Intel's long-range research focuses on energy efficiency and performance

Intel Wednesday showed off a range of advanced-stage research projects to the press and potential partners at its fourth annual Research at Intel Day held at its facility in Santa Clara. The projects spanned mobile technology, enterprise computing, large-scale computing platforms and “people-centered” computing and are being developed under Intel’s current mantra of “driving energy efficiency and performance.”

In his keynote session that opened that day, Justin Rattner, Intel CTO, said: “It takes a good four years to develop a new generation of microprocessor, and another 3 or 4 years preceding that for research and getting the ideas. What you will see today is work that has been going on for the last few years.” Intel did not announce which of the projects would make their way into the market.

Rattner said one of Intel’s goal is to achieve 10 times improvement in the energy efficiency and performance of its processors over the next three to four years. In communications, he said the major theme for Intel researchers is WiMAX and ultrawideband, adding that the two technologies will be “fully deployed in the platform over the coming year.” In enterprise computing, Rattner said Intel is “going after the maintenance portion of the pie,” with research focused on virtualization, data center performance and security.

Among the enterprise computing research being demonstrated Wednesday, were:

* The adaptive firewall – Intel’s traffic-adaptive filtering technology has been in development for two years. It sits on any node on the network and learns about traffic patterns to introduce shortcuts to frequently traveled paths. In their demonstration, Intel researchers showed a video streaming application going from a server to a client via a router with a firewall. The researchers launched a denial-of-service attack against the router but the video traffic was unaffected because the filtering technology had placed shortcuts in the frequently traveled paths between the server and the client, and the attacker to firewall, which reduced the number of memory accesses in the classification process and increased the throughput of the firewall. The researchers said they plan to make available the technology as open source by year-end.

* Trusted platforms with virtualization – This research puts Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) into the virtualized computing environment. TPMs, based on specification developed by The Trusted Computing Group, are microcontrollers used to store and authenticate passwords, digital certificates and encryption keys. In its research, Intel puts software-based Virtual TPMs (VTPM) in front of each virtual machine client to attest their status to the authentication server, which decides to allow or deny the virtual machine’s access to the whatever server it wants to connect to based on their status as reported by the VTPM. The technology has been in development for almost two years.

* Dynamic thermal management of the data center – Developed in conjunction with Arizona State University, this research enables job scheduler software to take into account the temperature of servers or server blades before deciding which data center component should do the job. The result should be an online thermal control framework that monitors and manages data center thermal performance from a holistic viewpoint. The researchers say the challenge for the project is to make the system reactive so that it knows when servers are starting to fail because of heat issues. They say it could be another two years before this project could be presented to Intel as a potential product.