Dr. Dobb's Journal July 2002
Stanford junior Daniel Wright was named champion of TopCoder's Third Annual Collegiate Challenge, a programming contest carrying a $100,000 grand prize. The contest brought together 512 contestants for three rounds of tournament-style eliminations. Although semifinalists included students from 10 different colleges, this is the second consecutive year that Stanford has taken the prize.
The competition, which judged participants' ability to create algorithms and submit bug-free Java code within the constraints of a tight time limit, was cospon- sored by Sun. The contestants were drawn from the highest ranked participants in TopCoder's ongoing online matches.
Wright isn't yet sure what he wants to do after graduation, but he'll likely be hearing from the corporate sponsors who pay TopCoder (http://www.topcoder.com/) for access to the company's database of programming talent. However, he already has some idea of what he'll do with the prize money. "First thing is, I'm going to pay off all the student loans," he says. "It's very nice...it's enough money that it can make a significant difference in my life for a long time."
In and around all the hype, a few real, publicly available web services have begun to appear. The SkyQuery site, for instance, uses XML and SOAP to combine data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which resides on several different astronomy databases, into a single "virtual astronomy." The XML wrappings allow data sharing even though the various archives map the sky in different wavelengths and use different taxonomies.
"Using SkyQuery, professional and amateur astronomers can...run combined queries predicated on attributes in the different archives and including advanced features such as cross matching and dropout elimination," explains the project web site (http://contest.eraserver.com/SkyQuery/).
Google also generated a great deal of interest when it released a beta version of its web APIs (http://www.google.com/apis/). An early service to take advantage of these APIs was developed by Cape Clear, a company providing development tools for web services. Cape Clear's "GoogleMail" service (http://capescience.capeclear.com/google/index.shtml) allows searches conducted via e-mail: You can mail search terms to google@capeclear.com, and an e-mail listing the top 10 results will automatically be sent back. "It's not going to take the world by storm, but maybe it'll kick start some thought processes," the company's web site suggests.
Meanwhile, the W3C's Web Services Architecture Working Group (http://www.w3c.org/2002/ws/arch/) is working to define web services and standardize its interfaces.
ASCI White, previously the fastest computer in the world, has been trounced by a new Japanese supercomputer called the "Earth Simulator." Built by NEC, the Earth Simulator is capable of running at 35 teraflops — some five times faster than ASCI White.
However, the new supercomputer actually uses fewer processors than its predecessor. Earth Simulator employs 5104 processors, taking up a building about the size of four tennis courts, while ASCI White uses 8192 processors. Earth Simulator gets its performance edge from an architecture that is highly optimized to the task of analyzing climate changes. NEC calls it a "vector parallel" architecture, combining parallel processing with vector processing.
Earth Simulator is located in Yokohama, Japan, at the Earth Simulator Center (http://www.es.jamstec.go.jp/esc/eng/). It took five years and cost about $400 million to build. It is expected to retain the title of the world's fastest supercomputer until IBM's Blue Gene comes online, in about two years.
Dorothy E. Denning is the winner of this year's Augusta Ada Lovelace Award, bestowed by the Association for Women in Computing on individuals who have either attained "outstanding scientific and technical achievement," or who have rendered "extraordinary services and contributions" to the community of women in computing. Past honorees include Adele Mildred Koss, Jean Sammet, and Grace Murray Hopper.
Denning is the author of Information Warfare and Security, along with three other books and 120 articles, and a professor of computer science at Georgetown University. Her web site is at http://www.cs.georgetown.edu/~denning/.
The award was presented on June 15th in Bethesda, Maryland. Details are available at http://www.awc-hq.org/lovelace/2002.html.