Debian and Red Hat are collaborating on a written specification of the "Linux Compatibility Standard" (LCS), which will outline specifications for being LCS compliant. The LCS document can be used as a guideline for how to build a "proper" system by those building Linux distributions, and supply information to developers on the basic system configuration to develop application programs.
-- Jonathan Erickson
Counterpane Systems and Hi/fn have announced a contest with $10,000 in prizes for the best attacks against the Twofish algorithm. The Twofish encryption algorithm, which has a key length of 128-bits or more, was submitted to the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) as a potential replacement for the current Data Encryption Standard (DES). Based on the Blowfish algorithm, Twofish is efficient on 32-bit micro-processors, eight-bit smart cards, dedicated hardware, and 64-bit architectures proposed by Intel and Motorola. Twofish was jointly designed by DDJ contributing editor and Counterpane Systems president Bruce Schneier, John Kelsey, Chris Hall, Niels Ferguson, Doug Whiting, and David Wagner. The prize is offered for the best analysis of the algorithm. For more information, see http://www.counterpane.com/.
-- Jonathan Erickson
IBM has unveiled a tiny hard-disk drive that weighs about the same as a AA battery and is the size of two postage stamps -- and has a storage capacity of 340 Mbits/sec. According to IBM, the "microdrive" will be used in applications such as digital cameras and hand-held computers. It is scheduled to start shipping in mid 1999. For more information, see http:// www.ibm.com/storage/microdrive/.
-- Jonathan Erickson
More than 1200 developers attended the Perl Conference in San Jose, California to chat with Perl gurus and learn about the latest release of Perl (v5.005). Larry Wall, Perl's creator, preached Perl's philosophy at his keynote address, explaining, "Our brains are built to do Perl programming." Problems that programmers encounter are complex, according to Wall, and programmers need complex tools to solve these complex problems. Just as the English language is a "mess," said Wall, "Perl was designed to be a mess -- though in the nicest of possible ways."
Other interesting sessions included Malcolm Beattie and Gurusamy Sarathy on the new features of Perl 5.005 -- which includes threads, a compiler, and better Win32 support -- and a panel discussion entitled "OO in Perl: Boom or Bust."
-- Eugene Eric Kim
A professor at the University of Reading (United Kingdom) claims to have become the first person to have a microprocessor surgically implanted in his body. Kevin Warwick, chairman of the university's Cybernetics Department, had a glass capsule about 23×3 millimeters in size inserted into his arm. Warwick reportedly demonstrated the experiment by walking through audio-enabled doorways which, after communicating with the implanted controller, told him how many e-mail messages he had. Upon his doctor's recommendation, Warwick removed the implant after 10 days. To prevent infection, he also took antibiotics.
-- Jonathan Erickson
TASC Inc., a Reading, Massachusetts, software company, needs programmers so bad that it's willing to put its money where its recruiting mouth is. TASC is paying $250.00 to anyone who qualifies and shows up for a job interview. According to the company's HR director, TASC received more than 1250 résumés in less than a week once the program was announced.
-- Jonathan Erickson
Although not as famous as NASA's Kennedy Space Flight Center or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Goddard Space Flight Center is one of NASA's biggest and most important facilities. This is where NASA builds many of its satellites, and this is where most of the data from those satellites is collected and analyzed. It is also where Don Becker is building "Beowulf" clusters using commodity PCs, Linux, and the PVM and MPI multiprocessing libraries. The current model boasts 15 gigaflops for a price tag of only $200,000. Don is best known in Linux circles as the author of much of Linux' networking system. According to John Dorband, who is porting various Goddard software to run on the Beowulf clusters, the biggest advantage of the Cray is that the 1024 nodes are connected by an exceptionally fast internal network. This lets you get reasonable speed even from programs that can't be cleanly parallelized.
The total capacity of a Beowulf cluster is impressive. A 64-node cluster can easily amass 10 gigabytes of memory, a terabyte of spinning disk storage, and total disk throughput of a gigabyte per second. Applications include simulation, image processing, cryptography, and high-throughput data storage.
In terms of price per gigaflop, Beowulf clusters are the cheapest high-performance computers around. As a result, more and more university departments and government agencies are building their own clusters. A few groups are experimenting with BSD-based or Windows NT-based clusters, but Linux-based clusters far outnumber them.
Red Hat sells an "Extreme Linux" CD-ROM containing all of the Linux kernel changes and support programs needed to build your own Beowulf from a few spare PCs. The computing power of such a minicluster isn't staggering; it takes quite a few old 486 machines to rival even a single Pentium II, Alpha, or G3. Still, in the process of experimenting with this technology, you'll learn about parallel computing.
-- Tim Kientzle
SPEC has released SPECjvm98, a benchmark suite that measures computer-system performance for Java virtual machine (JVM) client platforms. SPECjvm98 lets you evaluate performance for the hardware/software aspects of the JVM client. On the software side, it measures the efficiency of JVM, just-in-time (JIT) compilers, and operating-system implementations. On the hardware side, it measures CPU (integer and floating point), cache, memory, and other platform-specific performance issues. SPECjvm98 contains eight different tests. The tests measure the time it takes to load the program, verify class files, compile on the fly if a JIT compiler is used, and execute tests. A demo version, initial results, and order information is available at http://www.spec.org/ osg/jvm98/.
-- Jonathan Erickson