Located at the southern tip of Silicon Valley, Almaden claims to be the birthplace of the distributed relational database and the first data mining algorithms. Fiddling with bits and bytes to improve how they're stored and analyzed continues to be a focus, although the labs also work on areas like nanotechnology, spin physics and human-computer interaction.

The projects on show this week included Panache, a file system for use across wide area networks; Sage, a tool for moving data to different storage tiers automatically; and Cobra, which helps companies figure out what people are saying about them in online forums.

Panache is a clustered file system that provides applications with high-speed access to a large, central pool of data even if the applications are far away, in data centers in different parts of the country or on different continents, for example.

"Customers are asking us to give them a way, when data is created at one site, to make it available in other geographically distributed locations, so that users at those locations can access the data as if it were local," said Bruce Hillsberg, director of the Storage Systems research group.

The file system uses advanced caching techniques to make sure the data at each location is kept consistent. It has push and pull characteristics that replicate changes efficiently across multiple nodes in a wide area network, so that conflicts don't arise when changes are made to the data caches at individual nodes.