Faster Computers Accelerate Pace of Discovery
Washington Post (12/03/07) P. A7; Lee, Christopher
The first petascale computer is expected to become operational sometime
next year, continuing the trend of ever faster supercomputers. A petascale
supercomputer will complete a calculation in two hours that would take five
hours on what is currently the world's fastest computer. Scientists say
that powerful supercomputers will help solve long-standing mysteries in
climate change, geology, drug development, dark matter, and other fields
where direct experimental observation is too time-consuming, costly,
dangerous, or simply impossible. Supercomputers are expected to become so
powerful that they have introduced a new step into the scientific method,
with computation joining thesis, hypothesis, and experimentation as a
standard procedure of scientific discovery. The massive increases in
computing power rely on not only increases in processor speed and memory,
but on the ability of scientists to "gang" hundreds of thousands of nodes
into a single machine and to create better ways of having the nodes
communicate with one another when solving a problem. "If you ran today's
code on yesterday's computers, they would be much faster," says Raymond
Bair, director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility at the Argonne
National Laboratory. "People have figured out how to solve the problems
faster." Although petascale computing is not yet available, scientists are
already looking forward to the exascale machine, capable of 1 million
trillion calculations per second and about a thousand times more powerful
than petascale. Exascale machines could be available around 2018.
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Secretary of State Casts Doubt on Future of Electronic
Voting
San Francisco Chronicle (12/02/07) P. C7; Wildermuth, John
California Secretary of State Debra Bowen says that electronic voting
systems used in California are still too unreliable and untrustworthy to be
used in the state's elections. Moreover, Bowen doubts whether the
electronic voting systems will ever meet the standards she believes are
needed in California. Although Bowen says computer scientists may one day
develop reliable systems, she says today's machines are not as transparent
or auditable as the paper ballot systems they replaced. A rigorous
inspection of the state's voting systems found that most of the voting
machines were vulnerable to hackers looking to change results or cause
mischief, which resulted in Bowen decertifying almost all of the touch
screen systems used in California. Bowen says she would like to see
California use optical scan systems, which use a paper ballot and a
tallying machine and are already used to count mail ballots in California.
Optical scan systems are "old and boring, but cheap and reliable," Bowen
says, because the paper ballots make it easy to have a recount. While
Bowen's investigation and decisions only involve California, they have had
a nationwide impact because many of the same systems are used in other
states. "I want to make sure the votes are secure, auditable, and
transparent and that every vote is counted as it was cast," Bowen says.
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Government-Sponsored Cyberattacks on the Rise, McAfee
Says
Network World (11/29/07) Brodkin, Jon
Governments and groups across the world are harnessing the Internet to
mount cyberattacks on their enemies by attacking key systems such as
financial markets, electricity, and government computer networks, according
to a new report by McAfee. The report, which was created with input from
the FBI, NATO, and other intelligence groups, notes that China has been
charged with launching attacks against four countries in 2007. The United
States and 119 other nations are also believed to be conducting Web
espionage operations, reports McAfee. Such assaults are well-organized,
well-funded, and can operate on technical, economic, political, and
military fronts. Moreover, the attacks have grown so sophisticated that
they can evade the radar of government cyber defenses, according to McAfee.
David Marcus of McAfee anticipates the eventual creation of a privatized
model, under which governments will authorize cybercriminals to attack
enemies, noting that state-sponsored malware has already emerged.
Meanwhile, cyberattacks are also a growing threat to online services such
as banking and new targets include VoIP and social-networking applications
such as Facebook. Malware is also getting more flexible and robust, as
demonstrated by the "Storm Worm," and McAfee researchers have seen "the
emergence of a complex and sophisticated market for malware." Finally, the
report notes that cybercrime tools such as custom-written Trojans and
software flaws are available for sale, and that the underground economy
that distributes the tools is so competitive that customer service has
become a selling point.
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Forum to Upgrade MPI Standard
HPC Wire (11/29/07)
The MPI Forum has been relaunched and is calling on end users, hardware
and software vendors, researchers, and MPI implementers to take part in its
effort to bring the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard up to date. A
decade old, MPI is the ubiquitous application programming interface for
parallel computing, and it has made it easier to exchange data between
processes and adjust the number of processes in a single, parallel job.
The MPI Forum plans to clarify the current MPI 2.0 standard and make
corrections to the document by mid 2008 and address errors and omissions in
the standard by early 2009. The final stage of reassessing the standard,
with regard to its support for current and future applications, could be
completed by 2010 and could involve changes for generalized requests,
non-blocking collectives, new language support, and fault-tolerance. "MPI
has been extremely successful in enabling advances in simulation over the
past decade and will continue to play a key role in this arena," says Rich
Graham of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's National Center for Computational
Sciences, who is coordinating the project. "However, with a large body of
hands-on experience and a rapidly changing computing ecosystem, it is time
to take a look at adjusting the standard to meet this ever-changing
environment."
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The Transistor at 60
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) (11/27/07) Head, Beverley
Since its debut six decades ago, transistor technology has advanced to the
point where 820 million transistors can be housed on Intel's new Penryn
processor. However, the shrinkage of transistors to accelerate processing
speed and manage power efficiency has Intel co-founder Gordon Moore
convinced that a physical barrier will be reached within the next 10 or 15
years. Not everyone agrees with Moore's assessment. "What's happened
again and again when you come upon the physical limits is we've been able
to advance around them, and I think that will continue for at least the
next several generations," says director of IBM's Australia Development
Laboratory Glenn Wightwick. Intel CTO Justin Rattner forecasts that within
10 years electronics will shift from reliance on an electron's
electrostatic charge to its "spin," and perhaps usher in molecular devices.
Wightwick says many research labs are investigating potential replacements
for transistors, such as molecular cascades or carbon nanotubes. The
trade-off with a switch to new electronic components is the cost and effort
of facilitating such a transition, but users would benefit enormously
because their interaction with technology would be easier thanks to
single-system chips, Rattner says. He says these advances could lead to
innovations such as practical machine translation, continuous speech
recognition, and personal robots.
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Scientist: 'Hybrid' Computers Will Meld Living Brains
With Technology
Computerworld (12/03/07) Gaudin, Sharon
University of Arizona professor Charles Higgins believes that in 10 to 15
years "hybrid" computers that use a combination of technology and living
organic tissue will be common consumer products. Higgins has successfully
connected a moth's brain to a robot, using the moth's sight to tell the
robot when something is approaching so it can move out of the way. Higgins
says he started out trying to build a computer chip that could simulate how
a brain processes visual images, but found that the chip would cost an
estimated $60,000. "At that price I thought I was getting lower quality
than if I was just accessing the brain of an insect which costs, well,
considerably less," Higgins says. "If you have a living system, it has
sensory systems that are far beyond what we can build." The 12-inch-tall
robot that relies on a moth's sight may be considered cutting edge right
now, but Higgins believes that it is only the beginning of organic enhanced
computers. "In future decades, this will not be surprising," says Higgins.
"Most computers will have some kind of living component to them."
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Carnegie Mellon's National Robotics Engineering Center
Receives $14.4 Million to Develop and Demonstrate Next-Generation
Autonomous Ground Vehicle
Carnegie Mellon News (11/29/07)
The U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Research, Development, and Engineering
Center (TARDEC) has awarded Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics
Engineering Center (NREC) a $14.4 million contract to develop a more
advanced version of Crusher, its autonomous, unmanned ground vehicle. The
updated version of Crusher will have the latest suspension, vehicle frame,
and hybrid-electric drive technologies, which should give its performance a
boost. TARDEC also wants Carnegie Mellon to develop an end-to-end control
architecture and demonstrate its viability for autonomous UGV operations in
settings that have the most difficult terrain. "We're delighted that NREC
will play a key role in showing how advanced autonomous vehicles work in
FCS [future combat systems] settings," says NREC director John Bares. "Our
goal will be to develop, integrate, and test a high-performance UGV with
the most up-to-date mobility and autonomy technologies."
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Cryptic Messages Boost Data Security
ICT Results (11/28/07)
The first "real-life" application in quantum cryptography was the use of
id Quantique's unbreakable data code in the Swiss national elections in
October 2007. "Protection of the federal elections is of historical
importance in the sense that, after several years of development and
experimentation, this will be the first use of a 1 GHz quantum encrypter,
which is transparent for the user, and an ordinary fiber-optic line to send
data endowed with relevance and purpose," said id Quantique co-founder
Nicolas Gisin. Through quantum cryptography, two communicating parties can
generate a shared random bit string only they know, which can be used as a
key to encode and decode messages. Furthermore, the parties can be almost
immediately tipped off when an unauthorized third party is attempting to
gain access to the key and take action to counter the intrusion.
Accidental data corruption can also be detected, which is an important
consideration in the Swiss elections. The elections are just the first
step of a plan to set up a pilot quantum communications network in Geneva
called SwissQuantum, whose next phase will be the provision of a platform
for testing and validating the quantum technologies that will help
safeguard future communications networks. Id Quantique is a partner in the
SECOQC project, and id Quantique co-founder Gregoire Ribordy says the
initiative "makes it possible for id Quantique's engineers to interact with
some of the best groups worldwide in the field of quantum cryptography."
SECOQC's partners plan to lay the groundwork for a high-security
communication network that melds quantum key distribution with elements of
classical computer science and cryptography.
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Intelligent Software Helps Build Perfect Robotic
Hand
Innovations Report (11/29/07) Egan, Lisa
Researchers in Portsmouth and Shanghai plan to use artificial intelligence
to teach a robotic glove to move in the same dexterous manner as a human
hand. A cyberglove will learn human hand movements from software that is
being developed by Dr. Honghai Liu, senior lecturer at the University of
Portsmouth's Institute of Industrial Research, and professor Xiangyang Zhu
from the Robotics Institute at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai. The
device makes use of motion capture, sensor, and infrared illumination
camera technology to capture data, and has a measurement accuracy of up to
a few millimeters. The artificial intelligence and robotics experts
believe their research could ultimately result in the development of the
perfect artificial limb. "Humans move efficiently and effectively in a
continuous flowing motion, something we have perfected over generations of
evolution and which we all learn to do as babies," Zhu says. "Developments
in science mean we will teach robots to move in the same way."
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Open Source's Future: More Microsoft, Bigger Talent
Shortages
Network World (11/27/07) Brown, Bob
Raven Zachary, open source research director for The 451 Group, believes
the open source industry in 2008 will see more news from Microsoft, IBM,
Oracle and other big IT vendors, less startup funding, more M&A activity,
and an increasingly damaging shortage of talent. During The 451 Group's
second Annual Client Conference in Boston, Zachary said he is optimistic
about the market, largely because the traditional bottom-up adoption of
open source by developers and systems management professionals is being
coupled by top-down adoption driven by CIOs and executive committees who
believe in the cost reduction potential of open source software.
Additionally, companies are switching to open source for applications as
well as for browsers and operating systems. Zachary says big-name IT
vendors known for their proprietary technologies are embracing open source
and collaborative development systems, and that big vendors are
re-evaluating their business models, licensing schemes, and product plans
because of open source's "disruptive force." However, the current shortage
of open source talent is only expect to get worse as demand skyrockets for
internal open source support and developers. Zachary also expects there to
be a wave of failed open source businesses in 2008 as companies learn how
to monetize open source products.
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Computer Research Might Land Senior $100,000
Scholarship
Washington Post (12/03/07) P. B2; Chandler, Michael Alison
One of the top math and science contests for high school students in the
country will announce its winners on Monday. Over the weekend, six
individual and six team finalists presented their projects before a panel
of judges in New York City. Computer networks were the focus of Jacob
Steinhardt, an 18-year-old senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for
Science and Technology in Fairfax, Va. The research has the potential to
contribute to the development of faster computer networks. Steinhardt
turned his attention to studying computer networks algebraically in order
to improve their efficiency. "It was me just doing stuff for my own
edification, and it evolved," he says. Steinhardt has a chance to win a
$100,000 scholarship, and he intends to continue to pursue studies in math
and computer science next year at MIT. The competition, sponsored by the
Siemens Foundation, drew 1,600 entries.
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Comparing Collaborative Interaction in Different Virtual
Environments
SPIE (11/28/07) Shahab, Qonita; Kwon, Yong-Moo; Ko, Heedong
Significant strides have been made in the development of haptics hardware
and software, particularly in haptics technology. Such advances have
significantly altered collaborative virtual environments (CVEs), where
multiple users can work together and interact with objects in a virtual
world. In CVEs, all of the user's inputs need to be combined in real time
to determine how an object will be affected or behave. Several research
efforts have examined interaction techniques common to CVEs users,
particularly when multiple users are handling the same object. One
project, called the Virtual Dollhouse, examined two people working together
to build a virtual dollhouse using virtual building blocks, a hammer, and
nails. Network support allowed participants in different places to work in
the same simulation and to see the results of each other's actions. Part
of the study included the effect of haptics on a collaborative virtual
interaction as well as changes in collaborative efforts when the users were
in different types of virtual environments. Even during voiceless
collaboration, users were able to understand the status of an object being
operated by other users based on color feedback, and users could still work
together effectively. Meanwhile, 3D devices such as the space interface
device for artificial reality proved to be more intuitive for a task where
users are asked to select and move objects than a traditional joystick.
Immersive display environments such as the cave automatic virtual
environment were also found to be more suitable than non-immersive displays
such as normal PC monitors for simulating object manipulation that required
force and the feeling of weight.
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Taking Legos a League Beyond U-32 Students Program Robots
for National Competition
Rutland Herald (VT) (12/03/07) Larkin, Dapne
The For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Lego
League 2007 Challenge brought together students aged 9-14 for a worldwide
competition in robotics programming relating to global energy issues. The
competition involved programming robots for certain tasks, such as
replacing solar panels on a Lego house. The Lego Mindstorm robots used in
the competition are the same toolkits used by Tufts University engineering
programs, and can be as accessible or as challenging as needed for the
students. Student teams are given eight weeks to design, build, and
program a robot to complete specific tasks, which are announced each year
on Sept. 1. The competition also features workshops for FIRST mentors to
encourage the development of more FIRST teams. "The combination of the
public speaking presentation, computer programming and engineering adds up
to a brilliant piece," says Randy Brown, a FIRST team coach and physics and
computer science teacher in Vermont. "If you're going to have a soccer
team, you should have a FIRST team."
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Concurrency: The Compiler Writer's Perspective
Software Development Times (11/15/07)No. 186, P. 26; Morales, Alexandra
Weber
Google compiler writer Brian Grant acknowledges in an interview that
concurrency is a challenge for developers, but not an overwhelming
challenge. He notes that developers can address nondeterminism through
tools and methodologies, but there are complexities inherent in other
language features. "The key is managing the complexity by imposing some
kind of discipline," Grant explains. "As with all software, you need to
break it into components, layers, and well-defined interfaces." Grant says
we are a long way off from automatic concurrency or parallel compilers, and
adds that OpenMP works well for an extremely small set of applications such
as parallelizing hot kernels in numeric and scientific computing;
partitioning larger codebases is a far more daunting challenge that OpenMP
is not suited for. In contrast to existing languages such as C++,
higher-level languages tend to favor ease of correctness over ease of
performance, Grant says. He contends that GPUs or the Cell processor do
not necessarily tackle the problem of increasing performance while
decreasing concurrency. Grant points out that some applications run at
high speeds and others do not, while such applications are much more
difficult to program. He concludes that he has yet to see a compelling or
complete concurrency solution, and posits that "concurrency needs to be
well supported throughout the whole software ecosystem: languages, tools,
libraries and legacy code."
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Toward a Social Semantic Web
Computer (11/07) Vol. 40, No. 11, P. 113; Mikroyannidis, Alexander
Although there may appear to be a natural conflict between the structural
demands of the Semantic Web and the open availability of Web 2.0 and social
networking, the two areas are essentially compatible and can coexist,
writes University of Leeds research assistant Alexander J. Mikroyannidis.
Internet monitoring firm Netcraft reports that the Web currently comprises
more than 100 million Web sites and despite the rapid rate of growth in the
amount of information available, serious efforts to manage the information
have been lacking. Most published information is not structured to allow
for logical reasoning, and finding information that requires more than a
keyword search can be difficult. Meanwhile, the rise of Web 2.0 has seen
the rapid development of some incredibly popular and innovative
technologies, including social networking sites, communication tools, and
wikis. The widespread appeal of blogging, syndication, and tagging that
allows users to easily share and publish content has made Web 2.0
incredibly popular and has led to the Social Web, a medium for online
communication and collaboration. A popular way of organizing content on
the Social Web is with keywords, which creates sets of categories derived
from tagging that are commonly referred to as folksonomies. Folksonomies
can potentially be used to bridge the gap between the Social and Semantic
Web due to their ability to form stable structures. For example,
folksonomies' collective categorization scheme could be used as an initial
knowledge base for constructing ontologies, which could then use the most
common tags as concepts, relations, or instances. Essentially, creating a
Social Semantic Web would require allowing Web 2.0 users to tag as usual
and then exploit the folksonomies for the construction and evolution of
ontologies and metadata to deliver Semantic Web products and services to
users.
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