HP funds UK university IT research

Edinburgh University has won funding for research from HP

HP has announced it will pour funds into IT research projects at the universities of Bath, Bristol, Leeds and Edinburgh to identify technologies that will revolutionise the computing industry in the next five to 10 years.

The company will donate up to $100,000 (£53,400) per project for one year each, renewable for up to three years depending on “progress and HP business requirements”, said the company.

HP did not elaborate on the precise nature of the projects, but it has outlined five key areas ­ cloud services, collaboration, faster network interconnects, sustainability and data storage.

During a recent reorganisation of HP Labs, the firm earmarked $600m (£321m) worth of research and development funding to focus on what it terms “big bets” ­ projects that are likely to result in strong commercial propositions that can be turned into revenue.

“The way HP Labs operated in the past was appropriate for the time, but things have changed. The business is working so fast, we need to focus larger teams on coming up with almost-ready technologies for immediate transfer to the market,” said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of research at HP and director of HP Labs.

Once HP decides that a research project is worth backing, it will pump money and manpower into testing it on prospective customers.

“We will create a demonstration, invest some initial time and resources and work in partnership with the researchers and six to 12 engineers borrowed from HP’s business units, along with sales and marketing people. In all, there will be 15 to 25 people whose role is to start this product with five to six beta customers,” said Banerjee.

Two particular technologies, photonics and memristors, are being given special attention. Photonics are intended to replace short-distance cabling inside servers and supercomputers with faster optical data transmissions, providing the cost of individual components can be made affordable. Memristors could replace flash-based data storage or RAM in a variety of systems.

HP already has 120 researchers at the University of Bristol, part of a 600-strong team based in seven locations worldwide, including California, Tokyo, Beijing and Bangalore.