Spray-On Computers Reach Hard Places
From: Discovery Channel - 11/16/2005
By; Tracy Staedter

The Speckled Computing consortium is notable because of the interdisciplinary
course of action the researchers have taken, according to Roger Meike, senior
director at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. "Other people may just be focused
on wireless communication or the sensor and those are important and feed into
the other disciplines, but they are so interdependent that all of these
different things have to play together," explains Meike. The consortium, a
collaboration between researchers from five universities, is delving into
sensing, computer processing, and wireless computing to create a dense
network of tiny computers that can communicate with each other. Consortium
director D.K. Arvind and his team are engaged in simulations involving specks
that measure 5 millimeters square, and their efforts are based on a network
of 100 wireless devices. A network of thousands of sensors could be used to
monitor aircraft wings for structural problems or to rehabilitate people who
have suffered a stroke. "Because they are so small, you can extend computing
and sensing to areas that couldn't be reached before," says Arvind, who is
also a computer science professor at Edinburgh University. Each Specknet
sensor has it own processor; about 2 KB of memory; and a program that gives
it the ability to gather information, work with other local specks, and act
on the data. 

Read the entire article at:
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20051114/specknet_tec.html

Links:
Speckled Computing
http://www.specknet.org/

Scottish universities plan speckled computing net
http://www.eetuk.com/printableArticle/?articleID=16502163&article_path=/tech/news
http://www.eetuk.com/tech/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=16502163