2.1 The onward march of third information revolution in the first  (Page 5/14)

IBM released Power4 in 2001. It had two cores on a single chip. In 2005, SunMicrosystems commercialized eight-core UltraSpare T1(also known as Niagra).

Today 50 percent annual improvement is achieved in effective processing power by parallelism and not by speedier transistors. Memory Bandwidth will be the constraint on multicore technology. No more than 16 cores can be realized on a single chip.

In a more advanced approach, CPU is being combined with Graphic Processing Units(GPU) into Accelerated Processing Unit(APU). This has been implemented by AMD.

Future trend is to combine general purpose cores with specialized cores such as encryption core, decryption core, videoencoding core or anything with well-defined standard.

Technology 6_CLOUDCOMPUTING

In 1970, Advance Research Program Agency(ARPA) established ARPANET, the first wide area network(WAN), connecting Stanford Research Institute, University of Utah, University of California Los Angeles and University of California Santa Barbara. This ARPANET was used for Defence Research Programs. In three years it grew to cover whole of USA.

In 1971, electronic mail or e-mail is invented by Ray Tomilinson. He combined the existing mail program ‘SENDMSG’ that worked only within an organization with a file transfer program called ‘CPYNET’ to create an e-mail utility between 15 computers within the organization and use the same on the existing ARPANET.

In 1974,TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) model and protocols were developed and standardized by Vint Cerf and Kahn.

In March,1989, Tim Berners-Lee of CERN, Geneva, handed a proposal ‘Information Management: a proposal’. The proposal came up with hypertext language , the basis of “http” in website address. By October 1990, this team developed the first web browser. The World Wide Web Technology was made available for wider use on INTERNET from 1991 onward without any royalties. “ Internet is a vast network of networks, interconnected in many different ways yet they speak the same language. Web is one – albeit the most influential and well known – of many different applications which run over the INTERNET.

In 1991, ARPANET was confined to exclusive clientele (Department of Defence Research). To make the NET available to the University Community at large, National Science Foundation connected its own NSFNET to ARPANET. This led to exponential growth in the use of NET. In mid-90s the collection of networks was looked at as INTERNET.

With the development of HTML(Hyper Text Markup Language) for easy file transfer and the subsequent building up of World Wide Web with graphical browsers and clickable hyperlinks, internet became of use for the whole population.

By 2000, blogs, tweets and social networking were being built providing information, entertainment and 24 hours connectivity. It is this connectivity along with Wikileaks Cable exposure which has led to Egyptian and Tunisian revolution.

The breaking down of the barrier between hardware and software has made possible the internet miracle. Now most of our computational data , our files and pictures can be saved on the servers provided by our service providers. We need not be worried about our computers crashing and losing all our data. This is known as Cloud Computing. The powerful convergence of broadband access, the profusion of mobile devices enabling near-constant Internet connectivity and the hundreds of innovations for building and running data centres has made possible Cloud Computing. Just as we had time sharing of Main-frame computers in 1970s, in exactly the same fashion through internet we can carry out intensive computational tasks on the servers of some service provider but this computational results will be accessible to all.