Intel: The future is peer

And the rest of the industry better jump on board, said Pat Gelsinger, Intel's chief technology officer, in his Intel Developer Forum keynote speech Thursday morning.

As previously reported, Intel is spearheading a number of efforts to make sure that peer-to-peer networking receives wide adoption on the part of service providers and consumers.

"We suggest that it could be ushering in the next computing revolution," Gelsinger said. "Our job now as an industry is to change our perspective and now build the infrastructure that allows peer-to-peer computing to emerge in a broad way."

Not that the chip maker is embracing Napster and other music-file sharing services that have run afoul of the recording industry. Officially, Intel (intc) has no opinion on Napster.

However, it's quite clear Intel believes that this kind of model will play a major role in the future of computing.

Gelsinger announced the formation of a peer-to-peer working group of 18 companies, including IBM Corp. (ibm), Hewlett-Packard Co. (hwp) and Applied MetaComputing LLC. Intel, which will chair the group, has also established an internal peer-to-peer research lab inside Gelsinger's Technology Research Labs organization.

Aside from driving the development of standards, Intel will look to invest in peer-to-peer companies through its Intel Capital division, and lend some of its own technologies to the field. Intel is also exploring developing peer-to-peer products, but has no specific plans to do so.

Intel's overall peer-to-peer networking vision expects consumers and companies alike to create "self-organizing webs."

These webs could consist of employees at a company, family members or any group of with common interests or goals. Users in this private network would be able to share spare systems resources such as storage, or use the system to exchange files.

"It takes on a dynamic, self-organizing nature ... and the network brokers services to those who can partake of them," Gelsinger said in an interview Wednesday night.

Gelsinger compares Napster to Mosaic, the first widely used Web browser and the trigger for the Internet revolution. He also expects peer-to-peer technology, with the aid of the working group, to develop in much the same way the Web did. With Mosaic came the need for standards for transfer of data (HTTP) and security (SSL).

"Companies should start experimenting with this today," Gelsinger said, Wednesday.

During his keynote, Gelsinger outlined five possible applications for peer-to-peer networking for businesses: collaboration, distributed computing, file serving, edge services and intelligent agents.

However, "You don't necessarily share everything on your machine," he said.

Instead, a consumer or a corporate IT department might partition part of the hard drive on a PC to be used for shared space.

He demonstrated distributed computing by showing off Intel's own internal processor development tool, called Netbatch. Netbatch allows engineers to take advantage of unused processing power on some 10,000 workstations across 25 worldwide Intel locations to run computer simulations for chip designs.

Netbatch has saved Intel an estimated $500 million in costs over 10 years, Gelsinger said.

Gelsinger also demonstrated so-called edge services, which Intel uses for employee training. Using edge services, a document can be downloaded by a PC user to a local site via a wide area network connection. That PC then becomes the local server for that document.

There is one glaring problem that must be dealt with when addressing peer-to-peer networking, however: security.

"That's a big issue," Gelsinger acknowledged Wednesday.

The working group will address this and other issues.

Gelsinger said that private key/public key encryption technology or other technologies could be made to work with peer-to-peer applications.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The peer-to-peer networking revolution championed by Napster will change computing, Intel Corp. believes.

And the rest of the industry better jump on board, said Pat Gelsinger, Intel's chief technology officer, in his Intel Developer Forum keynote speech Thursday morning.

As previously reported, Intel is spearheading a number of efforts to make sure that peer-to-peer networking receives wide adoption on the part of service providers and consumers.

"We suggest that it could be ushering in the next computing revolution," Gelsinger said. "Our job now as an industry is to change our perspective and now build the infrastructure that allows peer-to-peer computing to emerge in a broad way."

Not that the chip maker is embracing Napster and other music-file sharing services that have run afoul of the recording industry. Officially, Intel (intc) has no opinion on Napster.

However, it's quite clear Intel believes that this kind of model will play a major role in the future of computing.

Gelsinger announced the formation of a peer-to-peer working group of 18 companies, including IBM Corp. (ibm), Hewlett-Packard Co. (hwp) and Applied MetaComputing LLC. Intel, which will chair the group, has also established an internal peer-to-peer research lab inside Gelsinger's Technology Research Labs organization.

Aside from driving the development of standards, Intel will look to invest in peer-to-peer companies through its Intel Capital division, and lend some of its own technologies to the field. Intel is also exploring developing peer-to-peer products, but has no specific plans to do so.

Intel's overall peer-to-peer networking vision expects consumers and companies alike to create "self-organizing webs."

These webs could consist of employees at a company, family members or any group of with common interests or goals. Users in this private network would be able to share spare systems resources such as storage, or use the system to exchange files.

"It takes on a dynamic, self-organizing nature ... and the network brokers services to those who can partake of them," Gelsinger said in an interview Wednesday night.

Gelsinger compares Napster to Mosaic, the first widely used Web browser and the trigger for the Internet revolution. He also expects peer-to-peer technology, with the aid of the working group, to develop in much the same way the Web did. With Mosaic came the need for standards for transfer of data (HTTP) and security (SSL).

"Companies should start experimenting with this today," Gelsinger said, Wednesday.

During his keynote, Gelsinger outlined five possible applications for peer-to-peer networking for businesses: collaboration, distributed computing, file serving, edge services and intelligent agents.

However, "You don't necessarily share everything on your machine," he said.

Instead, a consumer or a corporate IT department might partition part of the hard drive on a PC to be used for shared space.

He demonstrated distributed computing by showing off Intel's own internal processor development tool, called Netbatch. Netbatch allows engineers to take advantage of unused processing power on some 10,000 workstations across 25 worldwide Intel locations to run computer simulations for chip designs.

Netbatch has saved Intel an estimated $500 million in costs over 10 years, Gelsinger said.

Gelsinger also demonstrated so-called edge services, which Intel uses for employee training. Using edge services, a document can be downloaded by a PC user to a local site via a wide area network connection. That PC then becomes the local server for that document.

There is one glaring problem that must be dealt with when addressing peer-to-peer networking, however: security.

"That's a big issue," Gelsinger acknowledged Wednesday.

The working group will address this and other issues.

Gelsinger said that private key/public key encryption technology or other technologies could be made to work with peer-to-peer applications.