He preferred, however, to not say much about IBM's involvement with the attempted "hijacking of Linux" by SCO, and Microsoft's OOXML fight against ODF, since he thought there was already much written about these topics.

We discussed scientific computing (a.k.a. supercomputing), realt-time Linux and real-time Java, the Australian bid to host the Square Kilometre Array (a worldwide endeavour to build the world's largest radio telescope), and computing on a massive scale in general.

"We have well and truly moved beyond the environment of ten or fifteen years ago where transaction ruled and we measured systems only in terms of their transaction processing capability and throughput. ... Increasingly we are seeing enormous amounts of information arriving in real time events, that we refer to as stream computing, and what you're trying to do in those environments is make sense of very large amounts of information flowing in continuously.'

"You don't necessarily know what you're looking for. You might be seeing a whole bunch of data flowing in from wire services and across the Internet, financial information and so on."

"You might be looking for patterns and trends emerging that might enable you to understand particular trends and take decisions. There are some very interesting large computing problems in that space that we are beginning to take on as well."

Asked about the importance of the study of algorithms, Glenn Wightwick responded that algorithms are absolutely core to these sorts of problems, as important as they have ever been.

He described "System S" (exploratory Stream Processing Systems project at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center) where the size and complexity of these problems demands that you understand how they'll perform.

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