Intel Corp. Thursday outlined its vision of the Internet of the future, one in which millions of computer servers would analyze and direct network traffic to make the Web safer and more efficient.
Intel plans to play a major part in developing a new Web infrastructure based on computer servers running on its chips.
The current Internet, based on technology developed in the 1970s, will begin to buckle under the weight of millions of new computer users from developing nations, Chief Technology Officer Patrick Gelsinger said at a company-sponsored technical conference.
"We're running up on some architectural limitations," Gelsinger said.
Rather than replace the existing infrastructure of hardware and software code, Gelsinger called for an entirely new network to sit atop the existing Internet, one that could support new Web services, adapt to security threats, and work around sudden bursts of traffic to particular Web servers.
The new second layer would act as a monitoring and directing force that would make better use of the current technology which sends packets of information around the Web.
A model of such a network already exists in the form of PlanetLab, a collection of 429 computer "nodes" in 181 sites around the world. PlanetLab, which is funded by Intel, has won support from 150 universities and corporate research labs, including Princeton, Cambridge, Hewlett-Packard Co. and AT&T Corp. .
Such a vision of a new network that relies on Intel-based servers is admittedly self-serving for Intel and not necessarily the same notion held by companies like Cisco Systems Inc. , whose routers and switches form the backbone of the current Web.
Cisco, for instance, is introducing more intelligent features into its current infrastructure products.
"If the Net grows to 100 billion devices connected to it, our goal is to have a piece of Intel inside in every one of those hundred billion," Gelsinger said, when asked about Intel's business interests in the PlanetLab initiative.
"Plus," he added, "the billions of computers and routers, etcetera, that need to service those hundred billion connections. To us, the continued vital growth of the Internet is our business."
