Where Does All the Computer Power Go?

Defense Week's most recent broadcast has an interview with the Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Department of Defense Research and Development. He describes the priorities of that organization, including the development of technologies that will allow soldiers to process huge amounts of data in a theater of operations to identify that which has military tactical or strategic value. This is going to be computer intensive, as well as communications intensive, building on the remote sensing intensive data collection from unmanned platforms.

Currently, the military's angelfire system is collecting data in Iraq equal to 37,000 times the data in the Library of Congress every week. It is estimated that within 10 years the data collection rate will go up by a factor of one billion Computing power is seen as absolutely critical to handle the data flow, but the real problem may be the data mining software to utilize the computer power to get information from the data.

The idea is not developing the technology to allow one to drink from a fire hose, but rather to select a specific molecule of water from that flow.