A team of students at the University of California at Berkeley has broken the world record for data sorting. Joshua Coates, Spencer Low, and Philip Buonadonna completed the Datamation sort in 1.18 seconds -- less than half the time of the previous record holder. The record was set using a cluster of 16 off-the-shelf PCs, each with two Pentium processors and two hard disks, running Windows NT 4.0. The computers were networked together using an experimental protocol called VIA (Virtual Interface Architecture) developed as a commercial standard by Intel, Microsoft, and Compaq. The Datamation sort involves reading one million, 100-byte records off a disk, sorting them, and writing the data back to disk.
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson have been awarded the U.S. National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest award for achievement in technology. Thompson and Ritchie, who are researchers at Lucent's Bell Labs, received the honor for their invention of UNIX and C. More recently, both men helped develop the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, and have contributed to the development of Lucent's PathStar Access Server, which provides packet voice and data services.
The Medal of Technology credits their inventions as having "led to enormous advances in computer hardware, software, and networking systems and stimulated growth of an entire industry, thereby enhancing American leadership in the Information Age."
Thompson and Ritchie joined Bell Labs in 1966 and 1967, respectively. They worked closely together for several years on the design and development of UNIX. C, in which UNIX is written, was invented by Ritchie, but grew out of an earlier language, B, written by Thompson. Both Ritchie and Thompson are Bell Labs Fellows, and they have jointly received the ACM Turing Award, the IEEE Emmanuel Piore Award and the Richard W. Hamming Medal.
James Gray, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, has been honored as the recipient of the ACM's 1998 A.M. Turing Award. Gray has been honored for "seminal contributions to database and transaction processing research and technical leadership in system implementation from research prototypes to commercial products." Gray is a specialist in database and transaction processing computer systems. His research at Microsoft focuses on scaleable computing, specifically building super-servers and workgroup systems from commodity software and hardware. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked at Digital, Tandem, IBM, and AT&T on database and transaction processing systems including Rdb and NonStopSQL. The A.M. Turing Award, and the $25,000 that goes with it, is given annually for contributions of lasting technical importance made to the computing community.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with a way of creating patterns on surfaces that may offer an easy and inexpensive alternative to photolithography and other conventional procedures used in the manufacture of computer chips. The technique, developed by Assistant Professor Paula Hammond, graduate student Sarah Clark, and others, involves "printing" a pattern onto a surface, then using a material's electrical properties to build up layers of that material over the pattern. Theoretically, electronic circuitry could even be printed on treated paper or plastic surfaces.
Hammond's team can currently create stripes that are only about 3.5 micrometers wide (a human hair is about 75 micrometers in diameter). Layers of an inert material are deposited between the stripes. Hammond's technique is a variation of layer-by-layer assembly, in which polymers with different charges are sequentially absorbed onto a surface. Layer-by-layer assembly, however, produces continuous polymer films; Hammond is the first to create patterns.
Hammond's variation begins by "stamping" a surface with the pattern of interest using microcontact printing. What Hammond discovered, however, was that "ink" with specific properties would selectively attract certain polymers. Meanwhile the spaces between the stamped patterns, filled with the inert material, repel the polymer. What Hammond also discovered was that changing things such as the salt content or pH of the system can cause the polymer and the inert material to switch allegiances. Stripes that previously attracted the polymer now attract the inert material, and vice versa.
Case Western Reserve University has put a 0.9-meter telescope online for public use. The telescope, situated at the university's Nassau Astronomical Station (approximately 30 miles east of Cleveland, Ohio), is the first Earth-bound robotic telescope accessible to the public in the U.S. You can access the telescope by filing a request through http://astrwww .astr.cwru.edu/Nassau/nassau.html.
The robotic telescope provides two ways of viewing images. The primary viewing mode will be deeper images taken with main observing instrumentation of the telescope. The other is a quick look through a finder telescope. These quick images will be posted in real time to let you see where the telescope is pointed by the main observation request. You will need to provide the position of the object to be observed. This information is available through online astronomy catalogues, also linked to the site. The telescope operates only at night, but not during inclement weather.
The robotic telescope is composed of the telescope and associated instrumentation (camera and finder-guider), weather station, weather camera, and power controls for the dome. Each has its own software, which feeds information into a master control program. A computer-based scheduler coordinates the requests and returns the completed images and information to the telescope users. A camera trained on Polaris (the North Star) is linked to the telescope in the direction of Lake Erie. If the Polaris monitor generates an all-clear signal for 30 minutes straight, the master controller will instruct the dome to open. Weather is monitored every two minutes, with the dome closing in event of high humidity, rain, snow, extreme cold, or winds of 40 mph, any of which may damage the telescope's mirrors.