Technology Today, Ibadan (2026)

26/07/2018

Predicting the future requires hubris,
and it should therefore be met with
more than a terabyte of skepticism. In
past years, I’ve made some calls that
have proved prescient like predicting
way back in 2011 that social media
would determine the U.S. presidential
election . Meanwhile, some took
decades longer than I had foreseen
such as my 1992 prediction that this
new thing called the Internet would
lead Hollywood studios to merge with
telecommunications companies .
Over the years, I’ve learned that the
best way to predict the future is to
hang out with the people creating it.

When you work with a top
consultancy and have leading
technology innovators as clients, it’s
pretty easy to recognize trends that
have the greatest potential impact.
Here are my top four tech trends for
2018:

1. IoT becomes BIoT
The biggest mistake most
prognosticators make is
underestimating the potential for fast
growth in our hyper-connected world.
Automobiles took time to catch on
because would-be drivers had to wait
for roads and gas stations to be built.
But today’s disruptive innovations
rely on existing infrastructure for
mobile devices that puts most
companies just a few clicks from
billions of consumers. One of those is
the Internet of things (IoT), which
involves adding smart sensors to
connected devices so that users can do
things like ask Amazon’s Alexa digital
assistant to turn off the lights or order
a pizza.
But blockchain, one of the underlying
technologies for the hot
cryptocurrency bitcoin, can make IoT
devices even more useful. It creates a
digital record across hundreds or
thousands of computers, vastly
reducing the risk of hacking.
Combining IoT with blockchain —or
BIoT—ushers in a whole host of new
services and businesses. For example,
BIoT can be used to track shipments of
pharmaceuticals and to create smart
cities in which connected heating
systems better controls energy use and
connected traffic lights better manage
rush hour.
In 2018, companies will begin to use
Application Programming Interfaces,
or software used to connect different
databases and computer services.
Combined with the blockchain
Internet of things, it will be as easy to
get data from sensors in a warehouse
as accessing websites on our mobile
phones. When manufacturers,
retailers, regulators, and
transportation companies have real-
time data from sensors imbedded on
products, trucks and ships, everyone
in the distribution chain can benefit
from insights that they were
previously unable to get. With BIoT,
companies and consumers can also be
assured that their most valuable data
on the blockchain cannot be hacked.

2. The fintech renaissance
While bitcoin and blockchain were
grabbing the headlines in 2017, social
and mobile payments have
fundamentally changed the financial
markets. In China, mobile payment
volumes now exceed $5 trillion
annually.
All aspects of the payments chain are
open to disruption as blockchain
speeds clearing house functions while
smart contracts handle settlements. In
2018, look for biometrics such as
facial recognition, voice ID, and
fingerprints to help make shopping
far quicker —by eliminating the need
to swipe a credit card at checkout, for
instance. Instead, you will be able to
verify your identity for a merchant
scanning your eyes with your
smartphone, in what’s known as a
retinal payment. A bold clairvoyant
could even predict that some major
retailers will hop on the
cryptocurrency bandwagon and issue
their own secure currency next year.
Fintech will likely also become greener
in 2018. With cryptocurrencies
reaching over $300 billion in total
value, there is now a financial
incentive for investments into
quantum computing, which involves
using the behavior of energy at a
subatomic level to process computing
functions at a billion times faster than
today’s microprocessors.
By some estimates, mining today’s
cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin,
requires more electricity annually
than the amount of energy used in 159
countries . With cryptocurrency’s
carbon footprint rapidly growing,
quantum computing has the potential
to greatly reduce the estimated
28TWhs of electricity consumed by all
of the current computers processing
bitcoin.
Analysts now anticipate that banks
will derive over $1 billion annually
from blockchain-based
cryptocurrencies within the next two
years as traditional financial
institutions start treating
cryptocurrencies and other digital
assets similar to traditional fiat
currencies with more efficient
payment systems, loan processing, and
credit instruments. Going green by
using less energy to create bitcoins,
will translate into earning more green.

3. Augmented reality goes
mainstream
Before smartphones existed 10 years
ago, most people would consider
spending five hours daily staring at
your phone as crazy. In 2018, the
bent-neck trend will start to reverse
itself.
The mobile game Pokémon Go has
unleashed a billion-dollar demand for
augmented reality entertainment, and
major brands are taking notice.
Thanks to the introduction of
affordable augmented reality glasses,
our phones will remain in our pockets
and Heads Up Displays (HUD) will
improve how we work, shop, and play.
HUDs, best known today as the
instrument gauges that fighter pilots
monitor on their visors or
windshields, will become a standard
in consumer eyeglasses. Imagine
walking down the street in a foreign
country, for example, and having all
of the store signs instantly translated
into English thanks to your trendy
sunglasses.
AR will customize in-store experiences
with mannequins that match your
body type and display enough virtual
inventory to rival any online site.
Merchants will create AR experiences
with their packaging so that
demonstration videos can appear
when you look at the product on the
shelf or celebrity spokespeople can
magically stand in the aisle to pitch
the product. Virtual pop-up stores can
be built to appear anywhere that
crowds are gathered (in a stadium, a
busy street corner, or even inside a
subway). These non-brick and mortar
retail locations will bring new
opportunities for merchants to create
engaging shopping experiences
anywhere with accessible bandwidth.
Li-Fi, a new light-base wireless
connection with data speeds 100 times
that of Wi-Fi, will bring high-
definition virtual objects into stores.
With Li-Fi and AR, consumers can see
limitless virtual inventory in store, at
scale.
With just a wave of your hand, a car
salesperson can change the model,
color, and customized features of the
car “sitting” on the dealership’s
showroom floor. Combining real and
virtual objects can enhance
experiences for all out-of-home
activities. Sports stadiums will be
brought into the 21st century with
personalized HUDs of players on the
field. Imagine watching a live football
game in the stadium and seeing
personalized stats floating above the
fantasy sports players you follow.
When watching sports from home, AR
has the potential to bring the
excitement of life-size boxing matches
into your living room. The real
promise of AR is to bring people the
information they need without having
to ask for it.
For many, 2018 will be the start of
living an augmented life.

4. 2018 is the year of the bots
We all have gotten use to speaking
with bots whenever we call to make
airline reservations or to confirm our
bank account balances. The use of
natural language bots will expand
from use as automated customer
service agents to become routine for
daily living.
Home bots will do more than just
respond to requests, to being able to
provide timely information such as,
“It’s time to take your medicine.” You
may even feel like Don Quixote as
mobile bots become dedicated Sancho
Panza servants—always at the ready
and by your side.
Imagine a bot whispering in your ear
“don’t make that purchase or you will
be over your credit limit” or “your
parking meter expires in two
minutes.” Bots will help with the
children, act as financial investment
advisors, and be an omnipresent
value-add from the brands you trust.
With phones staying in our pockets,
businesses will likely spend more on
creating chatbots in 2018 than on apps
in an effort to better serve their
customers.
There’s always room for the
future to unfold
unpredictably
As timely as I believe these four
predictions to be, the pace of
disruption can be slowed by a host of
issues, including cyber security,
government regulation, and, most
importantly, consumers’ ability to
adapt and accept change. In this era of
endless innovation, the only
prediction you can be 100% assured of
is that future will look very different
from today.

02/04/2018

Bike limousine

04/01/2018

Microsoft Acquires
Avere To Bolster Cloud
Storage strategy

vere Systems, a Pittsburgh-based cloud storage
company, was acquired by Microsoft, the two
companies announced Wednesday. Financial
terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Avere's team will continue to work in Pittsburgh,
according to reporting by GeekWire.

"By bringing together Avere's storage expertise
with the power of Microsoft's cloud, customers
will benefit from industry-leading innovations that
enable the largest, most complex high-
performance workloads to run in Microsoft
Azure,"

Jason Zander, corporate vice president
for Microsoft Azure, the company's cloud
services, said in a statement. "We are excited to
welcome Avere to Microsoft, and look forward to
the impact their technology and the team will
have on Azure and the customer experience."

Avere was founded in 2008. Since, the company
has raised nearly $100 million through multiple
rounds of financing. The company announced in
March it had received $14 million in its most
recent round of funding, including a large
investment from Google.

"Our cloud business is growing at triple digits, so
over 100 percent," CEO Ron Bianchini told the
Tribune-Review in March.

Avere manufactures storage hardware and
software that helps companies make use of the
public cloud to store data and host applications.

Bianchini said the company's technology can
help firms better use cloud storage and reduces
the delay experienced when accessing data
stored on the cloud.

The company employs about 80 people in its
Troy Hill offices near the Heinz Lofts. There are
120 employees companywide, Bianchini said.

04/01/2018

Reality

Headset Race Heats Up
in Silicon Valley

ugmented reality is roaring back to prominence
as one of Silicon Valley's favorite frontier
technologies, nearly three years after Google's
brief, unsuccessful run at the market with its
infamous smart glasses.
When criticism of the Google Glass over privacy
and safety concerns led some bars and
restaurants to ban the then-$1,500 smart
glasses, the future of mixing artificial graphics
with real-life viewing seemed more like a pipe
dream than science-fiction-turned-reality.

But AR headsets are back in vogue, as
Facebook-owned Oculus, Apple and the much-
hyped and mysterious startup company Magic
Leap all work to bring new entertainment
devices to market, hoping to blend reality with
the internet.

Even Google Glass made a comeback in 2017 as
a niche, industrial product. The glasses are
reportedly being used in factories for Boeing, DHL
and General Electric, and by a few neuroscience-
related startups experimenting with the
technology.

Microsoft's Google Glass equivalent, the
HoloLens headset, also currently sells only for
commercial and development purposes. Ford
reportedly uses HoloLens to design cars in
augmented reality. And earlier this month, French
surgeons wore HoloLens during a surgery, helping
them visualize portions of a patient's anatomy
during a shoulder prosthesis operation.
Meanwhile, smartphone-based AR apps like
Pokemon GO are improving, and a new app this
holiday season has connected with fans of the
"Star Wars" movie franchise, finally bringing the
possibility of mass-market appeal that once
eluded Google Glass.
"We got the ball rolling this year," said Creative
Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin. "We went from
nobody having experienced AR to a whole lot of
people experiencing it."

AR is already heading from smartphones to
headsets in a natural evolution -- and that
transition was seen in products this holiday
season, Bajarin said, like the $199 "Star Wars"
augmented reality headset and lightsaber
package, built by Disney and Lenovo, which
allows users to battle AR-developed
stormtroopers and Sith lords like Darth Vader.

"We see augmented reality as a powerful way to
bring Disney stories to life in entirely new ways,
and we're already developing AR experiences on
these new platforms when it makes sense, such
as Star Wars: Jedi Challenges," said Kyle
Laughlin, Disney's senior vice president of games
and interactive experiences.
Owners of the Disney-Lenovo headset said they
were impressed by the believability of the
lightsaber battles.
"The sense of scale you get from having a
character like Darth Maul in your living room
while dueling with lightsabers is remarkably
compelling," said A.J. Minotti, a digital marketing
director based in Poland, Ohio. "The controller is
very responsive and provides a good amount of
rumble feedback to help the battles feel
believable."
But the device comes with some flaws, headset
owners said. For one, the headset only plays a
few "Star Wars"-based scenario games. It also
requires a smartphone attached to the headset,
draining a lot of battery power from the phone.
"I feel like the insertion of the phone was a little
cumbersome," said Christine Lauder, an
information technology and marketing manager in
Houston. "You must also be sure that your phone
is completely charged. Starting the app instantly
brightens your iPhone screen to 100 percent and
there is no built-in charger, so you are limited to
gaming for however long your phone will play
before dying."
Other new players are throwing their hats into
the AR ring. Florida-based unicorn startup Magic
Leap, which has raised $1.9 billion from
investors including Google and prominent Silicon
Valley venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and
Andreessen Horowitz, unveiled its first
augmented reality headset this month after three
years of working in stealth mode.
The headset, scheduled to be released next year,
consists of futuristic-looking goggles, a handheld
controller and a Sony Walkman-style external
computer, which hangs at the waist.
"We believe that what we're building at Magic
Leap will completely redefine the way we
interact with the world around us, and we're
determined to get it right," Magic Leap
spokesperson Jack Ortner wrote in an email.
Yet Silicon Valley powerhouse Apple may have
already made that achievable for app developers.
In 2017, augmented reality arrived for the
masses who use iPhones and Android
smartphones. Apple unveiled its new ARKit
platform in October, ushering in dozens of new
apps like Ikea Place, which allows users to
visualize three-dimensional furniture models in
their living rooms or bedrooms.
Apple's new platform also opened up possibilities
for existing AR apps, like the popular mobile
game Pokemon Go, which updated its app this
month to incorporate ARKit technology so
Pokemon appear in real-life scale and move and
react based on users' proximity.
Meanwhile, Google has rolled out its ARKit
equivalent, called ARCore, on a smaller scale.
Earlier this month, the search giant unveiled its
AR Stickers camera app, which allows users to
insert "Star Wars" or "Stranger Things"
characters into photos. Google declined to
comment about ARCore, Google Glass's future or
the company's investment partnership with
Magic Leap.
Facebook-owned Oculus, which launched a $199
virtual reality headset in 2017, filed patents in
August detailing its plan for a futuristic
augmented reality headset. Facebook and Oculus
did not respond to a request for comment.
"We all know what we really want: AR glasses,"
said Oculus's head of research Michael Abrash
at the F8 Conference in San Jose in April. "They
aren't here yet, but when they arrive, they're
going to be one of the great transformational
technologies of the next 50 years."
Yet in the increasingly crowded race to build the
first popular AR headset, Apple is best positioned
for two reasons, said Bajarin: Its enormous
developer community gives Apple an edge in
producing apps and content for its developing
headset, and it has a track record of making
sophisticated technology -- like wearables --
commercially attractive.
Apple is ramping up development for its first AR
glasses with hundreds of engineers in Cupertino
and Sunnyvale working to complete the headset
and a new operating system by 2019, according
to Bloomberg.
"We don't give a rat's about being first, we want
to be the best, and give people a great
experience," Apple CEO Tim Cook said about AR
glasses in an October interview with British
newspaper The Independent. "But now anything
you would see on the market any time soon
would not be something any of us would be
satisfied with."

22/12/2017

Paying with Your Face
Face-detecting systems in China now authorize payments, provide access to facilities, and track down criminals. Will other countries follow?

Shortly after walking through the door at Face++, a Chinese startup valued at roughly a billion dollars, I see my face, unshaven and looking a bit jet-lagged, flash up on a large screen near the entrance.

Having been added to a database, my face now provides automatic access to the building. It can also be used to monitor my movements through each room inside. As I tour the offices of Face++ (pronounced “face plus plus”), located in a suburb of Beijing, I see it appear on several more screens, automatically captured from countless angles by the company’s software. On one screen a video shows the software tracking 83 different points on my face simultaneously. It’s a little creepy, but undeniably impressive.

Over the past few years, computers have become incredibly good at recognizing faces, and the technology is expanding quickly in China in the interest of both surveillance and convenience. Face recognition might transform everything from policing to the way people interact every day with banks, stores, and transportation services.

Technology from Face++ is already being used in several popular apps. It is possible to transfer money through Alipay, a mobile payment app used by more than 120 million people in China, using only your face as credentials. Meanwhile, Didi, China’s dominant ride-hailing company, uses the Face++ software to let passengers confirm that the person behind the wheel is a legitimate driver. (A “liveness” test, designed to prevent anyone from duping the system with a photo, requires people being scanned to move their head or speak while the app scans them.

The technology figures to take off in China first because of the country’s attitudes toward surveillance and privacy. Unlike, say, the United States, China has a large centralized database of ID card photos. During my time at Face++, I saw how local governments are using its software to identify suspected criminals in video from surveillance cameras, which are omnipresent in the country. This is especially impressive—albeit somewhat dystopian—because the footage analyzed is far from perfect, and because mug shots or other images on file may be several years old.

22/12/2017

Self-Driving Trucks
Tractor-trailers without a human at the wheel will soon barrel onto highways near you. What will this mean for the nation’s 1.7 million truck drivers?

his long-haul 18-wheeler down a two-lane Texas highway when he saw an oncoming car drift into his lane just a few hundred feet ahead. There was a ditch to his right and more oncoming cars to his left, so there was little for him to do but hit his horn and brake. “I could hear the man who taught me to drive telling me what he always said was rule number one: ‘Don’t hurt anybody,’” Mugriyev recalls.

But it wasn’t going to work out that way. The errant car collided with the front of Mugriyev’s truck. It shattered his front axle, and he struggled to keep his truck and the wrecked car now fused to it from hitting anyone else as it barreled down the road. After Mugriyev finally came to a stop, he learned that the woman driving the car had been killed in the collision.

Could a computer have done better at the wheel? Or would it have done worse?

We will probably find out in the next few years, because multiple companies are now testing self-driving trucks. Although many technical problems are still unresolved, proponents claim that self-driving trucks will be safer and less costly. “This system often drives better than I do,” says Greg Murphy, who’s been a professional truck driver for 40 years. He now serves as a safety backup driver during tests of self-driving trucks by Otto, a San Francisco company that outfits trucks with the equipment needed to drive themselves.

At first glance, the opportunities and challenges posed by self-driving trucks might seem to merely echo those associated with self-driving cars. But trucks aren’t just long cars. For one thing, the economic rationale for self-driving trucks might be even stronger than the one for driverless cars. Autonomous trucks can coördinate their movements to platoon closely together over long stretches of highway, cutting down on wind drag and saving on fuel. And letting the truck drive itself part of the time figures to help truckers complete their routes sooner.

But the technological obstacles facing autonomous trucks are higher than the ones for self-driving cars. Otto and other companies will need to demonstrate that sensors and code can match the situational awareness of a professional trucker—skills honed by years of experience and training in piloting an easily destabilized juggernaut, with the momentum of 25 Honda Accords, in the face of confusing road hazards, poor surface conditions, and unpredictable car drivers.

And perhaps most important, if self-driving trucks do take hold, they figure to be more controversial than self-driving cars. At a time when our politics and economy are already being upended by the threats that automation poses to jobs (see “The Relentless Pace of Automation”), self-driving trucks will affect an enormous number of blue-collar workers. There are 1.7 million trucking jobs in the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Technology is unlikely to replace truckers entirely anytime soon. But it will almost certainly alter the nature of the job, and not necessarily in ways that all would welcome.

Breakthrough
Long-haul trucks that drive themselves for extended stretches on highways.
Why It Matters
The technology might free truck drivers to complete routes more efficiently, but it could also erode their pay and eventually replace many of the

Otto’s headquarters, in the once-seedy South of Market section of San Francisco, isn’t much like many of the other tech startups that have transformed the area. Proudly oblivious to that neighborhood upgrade, it’s a barely renovated former furniture warehouse converted to a garage and machine shop, with semi trucks in various states of dismantlement hulking over benches of tools and computers. “No fancy, shiny offices here,” brags Eric Berdinis, Otto’s young and clean-cut-looking product manager.

Berdinis shows off the latest generation of the company’s fast-evolving technology, which is currently installed on Volvo semis. Unlike the bolted-on, kludgy-looking hardware that’s been on testing runs for the past year, the newer versions of the company’s sensor and processing arrays are more sleekly integrated throughout the Volvo cab. The equipment includes four forward-facing video cameras, radar, and a box of accelerometers that Berdinis boasts is “as close as the government allows you to get to missile-guidance quality.”

Particularly key to Otto’s technology is a lidar system, which uses a pulsed laser to amass detailed data about the truck’s surroundings. The current third-party lidar box costs Otto in the vicinity of $100,000 each. But the company has a team designing a proprietary version that could cost less than $10,000.

Slideshow: A human can push the red buttons to the right of the steering wheel to instantly take over from the self-driving system.

Slideshow: The driver can sit in the back of the cab while the truck drives itself—albeit in the right lane only.

Slideshow: A shipment of Budweiser was loaded onto an autonomous Otto truck last year.

22/12/2017

The Way You Start Your Day Can Affect Your Whole Day… Begin It With A Smile, Calmness Of Mind, Coolness Of Emotions And A Heart Filled With Gratitude.

21/12/2017

they say Money is not an alcohol... bt imagine yourself in dis kind of Money... how will you feel....😴😆😵😜

21/12/2017

be sincere....

11/12/2017

Close to the edge

There is a tension that lies at the heart of the software defined network (SDN). Telecom and datacom operators have seized on it because the idea of software-based control makes everything more flexible and it is only natural that demand for more responsive communications services should push technology in that direction.

But software that runs on general-purpose microprocessors lacks the efficiency of carefully tuned hardware. That is a major problem when the customers’ other demands are for networks simply to deliver data more quickly and cheaply.

George Hervey, principal architect at Marvell, says one of the biggest driving forces for network capacity is within and between data centres. The workloads they run make heavy use of virtual machines that hop from server to server, based on available capacity, and call on specialised accelerators to handle data analysis or machine learning jobs.

“We see a tremendous growth in distributed compute nodes that need to share information with each other through the network,” Hervey says. “People today think of networks being driven by more subscribers. The component of the growth that is usually left out is machine to machine. Distributed workloads are causing the growth. People don’t understand how big this is.

“The network is going to be all about speeds and feeds. The only way to handle this and not be overwhelmed completely is to have smart traffic engineering.”

Traffic engineering involves machines close to the network but not necessarily the switches themselves making high-level decisions about where streams of packets flow. Video from a server may take one route, while control packets take another that offers lower latency, but cannot handle high bandwidths. In many cases, this is achieved by setting up virtual overlay networks using protocols such as VXLAN or tunnels. In response, core network switches become more streamlined and make fewer policy-based decisions. “The networks themselves don’t need [microprocessor-level] intelligence for forwarding,” Hervey contends. “Network processors just aren’t able to cope with the speeds and feeds. People are willing to give up the traditional value of network processors to offer more bandwidth and connectivity.”

Forwarding engines themselves do more than simple table lookups, Hervey says. The primary demand is for them to watch what passes through and relay that as telemetry information to the servers that decide how steams of packets should be routed.

“A lot of the applications being deployed in and outside the network are not being deployed in a traditional way. Operators need telemetry to understand how they are being deployed,” Hervey says. “There is a tremendous desire for knowledge and diagnostic ability. People want to know what’s going on in their network.”

Although they are now armed with more telemetry and other information from the network, the processors at the endpoints are struggling with the workload. This is leading to a further change in the balancing act between packet forwarders and processors. At the August 2017 Future:Net conference, organised by virtual machine specialist VMWare, Mellanox’ vice president of software architecture Dror Goldenberg explained the problem. A 200Gbit/s Ethernet switch needs to be able to parse, sort and forward some 16million maximum-sized frames a second. With much smaller 64byte packets, that number balloons to almost 300m. With the larger packets, a processor in a software-only switch has just 65ns to deal with each one – enough time for five level-three cache accesses or a call to the operating system. “With 64byte packets, you basically have budget for nothing,” he argues.

With today’s multicore processors, the ability to spread the workload out gives each processor core more time to do its job. But it imposes a heavy burden on servers expected to deal with the workload. Goldenberg says a software packet handler, such as Open vSwitch that runs on processors such as Intel Xeons, can consume half of the 16 cores of a high-end processor handling traffic at 10Gbit/s. “When datarates go from 10 to 25 or 40 to 100Gbit/s, the problem gets exacerbated. You end up losing almost all these cores,” he explains. In a data centre, ‘you’ve lost half of your compute, which is not acceptable’.

The answer being pursued by a number of silicon suppliers is to build smart network interface cards (smart-NICs) that can move workload back off the server processors. Although smart-NICs can be based on dedicated switch chips and FPGAs, suppliers ranging from Broadcom to Netronome have converged on an architecture that is, effectively, a smarter network processor. It has multicore processors that can run Linux, combined with a selection of accelerators for functions such as packet encryption and content-addressable memories to quickly find destination addresses.

“I believe network virtualisation is a killer app for smart-NICs. Especially when you go to datarates beyond 10Gbit/s,” says Sujal Das, chief strategy and marketing officer at Netronome.

The biggest problem facing smart-NIC builders is how they interact with the rest of the server. Only in a few cases will the smart-NIC offload all network processing from the Xeons on the main server blade. Some traffic will pass straight through the smart-NIC, but some packets need to be steered into the server for more extensive processing. This has subtle effects felt throughout the network.

Dejan Leskaroski, senior product manager for network virtualisation software specialist Affirmed Networks, explained at the OPNFV Summit in June that pushing some processing in smart-NICs makes it harder for the high-level services to see billing information. “We don’t see all the flows. And, with firewalls, how can a virtualised network function enforce policies when flows are bypassing it?”

The combination of software and hardware processing in smart-NICs brings problems of standardisation. The first wave of network function virtualisation software, based on projects such as ARM’s OpenDataPlane or Intel’s DPDK, focused on software that would be compiled onto CPUs. Those functions need to be translated into a mixture of microcode and register settings for network accelerators running alongside binaries for a Linux-compatible processor. Although server vendors and users could simply decide to standardise on a single vendor’s product line, this is not a popular option.

Broadcom distinguished engineer Fazil Osman believes: “When we talk to server vendors and ask what would make it easy for them to put in their systems, they want something that looks like a network device or storage device. The application doesn’t see it: it just sees it as an E£thernet device or a block device. The rest is done by an ecosystem of developers.”

The industry is struggling to find a standard that works across all forms of hardware. One possibility is to use a specialised language, such as P4 – a declarative language in the same vein as SQL, but for packet handling. Another is to use LLVM compiler technology to take applications written in a general-purpose language, such as C, and translate them on the target into binaries that can call on programmable hardware accelerators.

Das says: “I call it the Holy Grail of programming. You write code once and you don’t know where it’s running, it just runs in the right place.”

Goldenberg promises: “We will take care of the underlying plumbing.

Technology Today

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