NASA to Strut Its Supercomputing Stuff at SC07
InformationWeek (11/06/07) Jones, K.C.
NASA engineers will present 40 demonstrations at the Supercomputing 2007
(SC07) conference, covering research projects that demonstrate how
employees use high-fidelity computational and experimental data for safe
re-entry, shuttle landings, and how NASA analyzes the safety of designs for
its Orion crew exploration vehicle and Ares I crew launch vehicle. NASA
will also show how computing resources help with the study of planet
formation, stars, and black holes. "NASA high-end computers are enabling
simulations of the Earth's weather and climate with ever-increasing
detail," says Phil Webster, chief of the Computational and Information
Science and Technology Office at the Goddard Space Flight Center. NASA
will also exhibit Data-Parallel Line Relaxation code simulations, which
help predict the heating environment encountered by the high-speed re-entry
of space vehicles such as the space shuttle orbiter, the Orion crew
capsule, and the Mars Science Laboratory. Rupak Biswas, active chief of
the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division at the NASA Ames Research Center,
says, "These simulations involve modeling extremely complex geometry and
are vital to ensuring the safe launch of next-generation space vehicles."
SC07 is expected to attract more than 7,000 people from around the world.
For more information about SC07, or to register, visit
http://sc07.supercomputing.org/
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Targeting Internet Terror
Baltimore Sun (11/07/07) P. 4A; Gorman, Siobhan
President Bush on Nov. 6 requested $154 million in preliminary funding for
his plan to launch a program targeting terrorists and others who would
attack the United States through the Internet. Former government officials
say the initiative is expected to become a seven-year, multibillion-dollar
project intended to track threats in cyberspace on government and private
networks. The project would be run by the Department of Homeland Security,
but use resources from the National Security Agency and other intelligence
agencies. As many as 2,000 people would staff the initiative, and the
first goal would be developing a comprehensive cyber security program.
Lawmakers, who only recently received briefings on the initiative, continue
to have concerns over whether the program has adequate privacy protection,
as well as other questions. One former government official familiar with
the project says total startup costs could reach $400 million. "The
proposal may be long overdue, but there are too many questions on how it
will be implemented and how it will avoid the fate of past failed plans
that remain unanswered," says chairman of the House Homeland Security
Committee Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.). "I hope the answers to those
questions will come shortly so that cyber security no longer remains on the
government's back burner." Thompson expressed specific concerns over the
legality of the program and whether it provides sufficient privacy
protections. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), who chairs the Senate
committee overseeing Homeland Security, says he is "encouraged that the
Department of Homeland Security is finally taking a strong, leadership role
in domestic cyber security." He says that without knowing the details, the
initiative "appears to be a step toward better protection of government
computers and information."
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Women Lose Ground in IT, Computer Science
T.H.E. Journal (11/07) Nagel, Dave
Women are falling further behind in information technology and computer
science, concludes the NCWIT Scorecard, a new report from the National
Center for Women & Information Technology. The study found that women are
a distinct minority among science- and technology-related students,
particularly as they climb the academic and corporate ladder. The report
found that girls in K-12 have an advantage over boys in coursework in math,
with more algebra, trigonometry, pre-calculus, and other math courses among
SAT exam takers. However, girls accounted for only 15 percent of students
taking AP computer science tests in 2006, and only 1 percent of females
taking the SATs in 2006 indicated an interest in computer and information
sciences as a possible major. For the 2005/2006 school year, only 11
percent of bachelor's degrees in computer engineering, and 15 percent in
computer science, were given to women, although women earned 60 percent of
all degrees awarded that year. Meanwhile, for the 2004/2005 academic year,
only 18 percent of new tenure-track faculty hires in computer science were
women, and only 16 percent of all computer science assistant professors are
women. In the private sector, women are the vast minority in technical and
IT-related positions, with an even lower percentage of women at executive
levels. While women hold 56 percent of professional positions in the
United States, they account for only 27 percent of professional
computing-related positions, 15 percent of CIO positions in Fortune 500
companies, and only 5 percent of CTO positions at those companies. The
report cites a lack of awareness of what computer science entails as a key
reason for women's lack of interest. "In one study of high school calculus
students, only 2 percent could accurately describe what a computer science
major studies," the report says. "And several studies have shown that more
female than male students worry that a computing degree will not allow them
to work with people."
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U of M Researchers Reveal New Findings About Wikipedia
Authorship and Vandalism
University of Minnesota News (11/05/07)
About half of the content on Wikipedia comes from only one-tenth of 1
percent of its 75,000 contributors, according to the latest installment of
a study from University of Minnesota researchers. And edits are quickly
fixed, as the research reveals that less than one-half percent (0.0037) of
typical viewing is likely to involve a damaged article. Although
encounters with vandalism increased over time, there was a break in June
2006, which the researchers believe is the result of the increased use of
anti-vandalism bots. "Our research suggests vandalism on Wikipedia is a
relatively small problem today," says computer science and engineering
professor Loren Terveen. "But continued research is needed to contain that
damage in the future." ACM's Group 2007 Conference published the paper,
"Creating, Destroying and Restoring Value in Wikipedia," in its proceedings
on Nov. 4.
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Taming the Guzzlers That Power the World Wide Web
New York Times (11/07/07) P. S7; Wald, Matthew L.
The Environmental Protection Agency reports that unless energy
conservation for data centers becomes a priority, data center energy
consumption will double by 2011. By 2006, data centers in northern
Virginia and Washington state were consuming 1.5 percent of the nation's
electricity supply, according to the EPA, putting additional strain on the
power supply in areas where demand for power was already high. "The amount
of energy spent on data centers is huge, and it's not really very well
understood," says Hewlett-Packard's Brian Brouillette. The EPA says the
electricity needed to run the nation's server farms costs $4.5 billion a
year. Significant improvements could allow consumption in 2011 to drop
back to the consumption levels of 2001, about half of current levels.
However, a significant problem lies in the fact that servers are not
required to meet federal energy standards. The EPA report says that
managers who buy data center equipment need reliable, objective information
on equipment energy performance. Another problem is that those responsible
for purchasing and operating IT equipment are often not responsible for
power and cooling infrastructure. Manufacturers are beginning to make more
energy efficient electronics. "Not many years ago, typical was 75 to 80
percent efficient," says Richard DuBois of server manufacturer Emerson.
"We're pretty religiously running in excess of 90 percent right now." Data
center managers are also examining how to cool more efficiently, using
thermal scanning to find hot spots and redirecting cool air flow. Other
power saving strategies including using chips that turn off sections when
not in use and improving hardware to reduce electricity leaks.
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NLR, Internet2 Merger Off Again
Network World (11/06/07) Reed, Brad
For the second time this year National LambdaRail has ended discussions to
merge with Internet2 after its board of directors voted down a motion to
approve the combination of the two nonprofit research networks. NLR board
chair Erv Blythe says the research network provider's bylaws, which
entitled NLR members to a portion of assets liquidated in a merger, were a
key factor in the decision. "Even though NLR's bylaws permit the board of
NLR to cause a merger with another entity, the provisions in NLR's bylaws
pertaining to the contributions of NLR's members had to be considered when
evaluating a merger," Blythe says. Jeffery Lehman, chairman of Internet2's
board of trustees, says he regrets the decision, but adds that his research
network has "no choice but to move forward independently." The proposed
tie-up looked promising because NLR and Internet2 offered similar Layer 1,
2, and 3 services.
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Better Search in Virtual Worlds
Technology Review (11/06/07) Naone, Erica
Linden Lab recently released a search tool that helps residents of its
Second Life virtual environment find 3D objects. The tool scores results
by relevance instead of rating them according to the amount of traffic they
produce or arranging them in alphabetical order, while Linden Lab's Jeska
Dzwigalski says the tool lets Second Life residents search not just for
objects, but also for information in each other's profiles, which could
enhance the virtual world's social features. The Second Life search tool's
underlying algorithm will rank found objects based on how well the data
used to describe them matches the search terms entered, the closeness of
multiple words, and the apparent popularity of the objects according to the
frequency of references to their locations. The new tool relies on tags
flagging objects and places, and it is residents who have the ultimate
responsibility for tagging items they want indexed. As developers strive
to allow users to pass easily between virtual worlds, searching those
worlds is an increasingly important challenge. "If we're enabling a whole
network of virtual worlds, it's critical for the user to find just the
world that he or she wants," says Multiverse co-founder Corey Bridges.
"Odds are, it's going to end up like the Web, where there's a whole bunch
of stuff out there, and you don't want 98 percent of it."
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IBM Video Game Teaches Business and Computer
Skills
Journal News (NY) (11/06/07) Alterio, Julie Moran
IBM has developed a video game called Innov8 designed to teach graduate
students a combination of business and IT skills through a
three-dimensional gaming experience. IBM is offering the program for free
to more than 2,000 universities worldwide. Similar to how pilots use
flight simulators to learn to fly airplanes, information technology
management students can learn from business simulations and problems, says
IBM's Sandy Carter. "You get 80 percent greater retention when someone
does a task versus reading about it," Carter says. "The concept is to get
students to experience the task in a fun way." The game's main character,
named Logan, receives assignments to solve business problems from the
company's CEO. The first task involves improving operations at a call
center with long call times and poor documentation. "The fun part is you
are a character," Carter says. "You click on a video and learn about how
to do things. You can click on posters and the posters come alive." Pace
University associate professor of information systems Jim Lawler, who was
involved in the Innov8 pilot program, says the game is more like a tool
with a lot of intelligence behind it, and that a video game should appeal
to today's generation. "It brings the course into the 21st century,"
Lawler says. "Enrollment is lower in computer science and information
systems nationally. This is what schools have to do, integrate these kind
of games and tools."
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Is It Really a Van Gogh?
University of Haifa (11/05/07)
Researchers at the University of Haifa have developed a mathematical
program that is capable of determining if a painting is the artwork of a
particular artist. Haifa computer science professor Daniel Keren says the
program turns drawings of nature, people, and other scenes into a series of
mathematical symbols, sines, and cosines, which enable a computer to learn
some of the work of an artist, pick up the individual style of an artist,
and then identify an artist's painting from artwork it has never seen. "As
soon as the computer learns to recognize the clock drawings of Dali, it
will recognize his other paintings, even without clocks," Keren says. "As
soon as the computer learns to recognize the swirls of Van Gogh, it will
recognize them in pictures it has never seen before." The research is a
key contribution to the field of computer vision. Determining when a
picture is of a human face or how many faces are in a picture is not an
easy task for computers.
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DARPA Race Pushes Robotics Forward
CNet (11/05/07) Olsen, Stefanie
Participants said the completion of the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency's Urban Challenge--a competition of unmanned cars on urban streets
that was won by Carnegie Mellon University's Tartan Racing
vehicle--represented a major victory for robotics, in that it brought the
concept of driverless vehicles much closer to reality in people's minds.
Advocates say the technology underlying the challenge will lead to a new
generation of safer vehicles. Although a number of entrants successfully
completed the course, the fact remains that the cars are still not ready
for autonomous driving, says Sebastian Thrun of Stanford University, whose
vehicle came in second. "There's clearly more development needed," Thrun
says. The winners were ultimately judged by how quickly they finished the
course as well as their obedience to traffic rules. DARPA director Tony
Tether drew parallels between the Urban Challenge and the Wright brothers'
historic flight at Kitty Hawk. "Bot on bot was a new experience [this
year], and I saw them pass each other like any person would," he says.
Nevertheless, driverless cars remains a significant challenge. Only 35 of
the original 89 entries were chosen to compete in a qualifying event for
the race, and only 11 of those passed that test to compete in the actual
race. Although six of the 11 entries completed all three of DARPA's
required missions, only four did so in the allotted time of six hours.
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'Suicide Nodes' Defend Networks From Within
New Scientist (11/01/07) Marks, Paul
University of Cambridge researchers have developed a computer defense
system that mimics how bees sacrifice themselves for the greater good of
the hive. The approach starts by giving all the devices on a network, or
nodes, the ability to destroy themselves, and take down any nearby
malevolent devices with them. The self-sacrifice provision provides a
defense against malicious nodes attacking clean nodes. "Bee stingers are a
relatively strong defense mechanism for protecting a hive, but whenever the
bee stings, it dies," says University of Cambridge security engineer Tyler
Moore. "Our suicide mechanism is similar in that it enables simple devices
to protect a network by removing malicious devices--but at the cost of its
own participation." The technique, called "suicide revocation," allows a
single node to quickly decide if a nearby node's behavior is malevolent and
to shut down the bad node, but at the cost of deactivating itself. The
node also sends an encrypted message announcing that itself and the
malevolent node have been shut down. The purpose of the suicide system is
to protect networks as they become increasingly distributed and less
centralized. Similar systems allow nodes to "blackball" malicious nodes by
taking a collective vote before ostracizing the malicious node, but the
process is slow and malicious nodes can outvote legitimate nodes. "Nodes
must remove themselves in addition to cheating ones to make punishment
expensive," says Moore. "Otherwise, bad nodes could remove many good nodes
by falsely accusing them of misbehavior."
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New Computer Program Automates Chip Debugging
University of Michigan News Service (11/02/07)
University of Michigan engineering researchers have devised FogClear, a
new computer-aided design tool to automate "post-silicon debugging" that
employs puzzle-solving search algorithms to determine problems early on and
automatically adjust the chip's blueprint, dramatically speeding up parts
of the process. FogClear co-developer and University of Michigan professor
Igor Markov says it is physically impossible to validate today's chips for
all possible conditions. "Bugs found post-silicon are often very difficult
to diagnose and repair because it is difficult to monitor and control the
signals that are buried inside a silicon die, or chip," notes recent
University of Michigan doctoral graduate Kai-Hui Chang. "Up until now
engineers have handled post-silicon debugging more as an art than a
science." FogClear can spot subtle bugs that can be overlooked even after
months of simulations. The application looks for and locates the least
complicated debugging method that minimizes the effects on working parts of
the chip. Chang will present a paper on FogClear at the International
Conference on Computer-Aided Design.
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Computer Scientist Fights Threat of 'Botnets'
University of Wisconsin-Madison (10/31/07) Mattmiller, Brain
University of Wisconsin-Madison computer scientist Paul Barford is
developing Nemean, a new computer security technique for detecting network
intrusions. Barford says the problem with current detection systems is the
high number of false positives. Hackers have become so capable of
disguising malicious traffic that security systems create thousands of
false positives. Most network-intrusion systems compare traffic against a
manually collected database of previously recognized attack signatures.
Nemean automatically generates intrusion signatures, making the detection
process faster and more accurate. A test comparing Nemean against current
technology on the market showed that both systems had a high detection rate
of malicious signatures, 99.9 percent for Nemean and 99.7 percent for the
commercially available technology, but Nemean had no false positives,
compared to the 88,000 false positives created by the other system. "The
technology we're developing here really has the potential to transform the
face of network security," Barford says. Barford's research was supported
by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, and the
Department of Homeland Security. "This is an arms race and we're always
one step behind," Barford says. "We have to cover all the vulnerabilities.
The bad guys only have to find one."
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Revolution Ahead in Data Storage, Say IT Wizards
Agence France Presse (11/01/07)
The latest breakthroughs involving "spintronics" could lead to some
amazing developments for hard disk storage capacity and date retrieval,
according to French IT expert Albert Fert in the British journal Nature
Materials. In a review of nanoscale computing, Fert notes that spintronics
will allow researchers to take advantage of the quantum "spin" state of
electrons. Fert, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics last month,
helped discover the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) principle, and he
believes the effect can be applied to Magnetic Random Access Memory (MRAM).
By collapsing the disk drive and computer chip into one, processing power
and storage capacity can be substantially increased. "MRAM potentially
combines key advantages such as non-volatility, infinite endurance and fast
random access--down to five nanoseconds read/write time--that make it a
likely candidate for becoming the 'universal memory' of nanoelectonics,"
according to Fert and his colleagues. IBM engineers are developing
next-generation disk drives that will offer 100 times the data storage of
current offerings. Meanwhile, the transition from silicon to metals inside
the transistor "gate" at a nanoscale level means transistors will continue
to adhere to Moore's Law.
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Why VoIP Is the Next Target for Spammers
Guardian Unlimited (UK) (11/01/07) Hargrave, Sean
Email spam filters have become so good at preventing unsolicited marketing
messages from making their way into users' inboxes that it has become rare
for spam to actually be read, says Columbia University computer science
professor Henning Schulzrinne. As a result, spammers are increasingly
choosing to send their unwanted messages to voice over Internet protocol
(VoIP) accounts instead of email inboxes, Schulzrinne says. He notes that
while such attacks on Internet telephony accounts--known as "spit" (spam
over Internet telephony)--are still very rare compared to email spam,
spammers are finding it tempting to target VoIP because a ringing phone is
a lot harder to ignore than an email message. In addition to spam, VoIP
accounts are also prone to a type of phishing called "vishing." In vishing
attacks, a fraudster can choose the name and number that will be displayed
on the victim's caller ID. This allows fraudsters to claim that they are
calling from their victim's bank and trick them into supplying personal
information that can be used to steal money from online accounts or commit
identity theft. IBM's Jean Paul Ballerini says vishing will likely become
the most common type of attack on VoIP accounts because it is more likely
to lead to money for spammers.
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Survey: Good News for COBOL Programmers
Campus Technology (11/02/07) Nagel, David
The higher education sector has a need for COBOL programmers to work with
its legacy systems. More than 75 percent of CIOs plan to recruit COBOL
programmers over the next five years, according to a survey from Micro
Focus. The company also found that 73 percent of CIOs are having some
difficulty finding people who know how to work with the programming
language. Micro Focus has launched the ACTION initiative and has signed up
22 colleges and universities that will receive COBOL support for
maintaining legacy systems. "As educators we must not only expose our
students to the theoretical and 'hot' programming languages, but we must
also provide the knowledge of systems and languages that are more prevalent
in the work environment," says Harrison Simmons, a computer science
lecturer at New York City College of Technology, a participant in the
program. "By incorporating joint initiatives such as ACTION into the
curriculum, we provide our students better ways to equip themselves for
today's large-system, enterprise computing jobs."
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Aussie Math Whiz Supercharges Net
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) (11/05/07) Moses, Asher
University of Melbourne research fellow John Papandriopoulos has developed
an algorithm that reduces the electromagnetic interference that slows down
ADSL connections, a discovery that could make Internet connections up to
100 times faster. Most ADSL connections have a speed limit between 1 Mbps
and 20 Mbps, but Papandriopoulos' discovery could increase the speed limit
to 100 Mbps. Stanford University engineering professor John Cioffi, who
developed the computer chips inside the first DSL modems, was so impressed
by Papandriopoulos' work that he offered him a job at his Silicon Valley
startup company ASSIA, which is working on ways to optimize DSL networks.
Papandriopoulos says his algorithm was designed to limit the "cross-talk"
interference that occurs on transmissions carried over existing copper
telephone wires, which power ADSL connections. "Many years ago people used
to pick up the phone and make a phone call and you'd be able to hear a
faint or distant telephone conversation taking place, and that's called
cross-talk," Papandriopoulos says. "That is not an issue for voice calls
these days but it becomes a problem when you're trying to wring more
bandwidth out of these existing copper telephone wires. This cross-talk in
current day DSL networks effectively produces noise onto other lines, and
this noise reduces the speed of your connection." The technology could be
implemented by Internet providers within two or three years.
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Virtual Worlds, Real Science
Science News (10/27/07) Vol. 172, No. 17, P. 264; Vastag, Brian
Virtual worlds such as the online game environment World of Warcraft are
being increasingly tapped by behavioral scientists as a resource into
social dynamics. Tufts University's Nina Fefferman points out that
infectious disease computer models are limited in terms of accurately
projecting human behavior, and virtual worlds, which involve real human
interactions, sometimes on a vast scale, can help fill this void. She
presented this argument in a paper she co-authored with University of North
Carolina epidemiology grad student Eric Lofgren based on observations about
a virtual plague epidemic that ravaged the World of Warcraft population.
Fefferman notes a group dynamic during the outbreak in which thrill-seeking
characters willingly entered disease epicenters, a phenomenon that could
conceivably be paralleled in the real world. "I tend to think that it's
more realistic than we acknowledge, that there would be motivations for
people to go to the disaster," says director of the National Science
Foundation's Human-Centered Computing Cluster William Sims Bainbridge.
Fefferman now wants to intentionally unleash a virtual plague on a game
world to study its effects, and she contends that such a scenario could be
used to enhance the challenge of game worlds by offering players the
opportunity to collaborate on a cure or build hospitals, for instance.
With game companies reluctant to participate in such experiments, some
academic researchers are building their own virtual worlds to test their
theories, but success has been spotty. A $360,000 NSF grant was awarded to
a team headed by Carnegie Mellon University's Robert Kraut to study
interactions in World of Warcraft, Wikipedia, and other online social
centers, while University of Pennsylvania Wharton Business School professor
Dan Hunter has termed this emerging discipline "computational social
science."
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