Virtual Greg

Some of the Silicon Valley research labs jointly run an exchange program so that their interns visit each others’ labs. These “SIRS” events run for an afternoon, every few weeks. The companies use it for PR and to entice high quality recruits. So it’s win-win. Only in Silicon Valley is there enough leading research in the one area for a program like this to be easily doable.

Yesterday the hosts were Sun and HP. I’m not an intern but I was allowed to tag along, which is great as I’m keen to see as much as I can while I’m in Palo Alto. (Sadly I missed the MS/Google day last month.) About eight of us drove to the large Sun Labs campus on the other side of Palo Alto, where we met the interns from other companies. The Sun research director made a short speech and we broke into groups and toured the different labs. Sun do hardware and software, and there was a wide range of things to see. Their research includes wireless chip-to-chip communication using capacitance (and chips placed very close together). There was an interesting new web-dev environment based on JavaScript. Wonderland, Sun’s virtual world for collaboration among remote workers, was especially interesting to me, given my topic. We also saw interesting work Sun are doing with wireless sensor networks. This lab had a classic “college” vibe – young people excited about their work and having fun, gizmos strewn about including an electric car (!) parked inside the room, a robot wandering around etc.

From there we drove back to the HP lab which is just down the road from PARC. This is the original HP research facility and they have preserved Hewlett’s and Packard’s offices like a museum. (This reminded me uneasily of Lenin’s tomb.) These seem to be some of the biggest buildings I have ever been inside – I take a look in Google Earth. There was some interesting stuff at HP, though it had less of the college vibe that Sun had – possibly because they are reorganizing their labs and a lot of the space was empty. We went into a data-centre where they are experimenting with smart cooling and work allocation to reduce power usage for environmental purposes. This was a server-room on steroids – many banks containing 64 rack-mounted servers each. Part of the room houses the servers used to render Shrek, and there is a movie poster on the wall and a joke sign saying “Hollywood North”. HP are working on digital ink printers to compete with the traditional offset technology – this would make small-run print jobs such as niche publishing more economical.