Sun Labs eyes location systems, high-performance boxes

SAN FRANCISCO — Sun Laboratories, the research arm of Sun Microsystems, is working on technology ranging from a location system for tracking co-workers to building massive hardware with 100,000 processors.

During a Sun “Chalk Talk” session at the company’s San Francisco offices, Jim Mitchell, a Sun vice president, fellow, and director of Sun Laboratories, discussed goings-on at the lab as well as other technical areas he views as promising.

Sun is working on presence information technology called Awarenex, which would track precisely where someone is for location purposes via a device such as a badge, Mitchell said.

The technology may appear a bit probing; for example, it can tell how recently someone has been typing on a keyboard. “Something using Awarenex would know where you were. You [can] tell if a person is in his office sitting at his desk,” Mitchell said.

But it also could be used for purposes such as finding out when someone has a meeting, according to Mitchell. The technology currently has no security, he noted.

Sun is using related technology called Meeting Central, which connects persons for a meeting, said Mitchell.

Another technology project, Rhythm Awareness, tracks a person’s daily habits for predictive purposes.

Sun’s Awarenex-related technologies are not expected to be products for another couple of years, Mitchell said.  Awarenex would likely feature a directory server listing objects known as virsonas, for “virtual persona.”

Through the Awarenex research, “We found out many interesting things about people’s work habits and it convinced me even more that you have to have privacy and security,” Mitchell said. He cited one person’s commuting habits as an example of what Sun researchers learned.

Another research project, Jackpot, is intended to provide automated programming transformations for Java programmers involved in large development projects, said Mitchell. Jackpot is a couple years away from being used outside Sun Labs, he said.

Jackpot is a project of James Gosling, Sun vice president and fellow who also is known as the “father” of the Java programming language,

The lab’s enterprise PDA project is intended to provide for identical development mechanisms for building applications to run on PDAs or larger machines, Mitchell said. A PDA user would be able to access applications such as e-mail and calendars through the development technology.  A public demonstration of Enterprise PDA is planned for the Sun Networks 2003 conference in San Francisco next month.

Sun’s High Performance Computing Systems research, part of a contract with DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), entails developing machines with approximately 100,000 processors in them. “That means 100,000 threads,” said Mitchell.

Mitchell predicted that mesh networks for wireless systems would emerge to make wireless computing more ubiquitous. A mesh network is one where all the nodes are participating to make the network function, rather than relying on fixed base stations, Mitchell said. “Everybody could be a router,” he said.

“We’re going to see the emergence of mesh networks for wireless” to replace 802.11 hot spots, he said.

“I think we may have seen the last of the FCC selling frequencies,” said Mitchell.

Sun is developing technology called Intervals, in which algorithms for solving problems are threaded automatically. “The programmer doesn’t have to do it. That’s what’s cool,” Mitchell said. Intervals technology currently is included in Sun’s C++ compiler.

Another technology being pondered at the labs, labeled on a Sun slide as Milk Cartons, although that is not actually the code name, would provide tracking of consumer items such as the freshness of foods via RFID (Radio Frequency Identification). Sun has been working on software related to this technology, Mitchell said.

Technology is getting smaller, he noted. “The average size of things has been coming down.”

“The smallest things will probably be single-chips embedded in people, embedded in cars and all kinds of things,” said Mitchell. Chips for use inside people could be health monitoring devices, which Sun is not working on, he said.