disk format uses a lens with a numerical
aperture of 0.85 and a disk with a 0.1-mm cover layer, which makes
the format incompatible with the DVD format. The AOD disk is a phase-change
disk whose recording layers are made of a germanium-tellurium-rich
germanium-antimony-tellurium-bismuth alloy. The target capacity
is 40 Giga Bytes.
- EE Times
NVIDIA NV35
out of the bag?
The graphics chip wars are about to hot up some more. Many
people claim to have seen the hot new NV35 up and running already.
It's certain that NVIDIA has pulled out all of the stops to get
NV35 to market so that it can reclaim the performance crown from
ATI
Six secret
facts about the NV35
1. It's already up and running in NVIDIA's labs!
2. It will use DDR - not DDR2 (!) memory because of the lower price
of memory and PCB, more stability and availability in high volumes
3. It will have 256-bit 400 MHz DDR1 memory interface. And there
will be cards with 256 MB of memory.
4. It shows from 1.5 up to 2.0 times performance of NV30 depending
on the tasks and the final frequency specs.
5. It will be definitely faster than RADEON 9800 PRO
6. Other side specs like RAMDAC freq are the same as for NV30
- The Inquirer
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