How will IoT help us address more fundamental challenges, like feeding our growing global population?
Companies like Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) are exploring this question.
The Internet of Things is a particularly promising application for agriculture. At HPE, they are using Aruba wireless networking capabilities to collect, secure and send data, filter it with edge computing, and process it with high-performance computing systems. Those systems use algorithms, artificial intelligence and machine learning to manipulate huge amounts of data and quickly produce recommendations for farmers.
They are testing this through a strategic research initiative with Purdue University, which is using HPE technology to monitor farm fields through sensors. A first use case is the ACRE farm wireless monitoring, which is gathering data each day about the traits and growth of different crops, with the potential to generate and process up to 113 terabytes a week. Another case is an advanced phenotyping facility, a state-of-the-art greenhouse with the capacity to generate 1.2 petabytes per week. These are examples where computing systems can benefit by filtering data at the edge, rather than at the core compute system, to avoid sending all that data back across the campus network.