The recent Annual Fujitsu North America Technology Forum was Fujitsu Laboratories of America’s fifth such conference. This year’s theme was “From Sensor Networks to Human Networks: Turning Big Data into Actionable Wisdom.” In short, it was a one-day conference on Big Data.
Mr. Matsumoto passed the torch to Mr. Kimura (in the next picture), the new CEO of Fujitsu America Research Labs, who opened the conference.
Yasunori Kimura, new CEO of Fujitsu Laboratories of America.
The conference included very interesting information about Fujitsu itself and its take on Big Data. In addition, there were expert speakers in the Big Data segment. Fujitsu also exhibited 19 of their technologies at the conference. The agenda and other information are here. As in previous years, most presentations will be posted here.
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There were several presentations from Fujitsu, but I show only the slides, with my comments, that I found most interesting. A complete set of slides will be sent to all the participants and will be posted here soon.
In this slide, three basic research areas are shown with the core strategic R&D expanded. Cloud fusion and next-generation green data centers are the most directly related to Big Data. By the way, I do not see much use of the term cloud fusion by others, except for Fujitsu. Looking at their explanation (the 11th slide in here), it seems to be similar to cloud federation, which includes multiple private and public clouds. Such a federation will make it easier for enterprises to use multiple kinds of public and private clouds on-premise, or it may pose extra problems, such as identity management and interoperability of virtual machines (VM).
In the next slide, Fujitsu showed where data are coming from to form Big Data.
Fujitsu is serious about riding the Big Data wave. Their specific project areas are in the next slide.
I bumped into Dave Ohara, who has been writing a lot on data centers.He is now into Big Data, and his report on it will come out soon and be available at GigaOM’s website (for a fee).
Unless I make an energy-related comment, this blog is not complete. The current focus on Big Data is pretty much on how to exploit it. It is important to utilize “data exhaust,” similar to exhaust from cars, and make good use of it. Even in this instance, a large amount of data is created 24×7 in almost every corner of the world. Much of it is created via machine-to-machine (M2M) interactions. Some of it is discarded as exhaust, without any processing, while some is stored and accumulated with very little processing. Only a small percentage of it gets processed to produce useful information to improve our lives and accelerate smarter use of energy, as by smart grid.
Come to think of it, this is very scary. Many kinds of waste, including garbage, as long as they’re biodegradable, go back to nature. Of course, some do not. GHG disappears from our sight quickly but accumulates high up in the atmosphere and impacts the earth. But unused but accumulated Big Data will never leave us unless we delete it. It usually takes energy to collect and store Big Data. I wonder whether this will become a problem sometime soon. There are certain aspects of Big Data we can control, but we cannot control all of them. Am I worried about something that will never happen?
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