Cows and data centers: What HP’s chief engineer thinks about fusing the real world with technology

VB: Do you feel this fits within the whole Internet of Things theme?

Patel: I use the terminology “cyber physical systems.” It does fit into the internet of things. The only thing is, it’s not clear to me that you have to be connected to the internet all the time. Surely, for security purposes, you may choose to be sometimes connected to the internet.

Above: A picture of Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett in the original HP garage.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

VB: Smart and sometimes connected.

Patel: Right. That might be the right terminology. Smart to do what you’re doing locally. When you need to use the internet, you use it. But you’re not full time. So it is the internet of things, but it could also be just a physical and a cyber system.

In a lot of places we won’t get the connectivity. If we’ve failed to connect 60 percent of the world, what makes us think we’ll connect these trillion devices?

VB: It seems like there are still a lot of problems all over the place. If the internet of things happens, then you get billions of devices connecting to overloaded data centers. You have to work on data centers again.

Patel: I just did a back-of-the-envelope number. Let’s say the U.S. has 20,000 data centers, each about a megawatt, so the U.S. needs 20 gigawatts of power for data centers. That’s about 20 nuclear power plants. Now let’s say that the U.S. model is replicated in India, to connect 1.3 billion people. If I scale based on population alone, I need 80 gigawatts. India’s total energy production is roughly 300 gigawatts. How can we have data centers take up almost a third of the country’s electricity production?

You have always-on with a lot of spinning systems, even with solid-state drives—I ask myself, are we more efficient if we control our own destiny? Do we switch off the lights when we own the lights? If I have a local computer, will I manage the power better locally? We have to ask ourselves if we’re going back to the ‘80s. [laughs]

If you look at the systems we’re building, like 3D printing systems—the digital pipeline is very interesting. We can create a voxel that’s 20 by 20 by 80 microns. To make a part, you have trillions of voxels in there. If I have the ability to modify each one of them someday and create new types of materials, the digital pipeline is massive. What kind of computer do I need for that?

HP is in a unique place. We’re a physical company and a cyber company. You just saw Bill’s garage. When I joined, I went to Corvallis, to Vancouver, to Barcelona. It reminds me of the HP I knew 30 years ago. People with the same fundamentals, who care about pool boiling, nucleation—somebody might make a cup of team in the morning and just walk away from the pot of boiling water. We look at the bubbles forming, nucleation happening, bubbles coalescing, bubbles departing. We go back to fundamentals, like boiling heat transfer. That’s how the inkjet came about.

Even today I find that a lot of the physical scientists in our area, in the labs, go back to fundamentals. For nano-scale structures, how do I enhance Raman spectroscopy? They’re looking at Raman response, going back to fundamentals. This is a strength we have.

VB: It’s a good match for the maker community, it seems like, all this renewed interest in hardware.

Above: How to manage cyber physical challenges like airplane maintenance.

Image Credit: HP

Patel: Right, I would say so. As we put up our own maker spaces — I like to call them “tinker tanks,” given my own connection with Bill – as a chief engineer I want to make sure we have a pipeline of problem statements for them. We create the environment so you can go and play, but I want to make sure—the problem statement could be anything. It could be as complex as modeling heat transfer in 3D printing. It could be systemic, like how to use my devices to do physiological monitoring of a human being.

Things that are done by sophisticated devices, can I just use my cell phone to do all the critical physiological parameters? Today, more and more accessories are available. How do I put them together to build a systemic innovation? Just like that earlier example I gave with the data center. There is systemic innovation, and then there could be innovation that’s very fundamental. We’re trying to create a culture like that in the maker space, a very cyber physical culture.

VB: A week ago we had the hacking of all the IOT devices causing a lot of problems. Security still doesn’t seem like a solved part of that situation. It doesn’t seem like you can go forward with it until that’s addressed.

Patel: I can share a visual I use. I also drive security. There’s a research team and then an HP-wide security initiative that I drive. The way I see it, the 19th century is the machine age. The 20th century is the information age. The 21st century is the integration of those two. How do I use haptic holography and information analytics to manage my system? Very much value-driven.

When we think in terms of security, whether it’s collecting data here, like the video in a robot—I have to think about security from end to end. We hear about cybersecurity, but what is cyber physical security? At the hardware level, what kind of security features are we going to have? Am I connected all the time? Why am I connected? We have to ask all of those important questions. If we’re having this issue today, it’ll be a nightmare in a world where all these physical things are connected.

Above: The big problems to solve are cyber physical.

Image Credit: HP

VB: Charlie Miller, the hacker, gave a talk at the ARM TechCon event last week. He said, yeah, everything is all connected on the one CAN bus in a car. Could you have done two different systems? Maybe one for infotainment and all the systems for driving on the other? They didn’t do that. At the very beginning, they didn’t think anybody would hack a car.

Patel: Exactly. And what about an airplane? How do we segregate the entertainment system from the critical systems on an airplane? The Iranian nuclear centrifuges, they weren’t connected, but somebody used a USB key to get into their building management system.

For the kinds of things where I need real-time action, where I’m doing integrated supply and demand management, I need to be local. This is how I divide it. I go north of the internet when I’m doing historical analysis. I worked on analyzing cooling towers. We were building data centers in India and there were disputes over water, so we didn’t want to waste any.

We collected data from these cooling systems over a six-month period and looked at the patterns as they operated from a thermodynamic efficiency point of view. We chose the pattern that gave us the most efficiency in electricity and water consumption. This is an example where data was collected. We determined the pattern. A subject matter expert sits down with a machine learning expert and determines the best pattern to use.

The other thing I feel that is happening is the rise of multidisciplinary innovation. It’s no longer unidisciplinary. You can’t sit above the internet abstraction layer and create apps without knowing how a compressor works. Or you can, but you could do a lot of damage. In order to drive something useful—you can look at a compressor and say it’s cycling so many times and so it’s short-cycling. But a mechanical engineer might say, if it short-cycles X number of times it’ll fail. This is an area where I think Silicon Valley needs to be prepared not only with people with cyber skills, but physical skills as well.

I have a big concern there. I go back to my Berkeley days. It was all about fundamentals. Cory Hall had the microelectronics lab. I wonder how much focus on physical fundamentals is there today.