Intel planning to harvest free energy

Justin Rattner has been outlining Intel's latest research

Intel's chief technology officer has been detailing the company's latest research into power saving and generation.

Justin Rattner explained that one of the chief technologies being developed is Wireless Identification and Sensing Platforms (Wisps).

These small sensors can be implanted into buildings, devices or even humans, and could generate power by "scavenging" it from the environment through sunlight, thermal energy or even sound waves.

"We are sitting in a room that is awash with energy," said Rattner. "There are photons of light hitting the desk, thermal energy from body heat and you could even harvest the energy from a moving trackball on a BlackBerry."

The sensors would have a small radio and could provide real-time reporting on environments by sending bursts of data to receivers before recharging. A pilot scheme has seen Wisps installed on San Francisco street sweepers to monitor air pollution.

The technology has major implications for datacentre management, according to Rattner. Wisps implanted in datacentres could offer a far more accurate picture of heat dissipation, and allow managers to shift computing loads to cooler areas of the facility to cut costs.

"We will be able to model the weather inside the datacentre to enable thermally-aware load management," he said. "You can migrate workloads to cooler sections of the datacentre and stop freezing the whole data centre and operate at a wider variety of temperatures."

Looking ahead Wisps could be used on a mass scale in society to track germ movements though the air, or even implanted in the human body to identify viruses.

Rattner admitted that the technology is four to five years away at best, but said that Intel's research centres are having very promising results.