IBM Reveals advanced research on mobile P2P Networks.
IBM’s Emerging Technology Services team is working on a collaborative project to understand and develop technology for mobile distributed and evolving networks. Jointly funded by the US and UK militaries, the ten-year project has the potential to transform computing across a much wider range of users and applications than its immediate objectives. At the heart of the project is a federated and distributed database called the Gaian Database, which is already available in prototype form and could, for example, be used as a privacy preserving technology by individuals for storing their personal online data.
The International Technology Alliance project
The International Technology Alliance (ITA) project is a collaborative project that is funded on a 50:50 basis by the US and UK defence establishments and has the responsibility to provide communications networks for front-line forces involved in coalition operations. It is a ten-year project undertaking fundamental research, and all of its results are to be placed in the public domain. Nine companies and 15 universities are participating in it, roughly half from the US and half from the UK, under IBM’s leadership. While it is examining all barriers to information sharing, its primary concern is to understand how ad-hoc mobile networks evolve and function, and how they can be made secure and dependable. It is concerned with distributed peer-to-peer networks, which are much more complex than the mobile networks used in telecommunications, where the core network is static and just the end points are mobile. Here the entire network is in a state of flux and there is no hierarchy of nodes within the network.
Although the primary objective of the project is to satisfy the needs of the US and UK armed forces, its results should be sufficiently generic to be easily adapted to the needs of other armed forces, and be applicable in civilian scenarios in the longer term.
Information handling is about more than communication
The project aims to enable meaningful information sharing, and not just secure and dependable communication. Consequently, information handling is a key component. The project has adopted a far-sighted and novel approach to handling the confused and often contradictory information sources found in a battlefield. IBM has implemented a Gaian database, named after its inventor. This is a federated and distributed database in which each player in the network can maintain their own ‘database’ containing their information, and where each Gaian database can seek out other Gaian databases in the network to take information from them as needed. It seems appropriate to repurpose Sun’s strapline of the 1980s and say that here “the network is the database”. The technology, which has a resemblance to neural nets, determines optimum paths through the network to seek out the information it needs. Each Gaian database is a Java application that can have modest hardware requirements and could be hosted on a USB stick. A prototype version of the software is available for download from IBM’s website.
Future applications of the technology could transform IT
While this technology is not going to be efficient for mass data processing applications in the data centre, it could be the basis for holding information needed to answer ad-hoc queries in flexible information systems of the future. One particular attraction is the possibility that it could become a cornerstone of privacy preserving technology in the online society of the future. Individuals could hold their personal information in their own Gaian database, and control who is allowed to access it.
Academic research still has value for business
The
organisational model for the ITA project has a 1980s feel to it. A
multinational project with input from both industry and academia mimics
the EU’s Esprit programme. The military funding of the
research, with a general objective of contributing to industrial
efficiency, also seems somewhat distant from the more prosaic concerns
of the CIO today. IT now seems to be more about tuning and refinement
than about making fundamental leaps forward. However, projects such as
the ITA project show
that it is wise to keep in touch with the vision of what may become
possible beyond surviving the current storm.
Source: www.ovumkc.com 