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Stanford Adds to Parallel Programming Effort
A three-year project at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA, is being launched with US$6 million in corporate funds to explore fresh models for parallel programming, addressing the concern that software cannot keep pace with evolution of multicore processors. The problem requires genuine breakthroughs, since top researchers worked unsuccessfully for more than a decade to develop parallel programming models for high-end supercomputers. Advanced Micro Devices, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, NVidia and Sun Microsystems are behind the new Pervasive Parallelism Lab headed by Kunle Olukotun, a Stanford computer science professor credited with Sun's multicore Niagara processor. In March, Intel and Microsoft announced their five-year, US$20 million plan to fund work at new parallel computing labs at the University of California-Berkeley, USA and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. While there likely will be very different solutions to the many problems involved, some see this as academic competition on the technology and a benefit to the computer industry as a whole. Read more
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New Supercomputer Capable of Measuring Hurricanes, Tornadoes
The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) recently replaced three of its supercomputers with the IBM-engineered Bluefire supercomputer. Capable of performing more than 76 trillion operations per second, the computer will enable quicker and more detailed weather and climate-change research. The increased computing power will make all types of research easier and more efficient, according to NCAR project scientist Jordan Powers. “It will allow us to tackle bigger problems in a shorter amount of time,” Powers said. The new computing power will also allow scientists to examine weather events such as hurricanes and tornadoes on a more detailed scale, or at a higher resolution, akin to using a digital camera with three megapixels instead of one, Powers explained. Read more
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IEEE Computer Society Introduces Computing Now
The IEEE Computer Society has created an aggregation portal to let visitors access multimedia, engage in community building and consolidate the resources of its 14 magazines. Computing Now brings together new print and online content from the IEEE Computer Society’s peer-reviewed magazines, highlighting coverage of hot topics, such as computer games, social networking, green computing, robotics and agile computing. Spanning all computing-related technologies and more than 50 identified subjects, Computing Now provides free access to select peer-reviewed articles and departments from each magazine. The site’s multimedia center features podcasts, video blogs, webinars and online-only interviews with authors and guest editors. Focusing on serving the community, Computing Now encourages registered users to comment on blog entries, provide feedback and contribute content. Led by an advisory board of subject-matter experts from academia and industry, Computing Now represents the Computer Society’s latest efforts to bridge the print and online worlds. For more information, visit Computing Now
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Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference
The 2008 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) is being held 23-28 June at the Eagan Convention Center in Anchorage, Alaska, USA. The conference will include poster sessions, workshops and keynote speakers on a variety of computer vision and pattern recognition issues. Specific topics of interest include biometrics, image-based modeling, multi-view geometry, object recognition, medical image analysis, perceptual grouping and more. To learn more, visit the conference web site.
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Taiwan's Notebook Computer Shipments Increase More Than 20 Percent
Thanks to strong demand from emerging markets and continued replacement of desktop computers with the smaller, mobile models, notebook computer manufacturers in Taiwan are expected to ship 22 percent more laptops this year. Taiwan's contract manufacturers, who supply laptops to the world's major computer brands like Hewlett Packard and Dell, are expected to ship 110 million notebook computers in 2008, up from 2007's 90 million units, according to the Market Intelligence Center. Additionally, total revenues generated by Taiwan manufacturers grew 26.9 percent to US$13 (TWD 401) billion in the first quarter as personal computer vendors launched new high-end models. Read more
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Papers Sought for Special Issues of IEEE Intelligent Systems
The IEEE Computer Society is seeking original papers for several special issues of IEEE Intelligent Systems.
Special Issue on Semantic Scientific Knowledge Integration
This special issue aims to report on the state of the art in semantic e-science and is interested in original research papers that bridge the semantic-technologies community with the scientific-information-technology community in the area of knowledge integration. Papers on the practice and theory of semantic scientific knowledge integration are also welcome. All papers should include some discussion of evaluation and impact. Submit papers by 28 July 2008. See the complete call for papers
Special Issue on AI and Cultural Heritage
This special issue seeks to explore the problems and solutions of cultural heritage in the digital age and discuss to what extent computers, particularly knowledge-based technologies, can facilitate the processes of authentication, preservation and archiving of physical and digital artifacts. Submit papers by 15 August 2008. See the complete call for papers
Special Issue on Human-Level Intelligence
This special issue will focus on contributions that increase our ability to build broad models of human intelligence or to engineer intelligent systems with many different human-like cognitive abilities. Original research papers that exhibit the robustness and flexibility characteristic of human intelligence; can be integrated with systems that address other aspects of intelligence; and derive important design constraints from our knowledge about human and animal intelligence are preferred. Submit papers by 5 January 2009. See the complete call for papers
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Green = Efficiency = Savings: Symposium Summarized
InfoWorld’s Ted Samson offers his lessons learned at the Uptime Institute Green Enterprise Computing Symposium in Orlando, Florida, USA. According to Samson, companies need to do more than just cut waste, which does not necessarily mean you are making better use of what you have or that you are reducing your organization's environmental impact, in order to be green. Suggestions include measuring the current energy efficiency impact of implementing different strategies; making sure every machine running has a purpose by asking users or department heads to justify server and other IT equipment use; and addressing waste with standard best practices such as plugging holes, adjusting temperatures and eliminating hot spots. To increase the success of a company-wide green computing effort, Samson suggests getting executives involved by using dashboards depicting energy usage and savings over time; putting virtualization on the table, which can potentially jettison or reassign a large portion of your organization's hardware; and consider outsourcing, since it is possible that an outside provider can offer service less expensively and more efficiently. Read more
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Anti-Virus Software No Match for Malicious Hardware
More difficult to detect than computer viruses and worms, malicious hardware could become an even bigger threat, as demonstrated by Samuel King and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. In a presentation at the Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats conference in San Francisco, California, USA, in April, King described how his team gained control of a computer by adding malicious circuits to its processor. Using a processor called a field programmable gate array (FPGA), the team created a replica of an existing open source processor called Leon3 and added about 1,000 malicious circuits not present among the processor’s current 1.7 million circuits. The malicious circuits allowed them to bypass security controls on Leon3. When they hooked the FPGA to another computer, they were able to steal stored passwords and install malicious software that would allow the operating system it was running to be remotely controlled. “Once you have this mechanism in place, you can do whatever you want,” said King. Read more
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Roadblocks to Cloud Computing Discussed
Cloud computing was a hot topic at Interop 2008 in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. A panel moderated by BitCurrent analyst Alistair Croll agreed that the adoption rate of cloud services is growing, but there are major issues preventing businesses from embracing the technology. Security is the biggest concern, according to Kirill Sheynkman, CEO of start-up Elastra, who said, "I think there is data that belongs in the public cloud and data that needs to go behind a firewall.” Google's senior product manager of its Enterprise operations, Rajen Sheth, brought up the roadblock of interoperability, saying, "the more we can figure out ways for systems that are in the private cloud—behind the firewall—to interoperate with systems that are in the public cloud, the more useful for businesses these systems will become." Complexity of application licensing, determining code that works over the grid and compliance are additional issues slowing adoption of web-hosted services. Read more
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First Computer Brand, Business Class Debuts
Aimed at small and medium-sized businesses, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) has unveiled its first computer brand. The new AMD Business Class desktop personal computers, to be followed by notebook PCs in the second half of 2008, will receive sales help from AMD’s major chip customers. “We really tried to identify the nuggets [of technology for business desktop PCs] that weren't being looked at," said Hal Speed, a marketing architect for AMD. According to AMD, Business Class is designed to scale up to the biggest corporate clients as well. Desktops include the AMD Phenom X3 triple-core and AMD Phenom X4 quad-core processors, as well as the AMD Athlon X2 dual-core processors. The new product line is seen as part of AMD's efforts to regain its competitive edge against Intel Corp, building on the success of its Opteron microprocessors over Intel in the server market. Read more
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