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

VB: They get to a very particular contention point. Can you build the internet of things and smart cities and still have some shred of privacy?

Patel: When we’re looking at AR and VR, going back to haptics, I saw something with a workstation that was showing the insides of a human body – blood vessels and so on. My son, when he was studying surgery, I asked him, “There’s so much in there. How do you know what you’re touching?” He says, “You feel the vessel for elasticity.”

When I see a lot of these games—I try to put together things that people have to do. Games, AR, VR, they can provide applications in various verticals, whether it’s simulating surgery or whatever else. That’s where a lot of haptics things came in for us. Haptics is a great dimension in that regard. If that’s how they’re already training surgeons, how can we provide that feeling in a simulation as well?

VB: Going back to some of your interest in the edge, we have data centers. We have smartphones. Do you feel like there’s something missing from this basic equation? A new area of computing that has to emerge to fulfill what you want?

Patel: One image that I think about, I go back to our laser cartridge days, formed cartridges. I may be biased, because from a sustainability perspective I think in terms of life cycles, cradle to cradle. I don’t want proliferation of devices. I want to make one device work for a long time. And I look at the computer my dad had, an all-in-one back in India. He bought that because he wanted to put Magic Jack in it to make free phone calls on his 56 Kbps connection. He didn’t want to make the investment unless he could get a payback.

We’re building these computers. Can we use them to help? We have an aging demography. More people are over age 65 than under five. I have computers with fancy cameras and sensors. How can I read emotions? How can I use machine learning to do more inside the home? When I start asking myself that, I feel like there’s something missing between mobile devices and workstations.

There are people driving these situational intelligence algorithms. They get a lot of data – six months of data, 12 months of data – and they’re oblivious to the hardware at the bottom, but they’re coming up with algorithms, advanced algorithms. If they come up with an advanced algorithm, how do I impedance match with it? If I sell you a piece of hardware, and I come up with an advanced algorithm a year down the road, do you have to buy another computer? Could I have sold you a computer where now you can download the latest algorithm? I’d like to do the latter. I’d like to sell you one very useful computer, just like that Magic Jack was for my dad, except now you’ll download that algorithm and all of a sudden you get a new set of value.

I’m inspired by our neighborhood friends here, the flexible models, like the Tesla guys. They sell hardware with all kinds of flexibility. How do I build a platform like a car? You don’t just go out and buy another car. If you’re going to make it autonomous you’ll have to put physical features inside it. Similarly, how do I build a flexible, configurable, upgradable computer system? What’s lacking is reference architecture for a flexible, configurable computing building block.

My challenge is, what about the FPGA? That’s what I go back to. People say that FPGA programming is very complex, but I look at research at UCLA and other places where they’re looking at building an abstraction layer. You could conceivably someday take Matlab code and put it on an FPGA. The software guys are advancing. Algorithm guys are advancing. How do I do hardware so I can keep up with them? That’s where the software and hardware co-design comes in, and that’s where I think we have a missing link.

VB: Is this revisiting some of the failed efforts to do things like software-defined radio and reconfigurable hardware? Hardware that can redo itself.

Patel: The idea of making something self-healing, resilient—I don’t know if that’s it, per se. But it could be in the sense that you have something that’s low-cost and easy to build with it. I feel like the reference architecture is lacking, again. It’s more about how I enable things where you don’t have to pay a lot of money, but it’s sitting dark until it’s necessary. You don’t have to upgrade.

In a mobile device today, are we curtailing performance because of heat? If I have applications like at home, how do I drive a Lamborghini on the autobahn and not frequency scale it? Sometimes I wonder why we’re leaving all the performance on the table. I feel like we’re driving a Lamborghini on city streets, as opposed to the autobahn.

The thermal management problem can be solved once you dock it. I use the Elite X3. When I dock it, can it go into a super high performance mode? Can I use that one computer? Can my dad use the Elite X3 in a high performance mode when new features come in and require more power, but it’s in a docked mode? How do we advance that?

Above: Nintendo Switch.

Image Credit: Nintendo

VB: Nintendo had some of this idea with the Nintendo Switch, where they’re going to have a sort of portable tablet that plugs into a dock, which you then turn into the home console.

Patel: That’s what we did with the Elite X3. You plug this in and it’s Windows 10. I can use Powerpoint. What’s the next generation of Elites that we’ll have? Maybe we’re paving the way for that, for useful applications.

VB: It sounds like you’re open to maybe reviving some ideas of the past that are now doable, or more practical.

Patel: Sure. Leverage the past. The performance we left behind because we felt there was a thermal management barrier. How do we address that? As someone used to thermal management—we came up with all kinds of cooling systems. The one we thought we needed for a very high-performance chip was to spray coolant with inkjet heads. You provide the right amount of coolant so it matches the heat flux. If you use too much, a bubble forms. If you use too little, a dry-out happens. But you change phase all the time. We demonstrated the highest heat removal. But we never got to that, because instead of trying to solve the thermal problem, we decided to curtail performance. When multi-core came along, we decided to use that.

But what if I want to run all the engines at full speed when it’s docked, so I can do useful things that my friends inventing these algorithms can leverage? There’s an impedance mismatch. Suddenly that mismatch will get bigger as we go down the road.

The other thing that drives me is 3D printing, particularly because I’m a strong believer in cradle to cradle and lifetime joules as the currency, not dollars or rupees. I met Alan Greenspan once. My contention was, if joules were our currency, would we be digging bauxite out of Amazon jungles to ship to China and make aluminum that we ultimately threw away somewhere else? Or would manufacturing and design be local?

We’re getting to a world where energy is the currency. Cell phone users—almost 80 percent of the elements from the periodic table are in a smartphone. We’re using up critical elements, which will lead to geopolitical unrest. We need to think of ways where we can reduce this resource consumption and think from a holistic perspective.

That’s why I’m very excited about 3D printing. If we can make materials—it’s not just about making parts. There’s all this excitement about making parts. 3D printing parts is great. But can I also make materials on a voxel by voxel basis, mixing things? In the old days, if you wanted to use a composite—say I want to use aluminum silicon carbide to match the coefficient of expansion in thermal conductivity. I’d go to Alcoa or some company and get aluminum silicon carbide slabs. I’m using a material that’s already available off the shelf.

Can I now think in terms of a goal that I’m trying to achieve? I want a material to do a certain thing. Can I make it? That’s where we have the opportunity to change the way we think about making materials. Instead of using ready-made material, start with a goal and synthesize the material. That’s the excitement in the next 10 to 20 years. That’s what I’m getting at about the cyber physical world.

VB: Talking about the geopolitics of the tech industry, does that pull a lot of manufacturing back to the source, or to where it’s consumed? Do we still need all those giant factories in China, or do we just need 3D printers close to home?

Patel: Even if not at home, can we have small micro-grids of manufacturing? Even on the city scale of resources. This notion of having large-scale plants, whether it’s power plants, water, waste, or factories, this will give way to micro-grids. Not necessarily home manufacturing, but small-scale manufacturing of the type I knew when I came to the United States. I worked in a mulch factory in White City, Oregon. It was a small unit with about 20 people.

Economies of scale drove many large factories. But when you can right provision—in order to get economies of scale, I might print a million steel links, and I might not use 900,000 of them. They’re sitting on the shelves. But if we can give you what you want, when you want it—social networking and the sharing economy have shown that. They’ve created the abstraction layer, created the apps. Then we get to a world where if you want a steel link printed, a local shop in your neighborhood can make it for you. That’s what we’re going toward – micro-grids of small-scale manufacturing.