"Our charter has always been to do important work in computer science that also has an impact on the company," says Lyle Ramshaw, who manages a team that came from the Systems Research Center (SRC, or "circ") and has since joined with HP Labs' Information Dynamics Laboratory.

Ramshaw's team is working to let private networks handle more traffic by cleverly routing some packets over the Internet; to speed up inner loops of critical programs by using theorem-proving techniques to generate near-optimal machine code for those loops; to help biologists visualize and compare the huge trees of genetic data; and to enhance the security of handhelds by keeping owners' private date on a surrogate computer.

RISC pioneers

Western Research Lab (WRL, pronounced "whirl") the oldest of the four former Compaq labs, was founded in 1982 to pursue RISC computing. Their Titan computer provided the foundations that led to the landmark Alpha chip family.

"Our overall philosophy is hire people who have a breadth of knowledge and interests and have also demonstrated the ability to go deep in some particular area," says Bill Hamburgen, acting director of WRL. "We work at the edges of conventional approaches to problems, and aim to recognize where paradigm shifts are possible."

improving server performance and reliability

One of the team's current projects is exploring how to use power-management capabilities researchers developed for handheld computers to manage power for servers in large data centers. That work complements ongoing research in HP Labs on the growing problem of heat generation and energy use in increasingly powerful microprocessors and data centers.

Other WRL projects include improving enterprise-class server performance and reliability, increasing runtime in mobile systems and enabling mutually immersive telepresence, as well as investigations into network performance and protocols.

history of technical achievements

In addition to current research expertise, the Compaq labs bring to HP an impressive history of technological contribution that encompasses achievements from Digital Equipment Corp. (acquired by Compaq in 1998) and Tandem (acquired by Compaq in 1997).

Among the invention milestones:

• the Itsy, the first pocket computer with desktop performance. The Itsy inspired the highly successful iPAQ handheld computer.
• Personal Jukebox, the first portable MP3 player with an on-board hard disk that provided 50 times the storage capacity of other models of its day.
• key contributions to the Nonstop server platform (developed at Tandem), which runs ultra-demanding jobs such as the New York, London, Hong Kong and Tokyo stock exchanges, and Bank of America's automated-teller machine network.
• indexing technology behind the AltaVista search engine, the first to index every word on a page and provide word-based retrieval of relevant pages.
• first widespread application of Linux on a PDA, including the iPAQ and Jornada, and continued open source coordination through http://www.handhelds.org
• first multi-media search technology for the Web
• Palo Alto Internet Exchange, the first successful neutral, commercial Internet exchange in the United States, had its roots in WRL.
• pioneering work in chip multiprocessing (the Alpha-based Piranha design put eight CPUs on a single chip).