BWI: India’s Silicon Valley to Pay Tribute to One of The Fathers of Business Computing

Press release from Business Wire India
Source: IET India
Friday, November 12, 2010 10:30 AM IST (05:00 AM GMT)
Editors: General: People; Business: Advertising, PR & marketing, Business services, Education & training, Information technology; Technology
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India's Silicon Valley to Pay Tribute to One of The Fathers of Business Computing
Prestigious Pinkerton Lecture to be held in Bangalore, Infosys Chairman N.R. Narayana Murthy to be the Chief Guest

Bangalore, Karnataka, India, Friday, November 12, 2010 -- (Business Wire India) -- Bangalore, India, November 12, 2010: The Prestigious Pinkerton Lecture of the Institution of Engineering & Technology (IET) will be held in India for the first time on November 26, 2010 in the Convention Centre at the Infosys Technologies Campus in Bangalore. The Founder-Chairman of Infosys, Mr. N. R. Narayana Murthy, who is also an honorary fellow of the IET, will be the chief guest at the lecture.

Titled "The Relentless March of the Microchip", this year's lecture will be delivered by Steve Furber, ICL Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Manchester. Steve leads the Advanced Processor Technologies research group at Manchester. His awards include a Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal, the IET Faraday Medal, and he was a 2010 Millennium Technology Prize Laureate.

Speaking at the event Mr. Narayana Murthy said, "I am extremely happy that the Institution of Engineering and Technology has brought the prestigious Pinkerton Lecture to India. After establishing itself as a global innovation hub for software, India is now on its way to become a major force in the field of hardware. It is important at this juncture that we remember the contribution of John Pinkerton and Lyons Electronic Office for giving us the world's first business computer. I am very confident that the lecture will give birth to many new ideas in the field of Information Technology."

Shekhar Sanyal, Country Head, IET India, said, "India represents a huge growth opportunity for the IET and we are now investing in scale and quantity to enhance our presence in this strategic region of the world. As a mark of our ongoing commitment to the country, we have decided to bring this popular and prestigious lecture to India. We are happy that the lecture which commemorates and honours one of the fathers of business computing, John Pinkerton, is taking place in India's Silicon Valley in the presence of software Guru Mr. N.R. Narayana Murthy."

The Pinkerton Lecture is held annually in honour and memory of John Pinkerton who built the first business computer in the UK. As early as 1947 the catering firm of J. Lyons decided that the future lay with computers, and since nothing suitable was available, they resolved to build one and recruited Pinkerton to do so.

About the lecture

The first sixty years of computing have seen spectacular progress, driven for the last forty years by Moore's Law which, though initially an observation, has become a self-fulfilling prophecy and a board-room planning tool. Ever shrinking transistor dimensions have yielded increasingly complex and cost-effective microchips, a win-win scenario that has driven the explosion in the use of digital electronics and enabled computers to be embedded into a vast range of products.

However, there are limits to how small a transistor can be made, and we can no longer assume that smaller circuits will go faster, or be more power-efficient. As we approach atomic limits device variability is beginning to hurt, and the cost of microchip design is spiralling upwards. On
the desktop, technology changes are driving a trend away from high-speed uni-processors towards multi-core, and soon many-core, processors, despite the fact that general-purpose parallel programming remains one of the great unsolved problems of computer science.

If the cost-effectiveness of microchip technology is to continue to improve there are major challenges ahead involving understanding how to build reliable systems on increasingly unreliable technology and how to exploit parallelism more effectively, not only to improve performance, but also to mask the consequences of component failure.

Biological systems demonstrate many of the properties we aspire to incorporate into engineered technology, so perhaps that suggests a possible source of ideas that we could seek to incorporate into future computation systems? Current research at Manchester into the development of the "Brain Box" computer is a contribution to the computing Grand Challenge of 'Understanding the Architecture of Brain and Mind', and will provide a platform for the investigation of these important issues that will face the microchip industry in the near future.

About the IET

Established in 1871, the IET is the world's second largest professional society for the engineering and technology community, with more than 150,000 members in 127 countries. The IET has a strong presence in India, with an office in Bangalore and Local Networks of leading engineers and IT professionals in Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai. The IET provides a global knowledge network to facilitate the exchange of ideas and promote the positive role of science, engineering and technology. For more information, see www.theiet.org



CONTACT DETAILS
Priya Joshi, IET India, +91 (0) 80 40892228, PJoshi@theiet.org
Vijaylaxmi Pandey, Confluence PR for The IET, +91 98807 17358, paromita@lconfluencepr.com

KEYWORDS
PEOPLE, MARKETING, BUSINESS SERVICES, EDUCATION, IT, TECHNOLOGY

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