Biological Networks for CIO's to consider

Fred Hapgood about Biological Networks in the Tomorrow's Buzz Today blog at CIO.com

Networks used to be comprehensible; you could understand their parts and how they worked together, and, because you did, they were controllable in a very basic, mechanical way. But utilization rates, numbers of nodes, and application types have increased every year, sometimes exponentially, always significantly, and the trend shows every sign of continuing until retirement. Networks are steadily becoming more chaotic and harder to control.

Everyone's first thought about the right way to fix this problem, says Fred Hapgood, is to retain today's general outlook and just automate it. However, some researchers have noticed that biology is rich with large networks — such as protein cascades and gene switching networks — and seems to have no trouble extracting wonderfully adaptive and robust behaviors out of all these systems. Take a couple of minutes to step away from your current hardware challenges and check out what scientists say may be coming next.