Microsoft's Cambridge lab readies post-recession technologies

Microsoft’s SecondLight interface can be controlled using gestures

Despite recent confirmation that the parlous state of the economy has convinced software powerhouse Microsoft to make its first ever set of layoffs, the company has retained its commitment to R&D. And it believes that the fruits of these efforts will be the technologies that IT leaders turn to when the world moves out of recession.

So what should IT leaders expect from Microsoft?

At its UK research centre in Cambridge, managing director Andrew Herbert oversees projects tackling everything from machine learning and computer vision, transactional memory software systems and advanced user interfaces, to energy-efficient desktop and laptop systems, and software to improve storage performance.

One piece of research that could prove particularly advantageous to enterprises is focused on software transactional memory (TM), which has the potential to dramatically speed up database performance. To demonstrate the technology’s capabilities, the research team has tested the system on the computer game Quake. This seemingly odd choice of test environment actually places the same demands on processors as many corporate systems.

TM allows parallel compute systems to access shared memory more efficiently and to do so without deadlocking the system. A deadlock occurs where two processes are waiting for each other to release locked resources essential to continued program execution.

"The transition to multi-core processors is making us think about the fundamental internal structure of the operating system. Software transactional memory is going to be very important," says Herbert.

Elsewhere, Herbert's teams are working on a storage project codenamed Everest. Here researchers are experimenting with a system that allows data writes to overloaded disks to be temporarily written to less-loaded disks, allowing big improvements in peak load performance – as much as 70-fold.

The system also allows light loads to be consolidated from many disks onto a single one. Those disks not being used are then allowed to spin down, resulting in energy savings that could be as high as 60 per cent.

Another energy-saving technology being developed at the Cambridge facility is Somniloquy, which takes its name from the act of talking in one's sleep. This technology is being applied to the network interface to allow systems to respond to network requests while they are in a low-power sleep state.

Other projects under way include advanced user interfaces, such as Microsoft's SecondLight technology, which could have significant benefits for applications such as computer-aided design (CAD).

SecondLight is a enhancement of Microsoft's touch-sensitive tabletop surface computing technology, Surface. However, while Surface allows just two-dimensional interactions on the surface, SecondLight uses rear-projection surface technology that allows 3D gestures to drive the underlying application.

So how many of these projects spawn commercial products?

"There's not a single product on the shelves that isn't affected by Microsoft's research,” says deputy managing director Ken Wood. “But it's researcher led – we don't tell our staff which areas to concentrate on."

Wood and Herbert split their time between overseeing work at Cambridge and talking to product managers at the company's Redmond headquarters in the US.

"It can take anywhere from 15 seconds to about 15 years for an idea to emerge from a researcher's brain to being something that you see as an everyday technology in the market," says Herbert.

"Some of the Microsoft product teams will contact us because of our expertise, and we may have a solution sitting on the shelf that's a ready-made answer to their problem - that's the 15 second example," he adds.

But he remains coy about which technologies currently being explored at Cambridge are most likely to emerge in the enterprise anytime soon.

"That's like asking me which is my favourite child."