12 crackpot tech ideas that might just work

7. DC power

The warm, humming bricks that convert AC from the wall to the DC used by electronics are finally drawing some much deserved attention -- from data centre engineers hoping to save money by wasting less energy. The waste must often be paid for twice: first to power equipment, then to run the air conditioner to remove the heat produced. One solution is to create a central power supply that distributes pure DC current to rack-mounted computers. But will cutting out converters catch on, or is the buzz surrounding DC to the data centre destined to fizzle?

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have built a prototype rack filled with computers that run directly off 380-volt DC. Bill Tschudi, principal investigator at the lab, says that the system uses 15% less power than do servers equipped with today’s most efficient power supplies -- and that there can be even greater savings when replacing the older models still in use in most enterprises. If the server room requires cooling, as it does everywhere except in northern regions in the winter, the savings can double, because the air-conditioning bill also can be cut by 15%.

Others are working on bringing additional DC savings to the enterprise. Nextek Power, for instance, is building a system that integrates the traditional power grid, rooftop solar panels, and computer hardware using DC power. Choosing this standard avoids the inefficiencies of converting the DC produced by the panels to AC, then back to DC when it reaches the computers.

"It’s a big opportunity, because we’ve shown that there’s big energy savings," Tschudi says of the prospects of DC. "And it’s also got more reliability because there are fewer points of failure."

Cost savings? Reliability? The prospects for DC to the data centre are looking up.
Peter Wayner


8. Holographic and phase-change storage

Who wouldn’t benefit from a terabyte USB dongle on every key chain and every episode of Magnum, P I on a single disc? Thanks to phase-change memory and holographic storage, today’s pipe dream is shaping up to be tomorrow’s reality.

Currently under development by IBM, Macronix and Qimonda, phase-change storage is being touted as 500 times faster and a magnitude smaller than traditional "floating gate" flash technology. Whereas flash memory involves the trapping of electrons, phase-change memory achieves its speed by heating a chalcogenide alloy, altering its phase from crystalline to amorphous.

This technology could prove critical in embedded computing apps, as memory cell degradation has forced many appliance developers to add expensive NVRAM (nonvolatile RAM) to store configuration information, rather than risk premature flash failure. Once realised, it could dramatically drive down the cost of appliances and push new capabilities into enterprise handsets.

Holographic storage, on the other hand, could quickly change the way we think about CDs and DVDs. So quickly, in fact, that enterprise archiving may bypass slow-to-ship dual-layer optical drives altogether and head straight to holographic optical.

InPhase Technologies is already shipping engineering prototypes of a holographic disc storage system with 60 times the storage capacity of today’s DVDs. The advent of 3D optical storage could herald the era of sending a copy of your entire corporate database off-site affordably. Think of what holographic storage could do for personal records portability: a durable ID card that contains your entire medical file in your wallet.

Regardless of which technology ships first, business is likely to benefit from both soon. Maybe those data crystals from Babylon 5 aren’t so far off after all.
Brian Chee


9. Superconducting computing

How about petaflops performance to keep that enterprise really humming? Superconducting circuits -- which are frictionless and therefore generate no heat -- would certainly free you from any thermal limits on clock frequencies. But who has the funds to cool these circuits with liquid helium as required? That is, of course, assuming someone comes up with the extremely complex schemes necessary to interface this circuitry with the room-temperature components of an operable computer.

Of all the technologies proposed in the past 50 years, superconducting computing stands out as psychoceramic. IBM’s program, started in the late 1960s, was cancelled by the early 1980s, and the Japan Ministry of Trade and Industry’s attempt to develop a superconducting mainframe was dropped in the mid-1990s. Both resulted in clock frequencies of only a few gigahertz.

Yet the dream persists in the form of the HTMT (Hybrid Technology Multi-Threaded) program, which takes advantage of superconducting rapid single-flux quantum logic and should eventually scale to about 100GHz. Its proposed NUMA (non-uniform memory access) architecture uses superconducting processors and data buffers, cryo-SRAM (static RAM) semiconductor buffers, semiconductor DRAM main memory, and optical holographic storage in its quest for petaflops performance. Its chief obstacle? A clock cycle that will be shorter than the time it takes to transmit a signal through an entire chip.

So, unless you’re the National Security Agency, which has asked for US$400 million to build an HTMT-based prototype, don’t hold your breath waiting for superconducting’s benefits. In fact, the expected long-term impact of superconducting remains in range of absolute zero.
Martin Heller


10. Project Blackbox

A portable data centre may seem like pie in the sky, but in fact, Sun Microsystems has already constructed it. Whether Project Blackbox, which Sun calls the first virtualised data centre, catches on remains to be seen, but for some, the concept is compelling.

Take a 20-foot shipping container; provide it with integrated cooling, networking and power distribution; add external hook-ups for hot and cold water, 208-volt three-phase AC power, and Ethernet networking; integrate sensors, alarms, and GPS; fill its eight 19-inch shock-tolerant racks with servers -- either 120 Sun Fire T2000 servers or 250 Sun Fire T1000 systems -- and you’ve got one or two thousand processor cores, 7TB of memory and more than 2PB of storage. Connect them all as a grid, for simplicity.

According to Sun, this configuration can support 10,000 simultaneous desktops without requiring an administrator, and it can be located almost anywhere: on a rooftop, in a parking garage, in a secure warehouse. It can be delivered rapidly, even to theatres of operation or catastrophe areas. What’s more, Sun claims that a Project Blackbox data centre is a tenth the price of a standard data centre and that it can be turned on and configured in a day.

So if you find yourself unable to build or power or cool a data centre fast enough to keep up with your enterprise’s growth, or you’re in need of a server farm on the go or at a hard-to-reach outpost such as an oil rig, you may find yourself in the market for this deliverable soon.
Martin Heller


11. Quantum computing and quantum cryptography

The manipulation of subatomic particles at the quantum level has raised eyebrows in computer science research departments lately -- so much so that several approaches to incorporating quantum mechanics into computing have been launched to varying degrees of success.

The most advanced field of research is quantum cryptography, a bit of a misnomer given that it doesn’t rely on anything resembling traditional codes or ciphers. Instead of locking up data in a mathematical safe, the technique encodes messages in the clear by tweaking the quantum properties of photons -- a 1 may transform into a photon with "left" spin; a 0, into a photon with "right" spin.

The technique offers security because it is believed to be impossible to detect the spin of a photon without destroying or significantly altering it. So any eavesdropper would annihilate the message or change it enough for the recipient to notice. Two leaders in the field, IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory, have built working devices and have demonstrated the transmission of photon streams through fibre optics and even the air.

Another technology based on the principles of quantum mechanics, quantum computing, attempts to model computation with quantum states. The field has produced tantalising theoretical results that show how such a computer instantly could solve some of the most complicated problems such as factoring exceedingly large numbers.

Quantum computing is much further from having an impact in the lab or the enterprise than quantum cryptography. No one has built a particularly useful quantum computer yet, although some researchers have built machines that work with one or two bits. One group recently announced it is building machines that work with problems that take around 1000 bits to describe.
Peter Wayner


12. Total information awareness

When the US Department of Defence’s Information Awareness Office rolled out its high-tech scheme to track down terrorists in 2002, the program had all the hallmarks of a US government boondoggle, invoking imagined -- and sometimes unimaginable -- future technologies to solve an immediate problem.

First, there was the hyperbolic, Orwellian name, Total Information Awareness (TIA); then there was the project leader, convicted Iran-Contra felon Rear Admiral John Poindexter. And finally there was the bloated goal: to aggregate, store and analyse public and private data on an unimaginably massive scale, applying a predictive model that would correlate past activities to predict future acts. Minority Report, anyone?

The project eventually got a PR makeover, emerging as "Terrorism Information Awareness". Even so, the idea was still technically far-fetched. To create a system that could scoop up and analyse US citizens’ (or foreign nationals’) credit card transactions, medical records, website activity, travel itineraries, emails or anything with an electronic fingerprint, Poindexter called for a "total reinvention of technologies for storing and accessing information". That’s the IT equivalent of a Hail Mary pass.

Ultimately, the technical hurdles became moot. Privacy advocates howled, public sentiment turned, and the Feds officially pulled the plug in 2003. Yet for all its sci-fi underpinnings, many of the technologies that constituted TIA aren’t as nutty as they sound.

For instance, companies such as Teradata offer solutions that can migrate petabytes of data from disparate databases to a massive, integrated data repository, where customers can employ sophisticated data mining. Meanwhile, CallMiner and other speech analytics software enable companies to mine customer phone calls for business intelligence. And although today’s predictive analysis tools may not be able to foretell a terrorist attack, they can, for example, analyse the failure rates of mechanical parts so that companies can adjust their inventories accordingly. Not too bad a technical legacy for such a mixed bag of seemingly crackpot notions.
Steve Fox