The 21st century research lab

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Dick Lampman, Senior Vice President for Research and Director of HP Labs, offered a behind-the-scenes look into the lab.

Computers as small as grains of sand. Inexpensive electronic posters and billboards as sharp and clear as today’s glossy magazines. A worldwide auction for compute power for businesses of all sizes.

These are just a few of the projects in the works inside HP Labs, the HP central research facility.
Dick Lampman, Senior Vice President for Research and Director of HP Labs, offered a behind-the-scenes look into the lab at an HP global partner conference in Las Vegas.

"Our job is to invent for the company's future," Lampman said. Increasingly, that involves working "research networks", a web of research partners around the world with whom researchers co-create technologies and solutions that provide HP customers a competitive advantage.

THE POWER OF PARTNERS

These partners include digital animation powerhouse DreamWorks and global research institutions like CERN, the world's largest particle physics lab. HP Labs also teams with major universities, government

bodies and research organizations like the Gelato Federation, a group co-founded by HP to advance the Linux Itanium platform."

"The most valuable technologies are increasingly emerging within networks and across disciplines, and in geographies with deep, real-world problems to solve," said Lampman, noting the lab's global research presence. "Research networks or the knowledge supply chain are the prime ingredient for a successful 21st century research lab."

Work in progress

Lampman, who has been at the helm of HP Labs since 1999, also provided a glimpse at some of the lab's current projects in areas like utility computing, plastic electronics, nanotechnology and streaming media. These include:
• Auctions for compute power - A sort of eBay for computing power, this is software aimed at allocating and pricing storage and processing resources on demand. A business experiencing an unexpected surge in sales or Web traffic would be able to purchase more resources a