 Hi, I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com. We're here live reporting at San Francisco, California, at the Moscone Center for Intel Developer Forum 2012, Mira John Hengeveld. Welcome to the Mobile Cube. You are in charge of Director of Marketing for High Performance Computing for Intel. A big job where you guys are changing the world. So first, before we get into some of the high performance computing and all the great things that you guys are enabling, tell us about what's happening here at IDF this year with developers. What's the vibe? What's the story? There's a lot of interesting things going on. We're talking about some of the great new technology we're coming out with. We're talking about the UltraBooks. My group is in the data center and connected systems group. We're talking about technology and solutions in the data center. We're talking about big data applications and where those are going. We're talking about cloud computing and how that's becoming more relevant going forward. We're talking about a number of applications. Technical computing, which is my area. There's some buzz around big data. There's some buzz around UltraBooks. There's buzz around a lot of the new technology that we're coming out with. It's been very exciting. John, one of the things I saw on the keynote today was the mission slide for Intel. First of all, Intel always has great messaging because you're inventing the future years before anyone gets there with the code and the processors and embedded systems now all integrated in. It's basically creating and enabling and accelerating technology to enrich the lives of a global workforce and consumer. You're in that world. You're in the high-performance computing, which is the servers that use the cutting-edge stuff to do stuff that people want more horsepower. More stuff under the covers, under the hood, whatever you want to call it. People want more power. You're the guy. More performance and more performance per watt. We're in a green world today. One of the big signs around here is in order to be blue, that's Intel. You have to be green. One of the things we're trying to do is to lower the power required to come to these amazing solutions in computation. My job is great because it's easy for me to find ways to enrich the world because our customers are taking my technology and the technology of our partners and turning them into better predictions of the weather, where's the hurricane going to hit, better models of how the universe was created, better treatments for cancer, new drugs, new energy reserves, capabilities. High-performance computing really does hit the lives of pretty well every person on the planet today in a way that makes a difference today and will make a difference more in the future. We're at NAB and we saw some of the workstations that had all the multi-cores in and maxed out doing all kinds of video rendering. Cool stuff that you see kind of on Hollywood, kind of down on a desktop basis. But also there's the other side of the world that you live in, talking about the servers and the data center where really having that kind of compute power is changing the world. Can you give more examples of things where you guys are changing the world? Sure. So customers, for example, working on bending sheet metal might want to find what the optimum way and optimum process is to bend the sheet metal to produce the part they want for the lowest possible cost. They might put together a relatively small high-performance computing system because getting lots of simulations in a relatively short period of time helps them get their product to market at a lower cost. On the other end of things, Stephen Hawking's group, the Cosmos group at the University of Cambridge, uses high-performance computing systems, a fairly hefty size but not the biggest systems in the world to calculate what happened at the beginning of the universe so that our understanding of physics is improved. So there's a wide range in between that of systems of various sizes to work on different problems. One academic center is working on a big data research. He's coming in tomorrow to give a speech with me. Professor Michael Franklin is coming in to talk about advances in big data and relatively modest size computing systems, sieving the universe for information of relevance to come up with better insights that can be used to how to manage your business. One application he's got actually lowers the power of your cell phone. You go in and you log on to the certain site and he can tell you what's going on in your cell phone and from cloud wisdom actually figure out how to reduce your battery's life. That's easy. I can help everyone with that. It's just turn off your Wi-Fi. Well, not anymore because it's not complicated now, right? So the question is what applications are consuming your power and how do you manage the settings of those applications in order to make your phone a more effective device for you? We were just talking before we were doing the interview about the cancer work and some of that because that's really something that people can kind of relate to because there's a benefit to doing things that people couldn't do before getting answers faster. Sure. So a group of people produced something called the Cancer Genome Atlas and what that is is a set of genomic results on patients and their tumors and this is being studied to try and determine what the mutations are that are present in classes of cancers and then the idea would be you can produce targeted therapies to address those specific mutations in order to affect the mutated cells and not affect the normal cancer, the normal non-cancered cells. This is really personal to me. It turns out I'm a cancer patient too and this offers the hope for people like me and for therapies that might target their disorders. And where was this a couple of years ago just not available, just from a compute standpoint? So from a compute standpoint it wasn't available from the cost of doing a genome factoring. It wasn't realistic. The cost has come down like a factor of a thousand in the span of like five years. So it's now practical to consider taking a significant number of cancers and making the data from those cancer studies available for a big data class analysis. What about innovations and disruption in emerging markets and existing energy consumption? So part of the challenge in alternative energy is to figure out how much energy is being produced and how much are you wasting in the process. How to make the alternative energy forms efficient. And so high performance computing can be used to model the physics of what's going on and the devices that are changing for example solar or wind or something else into an energy footprint. How to make an optimized propeller for a wind farm. How to optimize a solar panel kind of design. All that stuff is in areas where high performance computing systems can make a difference. That's great stuff and that's obviously going to change the world. It's great that you guys are doing all that compute and obviously at a low power with the energy saving side of the chipset. My next question is in the reality of business and use cases, where do you see the demand right now for high performance computing? Because the notion of getting more performance out of the hardware has always been an Intel Moore's Law thing. But now we're getting into the era of companies taking advantage of it. So what are some of the use cases you're seeing? Well so one of the things that's really exciting is that as Moore's Law takes the top performance in the biggest systems of the world, it also takes the available performance to enterprises up significantly. So in 1997 the biggest computer in the world was the Terraflop and about a half a gigaflop was available to an enterprise. Today the biggest computer in the world is 16 petaflops that's a lot of computation. The biggest system available to most companies is about five Terraflops. In 2018 when we have an Exascale world with another factor of a thousand in performance, we're going to have something almost as big as the biggest computer on the planet in 2009 will be available to every enterprise at a practical price and in a practical power efficiency. So what does that mean? That means these companies can use more data to understand their customers better, to make better business decisions, to study how the economies are going to behave and time their products to market better. So from an enterprise perspective there's top line benefit and there's bottom line benefit to having this increased compute capability. Then the same technologies can be used in modeling and simulation of what products might be. So designing car parts or finding new places to drill for oil are all examples of things that people are doing with high performance computing systems on a much smaller physical scale system and much lower power system than they could do before because of Moore's law driving up the compute density and power efficiency in the marketplace. We've seen a surge of entrepreneurship and also invention among scientists and developers around taking some of these new elements, this massive amount of compute, solid state drives, disk or which is like memory and with big data. So my last question I want to ask you is explain to the folks out there how big and how disruptive is the big data trend and some of these new things from discovery, scientific discovery to everyday life. Share the magnitude or add some color to that. So big data is going to, is making a significant impact on businesses today but the potential to make more impact is even more significant. I think of big data as combined with the word opportunity. So if you think of big data as a large space where you have massive amounts of data and big data technology goes and gets the information relevant to a decision, then data analytics takes the data that you've gone and sieved for and indexed and found in the massive space of data that's out there and makes a conclusion from it. Then the only thing you have to do is imagine what kind of insights you want to form to get a system that can actually acquire the data you need to make a better job of those insights. So it literally is the space of creativity that people have about how to envision or re-envision their businesses, their services, their technologies. That's how much impact big data can have. Tremendous impact to the way businesses work, to the way consumers work. Again, things like optimizing the power of your cell phone down to improving the flow of traffic in your community are all things that big data can make a difference too. Is there a bound to how much impact big data will have? The answer is I don't think so because the volume of data we're producing every year is massively scaling. Scaling faster than Moore's law. The ability to use that data is also scaling faster than Moore's law. So the conclusions we're going to reach from that data are going to be more impactful and more valuable going forward. I think it's a tremendous economic force as well as a tremendous social force. Okay, John Hedgeveld with the High Performance Computing Group. This is the horsepower that's driving the change and creativity invention to businesses to scientific breakthroughs. I'm John Furrier. We're here at the Intel Developer Lounge Software.intel.com reporting here at IDF 2012.