Techno-Muse

In my ongoing efforts to explore the depth and breadth of Hitachi’s R&D I’m now pointing you to the August, 2009 overall review of Hitachi’s technology portfolio as well as featured research activities.  Overall Volume 58 Number 3 August 2009 Special Issue of the “Hitachi Review” covers many interesting ventures and research activities which Hitachi has been working on.  I find this journal as well as our annual Corporate Social Responsibility report as very interesting windows into what the Hitachi Group can offer to the world.

As I reviewed the section on R&D, specifically, I noticed something pretty interesting: attention to very fundamental things such as the composition of electric motors, or the usage of nano-patterning to move the semiconductor industry past the challenges of modern lithography.  Also within the R&D chapter of the report is more description of the Gazopa service, which I recently did a post on.  I wanted to follow-up on the area of Gazopa specifically because I was interested enough in the technology to visit the engineers at the Central Research Laboratory who developed the concept.  While obviously I cannot go into too many of the details that I witnessed, I can say that I was completely impressed with their innovation and their drive to make the fundamental research applicable to so many potential applications.  What is described in the referenced article is the storage technique used for building the structure needed to search for images.  To keep this post compact, I’ll end by pointing back to the start of this paragraph, where I mentioned that Hitachi pays attention to very fundamental things.  For the technology behind the Gazopa service it is this discipline of paying attention to the fundamentals that leads to improved scale.  This shows up in the fact that Gazopa can run on something as small as a standard Intel based laptop, but can of course take advantage of more powerful systems.  From my understanding it is through the novel approach used to warehouse the search index on disk that is key to making this kind scaling possible.