Innovators to Watch in 2005

The world is always watching for nascent technologies that will rise to solve problems and push the boundaries. This year, some of the most promising ideas are originating from people you may be reading about for the first time but certainly not the last: Dr. Paul Terry, creator of affordable high-performance computing at Cray Canada; Hideya Kawahara, a Sun engineer developing a 3-D-desktop interface; Mark Maiffret, a 23-year-old chief hacking officer of eEye Digital; Niklaas Zennström and Janus Friis, co-founders of p-to-p VoIP (voice over IP) software company Skype; and Pete Manca and Ben Sprachman of Egenera, builders of virtual datacenters. These names and companies are worth remembering.

Dr. Paul Terry, CTO of Cray Canada, wants to bring high-performance computing to the masses, or at least midlevel enterprises, with the Cray XD1 high-performance computer. Terry resisted the argument for more powerful processors and focused on networking issues. He helped create an architecture that links the processor directly to the interconnect fabric, eliminating the need for processors to compete for access to shared memory. With Cray XD1, “for the first time, you can have high-performance computing at the cost of commodity computing by using economies of scale associated with X86 processors and memory devices as prices drop to almost nothing,” Terry says.

Sun’s HideyaKawahara“wanted to break some boundaries” about 16 months ago when he took up a moribund development project. Now “Project Looking Glass,” a 3-D desktop interface, primarily written in Java and intended for Linux and Solaris x86 PCs, has caught the attention of the Linux community. The development environment runs both 2-D and 3-D applications. Kawahara says that by using Java, he can answer critics who think Java is too slow to handle high-intensity computing on PCs. “We are keen on seeing how we can contribute our Looking Glass effort to the Linux community in order to make Linux desktop more attractive and initiate desktop evolution movement from Linux,” he says.

At eEye Digital, co-founder Mark Maiffretis also the company’s chief hacking officer, reaching back to his roots as a teenage hacker. Maiffret, 23, brings that sensibility to the company’s security product development. He helped develop Retina Network Security Scanner, which scans each machine on a network, reports vulnerabilities and offers fixes. “As people invested money in perimeter firewalls and in intrusion detection, they were still being attacked because of undetected vulnerabilities. Now they say they need continuous vulnerability assessment,” Maiffret says. “We brought vulnerability assessment to an enterprise level.”

NiklaasZennströmand JanusFriis, who created the file-sharing company Kazaa, believe Skype will change the nature of telephony. Skype offers free Internet-based telephony through peer-to-peer software, and has received more then 11 million downloads since August 2003. “Skype is a self-organizing, p-to-p network,” Zennström says. Use is free, and in the future Skype “will upsell the value of premium services like the ability to make calls to and from the public telephony networks.”

Pete Mancaand Ben Sprachman, senior vice presidents at Egenera, lead a group that created hardware and software that virtualizes datacenter infrastructure. Called  Processing Area Network, the product is based on the idea of distributing resources, including processors, memory,  and storage, which are assembled into virtual servers and clusters. “For a large enterprise, deploying a new server can take weeks,” Manca says. “We set out to develop a way to get a server deployed in minutes.”