The Death of Yesterday's Datacenter

An executive from a mobile phone company recently told me the feature most requested by buyers in their fastest growing geography (India) was an LED flashlight. Not a camera, but a flashlight. Edison would never have guessed (obviously). Nor that electricity would one day be on airplanes, lunar landers or deep sea submarines. Nor would we have imagined that network connectivity and computation would end up on drill bits. Or on ocean going supertankers. And that's exactly what I was told last week by the CTO of a global energy company. They use sensors on spinning drill bits to extract seismic data, which then guides the bits as they descend into the earth (I had no idea you could actually steer a drill bit). And they do this on offshore drilling platforms. And after they pump crude into supertankers, they use data from sensors spread throughout the ships to monitor vibration, fluid dynamics and rotational physics - to keep the ships, and their precious sloshing cargo, moving safely in the right direction. I was similarly surprised to hear a global relief agency describe the IT challenges of managing a disaster - starting with a need to supply computing capacity to remote disaster locations without power. More painfully, without desktop system administrators. And then there's what Disney's up to, passing out trackable stuffed dolls to kids in their theme parks, so parents can follow them (as Scott would say, "that's not Big Brother...

Date: October, 10 2006
Url: http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/computing_in_the_strangest_places

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