Intel chief calls for 'modular internet'

Intel president and chief executive Craig Barrett has outlined his vision of the internet where customers build ebusiness systems from a variety of standards-based computer, networking and software products.

In his keynote address at the Intel Developer Forum, Barrett said: "The modular internet will be created as we work together, as one, to deliver solutions."

He told the audience they must work together to create interoperability, standards and modular products. "We as an organisation have to develop common protocols, ease-of-use and standards," he said. "We have to develop standard building blocks from a hardware standpoint, from a wireless standpoint and from a communications standpoint."

Barrett demonstrated a three-tiered ebusiness environment based on high-volume building blocks and capable of handling 15,000 simultaneous users. The demonstration included Intel-based servers from Compaq, Dell, Hewlett Packard and IBM, along with Intel appliances for server load balancing in data centres.

Another area of focus for Intel will be peer-to-peer networking, said Barrett. "We have to reach a new level of working together to make peer-to-peer computing happen." He described this as a collection of different and incompatible systems and networks running business applications.

He then introduced Andrew Grimshaw, president and founder of Applied MetaComputing, a company that is working on peer-to-peer business solutions. Grimshaw talked about a project the company is working on with Boeing. "The future is peer-to-peer networking where you have many computers working together that don't necessarily trust each other," he said.

Barrett said that while Napster is the most obvious example of a peer-to-peer application, he sees the day when "15,000 engineers doing integrated circuit design share resources in a co-operative fashion to compute and share capacity".

He added that the internet will reach a billion PCs and a billion wireless subscribers over the next few years and that developers need to plan for the integration of these complementary devices. "Wired and wireless technology will not compete but will work together," he said.