I.B.M. to Build Supercomputer Powered by Video Game
Chips
New York Times (09/07/06) P. C13; Markoff, John
IBM has won a contract from the Department of Energy to develop a
peta-scale supercomputer powered by 16,000 Cell chips. The system, due to
be completed in 2008, will cost a projected $110 million. The selection of
the Cell chip, which originally was jointly designed with Sony and Toshiba
for video games and animation, is an indication of how the computer
industry is increasingly shaped by technologies that were initially
developed for home and consumer uses. The IBM system will be housed at the
Los Alamos National Laboratory, and will be used to protect and maintain
the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons. It will pair the Cell
processors with a corresponding group of AMD microprocessors--a kind of
hybrid design that is becoming increasingly popular with designers looking
to squeeze more performance out of off-the-shelf processors. For use in
supercomputing environments, however, hybrid designs are still in their
experimental stages, several computer scientists caution. "There are a
number of risks involved," said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the
University of Tennessee. "It will be a challenge and it's still unknown
how we get to that performance."
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Time Is Running Out for H-1B Visa Cap to Be Raised--Or Is
It?
InformationWeek (09/06/06) McGee, Marianne Kolbasuk
U.S. tech companies will continue to lobby members of Congress on raising
the cap on the H-1B visa program, even though they are running out of time
to get a new limit in place for fiscal 2007. The Senate and House
calendars are said to be full as the Oct. 1 start of the next fiscal year
approaches, and lawmakers in both chambers continue to have serious
differences over immigration reform legislation, which include H-1B visa
provisions. Nonetheless, tech employers remain hopeful because separate
legislation, the Securing Knowledge, Innovation and Leadership (SKIL) bill
introduced by Sen. John Cronyn (R-Texas) in May, has emerged that does not
focus on contentious immigration issues such as border security. Like the
comprehensive immigration reform bill, the SKIL bill seeks to raise the cap
on foreign workers from 65,000 to 115,000, give employers an opportunity to
increase the limit by 20 percent annually based on need, and institute
changes in the green card program. "There's still a window of opportunity
Congress will pass H-1B and green card reform post-election," says Jack
Krumholtz, director of federal government affairs for Microsoft.
Meanwhile, U.S. programmers who oppose an increase for the H-1B visa
program still express concern that Congress will attach the H-1B visa
provision to another bill or pass a separate H-1B visa bill during a lame
duck session before next January. "Sometimes we think these things are
dead, and then someone slips something through at 5 p.m. on a Friday," says
Programmers Guild President Kim Berry.
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Researchers Tackle Problem of Data Storage for
Next-Generation Supercomputers
Carnegie Mellon News (09/07/06) Spice, Byron
The national Department of Energy has granted the Petascale Data Storage
Institute--composed of Carnegie Mellon University, the University of
California at Santa Cruz, and the University of Michigan, and the Los
Alamos, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Lawrence Berkeley and Pacific Northwest national
laboratories--a five-year, $11 million grant under its Office of Science
Scientific Discovery Through Advanced Computing program. The institute
will be charged with coming up with advanced data storage technology to
handle the huge amounts of data that will be produced by future petaflop
supercomputers used for scientific research. Today's supercomputers crash
once or twice a day. On the scale of petaflops, the number could increase
to once every few minutes. "It's beyond daunting," says Gary Grider, a
co-principal investigator at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "Imagine
failures every minute or two in your PC and you'll have an idea of how a
high-performance computer might be crippled. For simulations of phenomena
such as global weather or nuclear stockpile safety, we're talking about
running for months and months and months to get meaningful results."
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Rice Awarded $10M DOE Grant for Computer Research
Center
Rice University Press Release (09/07/06) Boyd, Jade
Computer-science researchers at Rice University have received three major
grants from the U.S. Department of Energy through the department's
Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program. The
projects include a $10 million five-year grant for the Center for Scalable
Application Development Software (CScADS) for research and development of
software tools for supercomputers. CScADS is a multi-university initiative
led by Rice that includes such partners as Argonne National Laboratory, the
University of California at Berkeley, the university of Tennessee at
Knoxville, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. A series of summer
institutes put together by CScADS will allow researchers into scalable
computing to discuss problems, share information, and create a long-term
vision for high-performance software development tools. CScADS director
and principal investigator Ken Kennedy says, "The fundamental question
[CScADS] will address is: how do you build software tools that are scalable
from a system with a single homogenous processor to a high-end computing
platform with tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of heterogeneous
processors? Our goal will be to take the results of our research and turn
them into useful and usable tools for these high-end platforms." The other
two grants involve two SciDAC projects specifically focused on programming
models and performance evaluation for leadership-class computer facilities;
the three projects are all preparing for the expected arrival by 2010 of
"petascale" supercomputers that can perform quadrillions of calculations
each second.
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Registration Opens for SC06 Conference
Business Wire (09/07/06)
"Powerful Beyond Imagination" is the theme for the Supercomputing 2006
conference to be held at the Tampa Convention Center during the week
beginning Nov. 11. The conference, sponsored by ACM's Special Interest
Group on Computer Architecture (SIGARCH) and the IEEE Computer Society,
will offer more than two dozen full and half-day tutorials, eight
workshops, seven panel discussions, and 54 technical papers, among other
offerings. Hands-on sessions will also be made available to educators
interested in using computational tools in the classroom. Additionally,
attendees can browse over 225 exhibits displaying new systems, services,
and scientific breakthroughs. Awards to be presented at the conference
include the Sidney Fernbach and Seymour Cray Engineering awards, the Gordon
Bell Prizes for fastest computer performance, and challenge awards
recognizing competitive efforts in utilizing bandwidth, analyzing and
visualizing data, and effectively accessing stored data. For more
information go to
http://sc06.supercomp.org.
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A Report Card on Anti-Terror Technology
CNet (09/07/06) McCullagh, Declan
While the federal government has developed and adopted many anti-terrorism
technologies in the five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the FBI
is still working with out-of-date computer systems, the Department of
Homeland Security is struggling to systemize its container inspections, and
it remains uncertain whether the passports with RFID tags that are being
rolled out are any harder to duplicate. The FBI has only recently launched
an initiative to outfit its field agents with wireless technology to take
and upload digital pictures of a suspect that other agents could, in turn,
view on their BlackBerry. Preliminary feedback from agents has been
positive, and the FBI hopes soon to roll the system out to all its field
offices, though it has not yet established a timetable. The FBI is also
behind on search technology. The agency's Investigative Data Warehouse
tool, which enables approved users to search through some 650 million
records of multiple government agencies through a single Web interface,
does not update information in real time, instead waiting for contributing
agencies to upload their records into the system. "Right now, we don't
have that Google-like search capacity to go (directly) into databases of
different agencies," said Zal Azmi, the FBI's CIO. Also, government
auditors have declared the computerized modeling system designed to help
identify which cargo containers should be inspected a failure. Government
intelligence could also benefit greatly from improved language-translation
software that can provide automatic real-time translations of obscure
languages such as Pashtu and Somali. While many of the government's
post-9/11 technology initiatives lag frustratingly behind schedule, others
have raised troubling privacy questions, such as the proliferation of
surveillance cameras in public places, particularly if they were to be used
in conjunction with facial recognition software. Another potentially
invasive technology is known as brain fingerprinting, which relies on the
detection of an electrical signal to try to determine whether a suspect was
present at a crime scene, which has already been ruled admissible by one
judge in Iowa.
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Organization Makes Case for Supercomputers
Electronic News (09/07/06) Taylor, Colleen
Supercomputers need to be employed more aggressively, according to the
U.S. Council on Competitiveness. "The Council on Competitiveness believes
the nation that out computes is the nation that out competes," stated
Council on Competitiveness President Deborah Wince-Smith. "High
performance computing is undervalued in many regions of the country, and
public and private sector organizations are frequently unaware of the
supercomputing resources available within their own economic regions." The
organization released a pair of studies at Thursday's annual High
Performance Computing Users conference indicating that it can be
competitively advantageous for industry to access supercomputing resources
at federally-funded academic institutions. Both of the reports were
prepared in collaboration with IDC; one study assessed a National Science
Foundation program that helped American businesses exploit
federally-supported university supercomputing resources, and the businesses
that participated in the study said their innovation output--and thus their
competitive edge--was raised by the partnerships. The other study focused
on industrial alliances with Department of Energy-sponsored universities,
with industry participants claiming that access to university
supercomputing centers helped generate "breakthroughs needed to create
superior products for the private sector and government." Wince-Smith said
the council is preparing a plan for a national "innovation ecosystem"
designed to increase joint supercomputing ventures between government,
industry, and higher education.
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Beefing Up Animation Software
Technology Review (09/07/06) Greene, Kate
Researchers at the University of Bournemouth in the U.K. have created a
set of tools to make the skin and muscles of animated figures move more
realistically. Traditionally, animators start creating characters by
drawing their external appearance, adding details such as how muscles look
when flexed after the basic design is created. Animators favor this
skin-based approach because it is the most intuitive and because adding
muscle details to a form that is already drawn is simple enough, but it
cannot account for the subtle ways that skin moves when the muscles
underneath flex or contract, and characters can look fake if their skin
does not fit correctly. Building the muscles first and then layering the
skin on top of them creates more natural-looking characters, though it
requires an advanced knowledge of human anatomy, says Jian Zhang, a
professor of computer graphics at Bournemouth. Zhang and his colleagues
have developed an algorithm that begins a design with the muscles while
retaining the intuitive appeal of the skin-based technique. Animators
begin with the character's external appearance, and then alter the movement
of the major muscle structures. When a body part is flexed, the animation
algorithm makes the muscle expand or contract and the skin react accurately
using information about the muscle's shape underneath the skin. Zhang
began by looking at the muscle groups that most often cause skin to move,
including the shoulder, neck, arms, thighs, and calves. Using software, he
then analyzed the muscles' shapes and simplified them into ellipses. While
he notes that they are just estimations of the shapes, the simplifications
enable the animators to make realistic movements without having a detailed
knowledge of anatomy, as well as conserving the computational power
required by the process.
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Quantum Effect Offers Molecular Transistors
New Scientist (09/08/06) Mullins, Justin
A new generation of more efficient, molecular-scale microprocessors could
spring from a novel molecular switch that taps the unique laws of quantum
mechanics, according to scientists at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Molecular transistors proposed by several groups require relatively large
amounts of energy to switch the current on and off, and power requirements
would rise substantially as microprocessors equipped with molecular
transistors become more complex. A molecular switch envisioned by
University of Arizona physicist Charles Stafford and colleagues harnesses
the quantum process of "interference" to address this challenge. Stafford
discovered that a circuit could switch current on and off if it is built so
that electrons passing through it naturally negate each other via
destructive interference, resulting in a new kind of transistor that
regulates current flow by switching quantum interference on and off.
"Quantum interference effect transistors" could be fashioned from
well-known molecules such as benzene, according to Stafford and colleagues.
"We simply exploit the beautiful symmetries that occur naturally in these
molecules," the physicist explains.
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Subatomic IT
Computerworld (09/04/06) Anthes, Gary
Intel has partnered with Stanford University and the University of
California campuses at Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Santa Barbara to
establish the Western Institute of Nanoelectronics (WIN) with the primary
goal of developing a viable alternative to conventional CMOS technology.
The institute specializes in spintronics, a technique that capitalizes on
the vertical spin of electrons as a novel way to store and manipulate data.
As CMOS features scale to below 65 nm, chips waste more energy through
heat, which has driven researchers to explore alternative designs. "The
major reason for spintronics is clearly anticipation that there are really
no solutions below 20 or 30 nanometers, particularly in terms of power
dissipation," said Kang Wang, director of the institute. "Today we use
electron charge, but we are looking for alternatives." Spintronics is also
an appealing method because the electrons' spins align to create a
magnetism that persists even without power. That type of nonvolatile
memory, such as Freescale Semiconductor's magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM),
which blends magnetic materials with traditional silicon, could lead to
computers that can boot up instantly. In the near future, spintronics
researchers at WIN should be able to refine MRAM to make it faster and
denser. They are also looking to make use of the spins in logic circuits,
which could ultimately lead to a logic device that contains a memory state.
Binding memory and logic together could significantly speed image
processing and other applications that need frequent and fast memory
access. WIN researchers are also exploring more distant applications, such
as techniques to harness the spin of the atomic nucleus in an attempt to
create memory and logic units at the subatomic scale. One possibility is
to use an electron's spin to shuttle data to the nucleus, where it could be
either utilized or retained by nuclear spin.
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STEM Workforce Salaries Between 1995 and 2005
CRA Bulletin (09/07/06) Vegso, Jay
Salaries for scientific, technological, engineering, and mathematic (STEM)
workers rose about 6 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars between 1995 and
2005, according to a report from the Commission on Professionals in Science
and Technology (CPST), peaking in 2002 and remaining flat since. The
increase is similar to the entire U.S. workforce, but the median salary for
STEM workers in 2005 was significantly higher. Computer software engineers
had a median annual salary of $73,000, followed by $59,000 for math and
computer scientists, and $43,000 for computer support specialists. The
median salary for math and computer scientists dropped significantly
between 2002 and 2003, which the report noted could have been the result of
changes in occupation codes during that time. The report can be found at
https://www.cpst.org/STEM/STE5_Report.pdf.
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Researchers Challenge DOS Attack Data
Dark Reading (09/06/06) Wilson, Tim
A group of University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon University, and AT&T
Labs-Research researchers say DOS attack data may not be generated by
sources of spoofed IP addresses as previously thought. The researchers
conducted a study that found 70 percent of DOS attacks are created by less
than 50 sources. Many think IP spoofing is the most popular way to launch
a DOS attack, but the researchers found that IP spoofing was found in a
only a small number of incidents. Unwanted traffic that is delivered to
unused addresses, commonly known as backscatter, is often used as a way to
track DOS attacks, but researchers say it does not track DOS attacks
launched by botnets. The report found that less than 1 percent of directly
measured attacks produced backscatter. The researchers suggest that
organizations use DOS defense tools to decrease the number of malicious
traffic.
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India Attracts Western Tech Talent
BBC News (09/05/06) Ahmed, Zubair
India is becoming more attractive to information technology workers from
Western countries. Some local IT companies, such as Infosys Technologies
in Bangalore, are now able to offer salaries and other perks that are
comparable to what Western IT talent would find in their home countries.
Infosys, which is currently training 126 Americans at its cutting-edge
complex in Mysore, expects to employ 300 Americans by the end of 2006 and
add a large contingent from Great Britain next year. For years, industries
such as aviation, hospitality, and tourism have been bringing in senior
level talent from abroad, but IT companies are wooing employees for lower
level management positions and for work in software development units. The
opportunity to work in a fast-growing nation is attracting many Westerners
to India, says John Almeda, a management trainee from the University of
Houston. "The environment here is at the same level if not better than the
companies I've worked for," according to Almeda. Working with Westerners
will have a positive affect on India workers, says Infosys human resource
director Mohandas Pai. "We are trying to make sure that over a period of
time our workforce reflects the countries from where we do business," Pai
says of the global firm, which obtains only 2 percent of its revenues from
India.
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Synthesizing Certified Code
University of Southampton (ECS) (09/06/06) Whalen, Michael; Schumann,
Johann; Fischer, Bernd
Researchers Michael Whalen, Johann Schumann, and Bernd Fischer present a
process that integrates code certification with automatic program synthesis
to relieve software designers of the burden of manually adding annotations
to code. Their approach involves the concurrent generation of code and all
annotations necessary to certify the code. Advantages of this strategy
include the provision of independent verification that automatically
generated programs are okay; certification of properties that are too
"low-level" to be practically confirmed by typical
correctness-by-construction contentions of the synthesis approaches;
validation of higher-level properties and bigger programs; and the ability
to customize the process to supply proofs that serve as audit trails for
specific characteristics that regulatory agencies require for
safety-critical software. The architecture of the researchers' certifying
synthesis system consists of the AUTOBAYES synthesis system, the MOPS
verification condition generator, and the E-SETHEO automated theorem
prover. By offering a tool and methodology that illustrates important code
properties in an automatic and independently re-checkable manner, the
system addresses the biggest drawback of correctness-by-construction --
namely, the difficulty current technology has in ensuring the correctness
of the underlying synthesis engine and the domain theory. The researchers
see no reason why the approach cannot be extended to the entire domain
theory.
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U.S. Leadership on Cybersecurity 'AWOL'
SD Times (09/01/06)No. 157, P. 1; deJong, Jennifer
For nearly two years, the position of cybersecurity chief at the
Department of Homeland Security has been vacant, and while the department
could be close to appointing an acting assistant secretary for
cybersecurity and telecommunications, such a move would be little more than
a stopgap. "We are operating without a cyberspace czar," said Ron Moritz,
chief security officer at CA, noting that government and industry will
never be in a full partnership until a permanent appointment is made.
Chief among the security concerns is the increasing frequency of
consumer-data breaches. The absence of leadership has also stalled the
department's response to the recommendations on creating secure software
drafted by the Improving Security Across the Software Development Lifecycle
task force, which Moritz co-chaired. "It is frustrating not having the
government respond to that," he said. In 2003, DHS brought in Symantec
executive Amit Yoran to lead its cybersecurity branch, but he resigned
after just a year. Though Yoran has not made his reasons for leaving
public, it has been reported that he was given less authority than promised
at the department. While it continues the search for a nominee, DHS has
launched the "Build Security In" Web portal to provide guidance to software
developers, and in the future it will sponsor publications that support
software security.
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Computer Education's Failing Grade
CIO (09/01/06) Vol. 19, No. 22, P. 18; Overby, Stephanie
CIOs must show more concern for computer science education in the United
States if the nation is to head off a severe shortage of IT workers by
2012. Concerns about teacher training and resources at the high school
level, the low number of female and minority students in courses, and the
inability to add computer science courses to full schedules prompted the
National Science Foundation to set up the Computer Science Teachers'
Association (CSTA) last year to address such issues. CSTA has studied
other countries that have had success with computer education, and has
developed a model curriculum. CSTA is making the model curriculum
available at a time when only 25 percent of U.S. high schools require
students to take a computer science course. CSTA executive director Chris
Stephenson says students become interested in computer science when they
understand how it can impact their interests, such as health care or the
environment. CIOs should make visits to schools to discuss potential
career opportunities with students, support the CSTA in its efforts to
lobby policymakers on spending more on computer science education, and
encourage their companies to invest in education programs.
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Sandia's Red Teams: On the Hunt for Security Holes
eWeek (09/04/06) Vol. 23, No. 35, P. 22; Preimesberger, Chris
Countries and companies hire Sandia National Laboratories' Red Teams to
project and assess cyber-terrorism scenarios, produce worst-case
contingency measures, and deter a pending attack by patching existing
vulnerabilities. "The threat and risk level has never been higher for
cyber-security," maintains Red Teams' leader Michael Skroch, who says
government agencies and utilities' replacement of custom IT systems with
cheaper, commercially available Windows and Unix systems places them at
greater risk because the off-the-shelf components are more hackable. Each
Red Team consists of a small group of computer and systems experts who
supply independent evaluations of information, communication, and critical
infrastructure to spot security holes, upgrade system design, and help
decision makers boost system security. "We have a spectrum of assessment
methodologies and assessment types that we apply as needed to most
efficiently meet customer goals and provide consistent, measurable and
actionable results," explains Skroch. Sandia's Information Operations Red
Team & Assessments (IORTA) group lists eight "red teaming"
categories--design assurance, hypothesis testing, benchmarking, behavioral
red teaming, gaming, operational red teaming, penetration testing, and
analytic red teaming--that are blended together to fuel evaluations. In
addition, the teams employ external methods such as event trees and fault
trees, processes such as the Control Objectives for Information and related
Technology governance framework, and open-source computer and network
security tools that apply to specific assessments. Both hardware and
software tools are used by IORTA, with Skroch noting that some tools are
utilized in an analytical capacity, others are used for planning attacks,
and still others are used to make contact with targets. According to him,
the Red Teams also create their own scripts and tools on the spur of the
moment.
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Spam+Blogs=Trouble
Wired (09/06) Vol. 14, No. 9, P. 104; Mann, Charles C.
Spam blogging or "splogging" is the practice of posting nonsensical
gibberish in blog form and then getting viewers to click on ads that run
next to the text, and Wired contributing editor Charles Mann warns that the
Internet's potential as a user-controlled, bottom-up platform for all kinds
of data could be undone by such chicanery. Splogs are created by software
that pillages Web pages for potential search terms, automatically copying
text and then jumbling it together, thus creating a deceptive blog that
searchers might click on without realizing it is a scam. "The blogosphere
is increasingly polluted by spam," reports Six Apart VP Anil Dash.
Spammers are using blogs as components in fake networks of interconnected
sites or "link farms," which are employed to imitate the popularity that
search engines use to determine sites' ranking on search results pages.
Dash is concerned that as spammers seek easy money through pay-per-click
advertising via highly ranked search results, the time will come when there
will be "a reckoning with the economy that's building up around search
engine rankings, one way or another." Sploggers can not only set up vast
numbers of bogus blogs, but can also assume control of abandoned real
blogs; worse still, sploggers employ robo-software to inundate real blogs
with phony comments that link back to the splog. To spot splogs so they
can be eliminated from blog-search companies' results, Technorati founder
David Sifry proposes training computers to recognize splog identifiers that
are distinct from authentic blog characteristics, while URLs with multiple
dashes and .info domains are other splog telltales. Dash thinks the best
defense against sploggers is the enforcement of accountability, and Six
Apart's solution is to make bloggers pay a monthly fee, which not only ties
bloggers to a bank account but also discourages spammers, who would have to
pay outrageous sums to support the massive numbers of splogs they operate;
realizing that not all companies will employ such a scheme, Dash suggests
the implementation of a global identifier.
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