Natural-user-interface tasks like the Mobile Surface and Challenge Gustav are hardly the one new study tasks which will be on exhibit at Microsoft;s TechFest 2010 study showcase this week. The organization also will probably be displaying off quite a few cloud-computing advancements it has been honing in its research labs.A number of of those TechFest 2010 highlights with this area, which I unearthed around the organization;s Web site:Cloud Mouse: A joint challenge from MSR Asia and MSR Cambridge, the Cloud Mouse is a new “interaction device” for cloud computing. It sounds like another natural-user-interface (NUI)-type task that deals with “new interaction metaphors” and new ways of handling the input/output of data.There aren;t a great number of details posted yet, but here;s a bit from the cloud mouse description about the MSR internet site:“Every consumer will have one. It will likely be a secure key to every user’s cloud data. And, with six degrees of freedom and with tactile feedback,
Purchase Windows 7, the cloud mouse will enable users to orchestrate,
Office Standard 2010 Key, interact with, and engage with their data as if they were inside the cloud.”Cloud Faster: Two tasks are part of this initiative,
Buy Office 2010, one called “Application Proxies at the Edge,” (Wide-area TCP) and the other,
Microsoft Office Pro 2010, “DCTCP Transport Optimization for Datacenters.” What;s interesting to me about these assignments is they are the result of collaborations between the Bing and Windows Core Operating System Networking team. Microsoft is planning to demo how its protocol tweaking will improve the performance of Bing Web sites, according to the write-up on the study internet site.There;s a bit more information which isn;t hidden (at least not at the moment) around the MSR Web web page:“To make cloud computing work, we must make applications run substantially faster, both over the Online and within data centers. Our measurements of real applications show that today;s protocols fall short, leading to slow page-load times across the Online and congestion collapses inside the data center. We have developed a brand new suite of architectures and protocols that boost performance and the robustness of communications to overcome these problems.”Anyone have any guesses as to how these cloud assignments may possibly look if/when they are ever commercialized, based on these early snippets of information?Update (March 2): In Microsoft Research other cloud-computing news,
Microsoft Office 2010 Product Key, Microsoft and Cray Computer announced they plan to collaborate on “a prototype system that aims to significantly lower the cost of running cloud-computing systems by combining “super efficient power delivery, high-density packaging and innovative cooling technologies,” according to TechFlash. This isn;t the first collaboration between Microsoft and Cray; the pair announced plans for a $25,000 supercomputer running the HPC SKU of Windows Server 2008 a couple of years ago.