Dr. Dobb's Journal June 2001
The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) supported by Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and a host of other companies, has been submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for acceptance as a standard protocol. WSDL is an XML-based "grammar for describing network services as collections of communication endpoints capable of exchanging messages." WSDL supports Microsoft's .NET implementations as well as the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). For further information, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/.
Getting the federal government to pony up funds for scientific research is a familiar challenge for the scientific community. Prospects for historical funding levels appear to be shaky, at least in the areas of physical sciences and engineering. The White House's proposed science budget includes significant increases for the National Institutes of Health (14 percent) for biomedical research, but a 2 percent decrease for the National Science Foundation (NSF), a 3 percent decrease for the Department of Energy (DOE), and an 11 percent decrease for the U.S. Geological Survey. As Donald Kennedy points out in the March 2001 issue of Science magazine, scientific research is increasingly interdisciplinary, and funding cuts to the NSF, which provides a lot of funding to computer scientists and mathematicians, could reverberate into other disciplines. Likewise, an article in The Economist (March 21, 2001) states that "part of the scientists' case is that bankrolling the NIH at the expense of the NSF is counter-productive, because the biomedical sciences have drawn heavily on advances in physics, chemistry, and information science." Another disturbing aspect of the emerging science policy is that the positions of the Director of the Office of Science and Technology and the President's Science Adviser still have not been filled.
With the increasing complexity of integrated circuits, it's getting harder and harder to keep up with Moore's Law (which states that processor performance and memory capacity double every two years). A manufacturing technique called "Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography" (EUVL) may be the best bet to extend Moore's Law. Charles Gwyn, program director at the EUV Limited Liability, a consortium funded by companies such as Intel, Motorola, AMD, IBM, Micron, and Infineon, says that "optical lithography is nearing the end of the economical manufacturing cycle and a new solution is required."
In EUVL, which has its roots in research conducted at Lawrence Livermore and Sandia Labs, a high-powered laser is focused on a droplet of xenon to produce plasma. The resulting extreme ultraviolet radiation is collected into a narrow arc and focused on the mask (the plate that holds the circuit pattern and works like a negative in the projection process). With circuit feature sizes getting down to 70 nanometers in the next few years, EUVL looks promising. EUVL is not the only next-generation lithography process in the running — X-ray, electron beam, or ion beam lithography may yet prove to be more cost effective.
The National Reconnaissance Office (http://www.nro.gov/) will spend about $25 billion over the next 20 years to launch a new generation of spy satellites. And companies such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon will be employing thousands of engineers to build the new system, which will be able to provide views of the ground under total cloud cover or dark of night.
Reportedly, the project will require 5000 engineers, technicians, and programmers over the next five years for initial design and development. Details of the project are classified, but the plan is to start launching the satellites in 2005. Boeing has reportedly opened a recruitment office in Silicon Valley to find technical workers for the project.
The "Gobierno del Distrito Federal," the Mexican equivalent of the District of Columbia, has adopted Linux as its standard operating system. According to Jose Barberan, the Technical Director for the capital administration, the government expects to save "tens of millions of pesos" by avoiding Windows and standardizing on the open-source Linux OS (http://www.reforma.com/ciudad_de_mexico/ articulo/078598/). The transition to Linux will take "one to two years" and be implemented first for tax collection and new database systems for the Mexican transit system. The savings from the switch to Linux will be used to fund antipoverty and other social programs, according to the District chief, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. Linux is gaining popularity among governments. The People's Republic of China also announced recently that it would make Linux its OS standard.
Sony, Toshiba, and IBM have teamed up to design an architecture that will effectively deliver a supercomputer on a single IC. According to a statement from IBM, the project is code-named "Cell," and "the new microchips will employ the world's most advanced research technologies and chip-making techniques, including copper wires, silicon-on-insulator transistors, and low-K dielectric insulation, with features smaller than 0.10 microns; 1000 times thinner than a human hair." The companies plan on investing more than $400 million in the Cell project, which will be based in Austin, Texas. The result will be "consumer devices more powerful than IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer."
Researchers at Dartmouth College have developed a database repository of images from human brain scans, and will make it freely available to researchers and educators worldwide. The National Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Data Center was established with a grant of $4.7 million over five years from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dartmouth computer scientists Javed Aslam and Daniel Rockmore are developing sophisticated search engines and image analysis tools to allow researchers to fully scrutinize the brain scans. The first data sets have been released on CD-ROM, and more will be released as more images are collected and converted to a standard format. For more information, see http://www.fmridc.org/.