ReadWriteWeb

The Obama Administration's 2012 budget includes $126 million for the development of exascale supercomputing. The last budget marked out only $24 million for supercomputing.

Exascale computing systems are said to be capable of 1,000 times the processing power of the fastest computer currently operational, the Chinese Tianhe-1A supercomputer.

Are you ready for IPv6? Did you know you'd better soon be ready? Is your ISP, or even country ready, and do they know why?

If you don't even know what IPv6 is, you are not alone. There are billions of people who don't know, and they shouldn't, since this fundamental protocol - IPv6 being the latest version of IP, invented in the 1970s by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn - is so deeply buried in the Internet services we use every day that when you are forced to see it, you know something is very, very wrong.

Eric Schmidt spoke at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe today and dropped some serious rhetorical bombs. "There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003," Schmidt said, "but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing...People aren't ready for the technology revolution that's going to happen to them."

The Techonomy conference is a gathering of people from around the globe seeking to use technology to solve the world's big problems. Schmidt spoke there today and said that people need to get ready for major technology disruption, fast.

The Internet will run out of Internet addresses in about 1 year's time, we were told today by John Curran, President and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN). The same thing was also stated recently by Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist.

The main reason for the concern? There's an explosion of data about to happen to the Web - thanks largely to sensor data, smart grids, RFID and other Internet of Things data. Other reasons include the increase in mobile devices connecting to the Internet and the annual growth in user-generated content on the Web.

One of the key aspects of the emerging Internet of Things - where real-world objects are connected to the Internet - is the massive amount of new data on the Web that will result. As more and more "things" in the world are connected to the Internet, it follows that more data will be uploaded to and downloaded from the cloud. And this is in addition to the burgeoning amount of user-generated content - which has increased 15-fold over the past few years, according to a presentation that Google VP Marissa Mayer made last August at Xerox PARC. Mayer said during her presentation that this "data explosion is bigger than Moore's law."

During my visit to Hewlett Packard Labs earlier this month, I spoke to Parthasarathy Ranganathan - a Distinguished Technologist at HP Labs - about this large influx of data onto the Web.