Scottish University tasked with freeing up internet bottleneck
As the internet clogs up with an increasing number of regular users, one Scottish company has been asked to find a solution to help stop it juddering to a halt. Edinburgh Informatics has been awarded a six-figure sum by Hewlett Packard to devise a solution that it hopes will stave off a log-jam on the information highway.
The HP investment in Scotland is designed to free up a cyberspace that is bulging at the seams. AT&T has warned that the net could fill up by as early as next year due to a surging demand for video and Web 2.0 content. Such an explosion in activity grows at 60 per cent per annum, with no indication of a let-up in online use.
In the vanguard are what has been labelled the "Facebook generation", including well over one million Scots, 80 per cent aged 20-plus, who are frequent users of the social networking website. These highly mobile budding entrepreneurs can be found networking and developing their ideas "in local coffee shops for a global market", according to Paul Anderson, principal computing officer at the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics. But they expect everything on tap when it comes to an online infrastructure that matches their fast-paced lifestyles. Daily activity involves a constant barrage of apparently limitless multimedia applications. Such a rich array of data traffic is densely packed, with bandwith-hungry downloads of video and music dominating.
HP has chosen Edinburgh's School of Informatics, as part of the American IT multinational's £5m investment, to date, in a select cluster of universities worldwide. The collective aim is to remove the unpredictability and complexities already evident in Cloud computing, and instead provide a more cost-effective and customised "everything-as-a-service" via the net for businesses and economies.
Read the full story by Bill Magee @ The Scotsman