Microsoft researchers take aim at the latency problem, among others

As Microsoft took the wraps off two dozen research and development projects at an open day at its Cambridge UK research lab it revealed two things: the amount of information in the world is growing exponentially, and the world’s capacity to absorb, store and use it productively is approaching a limit.

Microsoft spends around $9.5bn on R&D. It has pure R&D labs in Redmond, Cambridge UK, Cambridge, Mass, Bangalore and China, with satellite labs in places such as Aachen, Barcelona, Egypt and Israel.

Research in the UK focuses on computational science, computer-mediated living, innovation development, constraint reasoning, machine learning and perception, online services and advertising, programming, principles, tools, systems and networking.

Ever since the iPhone crashed AT&T’s network, it has become  common cause that the increase in mobile data, or rather data that is transmitted over the air, is going to grow. A lot.

Networks are already straining to cope. But that’s not the big problem, says Andrew Herbert, director of Microsoft’s Cambridge Lab. The real problem, he says, is latency.

Latency is the delay between sending a signal and receiving an acknowledgment of receipt. The time it takes light to circumnavigate the Earth, about 133 milliseconds, is a fundamental constraint on network speed.

In practice, latency delays are much longer. This is due to “friction” in the media through with the message travels, the route it takes, the time it takes to navigate through switches and routers, and to display.

Humans can mostly tolerate the delays caused by network or application latency, but having to wait more than a second for response from a computer after you’ve pressed the key soon vexes one.

Modern computers are far less tolerant of latency, partly because more things happen simultaneously these days. This happens at a macro level, as in the huge data centres that host Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing products and services, as well as the micro level, as in smartphones that have four or more radios, web browsers and streaming video cameras.

Clever ways to overcome latency have existed for a long time, but mostly they involve asking processors to wait while something else happens. That overhead is less and less tolerable, not only because of the volumes of data that must be processed, but also because waiting wastes energy. Multiply that by tens of thousands of processors, and you begin to see that addressing the problems starts to solve some important problems.

But data-level concurrency raises issues: how to manage data flows through the unit, whether it is a data centre or a smartphone; how to cope with the volumes using the least possible energy; how to ensure that once in, data can be found again.

These problems are the object at least three Microsoft research projects. The latest, which started in December, is a joint investigation with the Barcelona Supercomputer Centre to explore the use of vector processing in data centres and smart phones.

The researchers believe they can build a grid of simple processors that uses a single instruction to process multiple data streams at once. In addition, the processor would reconfigure itself on the fly to accommodate the work load.

Microsoft is also working on Sierra, a storage management system to avoid the high cost of moving data in a data centre in order to be able to switch off (not merely power down) servers when they are not required.

In separate projects that may find they have application in the above projects, the Cambridge Lab is working on new operating systems and programming languages. Barrelfish is a new research operating system that Cambridge is developing with ETH in Zurich for multicore and many-core processors, while F# (F sharp) is a new programming language, now in Visual Studio, that provides a better programming experience for programmers, says Herbert.

At the user end, Microsoft is exploring a new search tool, The Gathering Engine. This assumes that you are not searching for anything special, but trawls the internet looking for stuff that looks interesting and might appeal to you. Which is great, but can it find my car keys? No doubt, as auto makers shift to electronic locks, that will be a trivial request, with the answer delivered to your mobile phone.

• Ad Predictor

Being an industrial lab, commercial considerations are never far away from researchers’ minds at Microsoft’s Cambridge UK laboratory.

One former R&D project, still under refinement, is now at the heart of Microsoft’s attack on Google. Ad Predictor is the lever it hopes will overthrow Google as the search-based advertisement server of choice.

Ad Predictor aims to give Bing users a better experience by not serving advertisements that do not match the user’s interests, and selecting only those with a a high probability of being clicked through.

Senior researcher Thore Graepel explains that Microsoft can charge more for ads that match users’ interests to the point where they click through to view the offer. It must evaluate tens of millions of searches overnight to arrive at a score for an ad. It then uses the score to set reserve prices for an auction for the presentation and click-through of ads.

A hefty dose of game theory informs the auction process. Rather than try to maximise the price, Graepel says Microsoft will always offer the ad for the second-highest price bid. This allows it to capture all the information in the market about how much people are willing to pay for the ad, its position, its frequency etc, says Graepel.

But Microsoft has also to balance the price advertisers are willing to pay against the probability that people will click through to the offer. That means no matter how much someone is prepared to pay, Microsoft may not serve an ad if it has a low chance of being clicked. Naturally, Microsoft offer help in selecting the right keywords to include in the ad.

If Microsoft can get this balance right, it could well upset the juggernaut that is Google. At the very least, for users it means a browsing environment less cluttered with irrelevant ads. That alone may be a blessing devoutly to be wished for.

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