Dr. Dobb's Journal February 2003
Reports and counter-reports have been flying on the utility of open-source software within government agencies. First, MITRE—a not-for-profit organization that runs research and development centers for the Department of Defense—released a report concluding that the DOD already relies heavily on free and open-source software, and should actively encourage the adoption of technologies such as Linux, Apache, and the GCC compiler. A month later, the Initiative for Software Choice—an industry group backed by Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel—responded by questioning the report's premises and warning the DOD away from "viral, restrictive" licenses like the GPL.
Still, some federal agencies may be leaning towards the open-source side of the argument. The National Technology Alliance, a program launched in 1987 to discover and guide commercial technology that meets federal needs, is piloting an Open Source Program to put government project leaders in contact with open-source software communities. The NTA has so far tapped ImageLinks, a company specializing in open-source mapping software, and the Open Source Software Institute (http://www.oss-institute.org/) to help create the program.
The effort to define a single, standardized UNIX once again took a step forward with a joint announcement by ISO and The Open Group that the IEEE POSIX specifications and the Single UNIX Specification have been merged. The joint revision, formally dubbed ISO/IEC 9945:2002, began in 1999 (the 30th anniversary of the UNIX system). The specification gives base definitions; a description of system interfaces, the shell, and utilities; and a concluding rationale. For more information, see http://www.opengroup.org/.
IBM has won a new contract from the U.S. Department of Energy to build two new supercomputers—ASCI Purple to simulate the aging of nuclear weapons, and Blue Gene/L for a range of scientific applications. IBM says that "the two systems will have more combined processing power than the combined power of all 500 machines on the recently announced TOP500 List of Supercomputers."
ASCI Purple will be the fifth generation of IBM's ASCI systems. It will run on a cluster of IBM's POWER-based eServers and custom storage systems, and perform calculations at speeds up to 100 teraflops. It will primarily serve the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) Stockpile Stewardship Program.
The more ambitious Blue Gene/L will be at the service of research labs at Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore. Blue Gene/L will span 65,536 Linux nodes (each with two processors) and is expected to operate at about 200 teraflops, with theoretical peak performance of 367 teraflops. It's designed to be able to process data transmissions from 10,000 weather satellites—though turbulence simulations will be only one of its duties. Other applications include predicting the behavior of high explosives and performing life sciences calculations. Blue Gene/L will also incorporate some of IBM's autonomic technology, in the form of a "checkpoint/restart mechanism" for recovery from individual component failure.
A technical overview of Blue Gene/L is available at http://www.sc2002.org/ paperpdfs/pap.pap207.pdf.
The FDA has, for the first time, approved the use of robots in heart surgery—specifically in mitral-valve repair surgery. Other robot-assisted procedures are undergoing clinical trials, and some cardiologists are reporting that patients who undergo surgery with robot guidance recover almost twice as quickly as patients who undergo the traditional operations.
Dr. Michael Argenziano, director of robotic cardiac surgery at New York Presbyterian Hospital, is spearheading a number of clinical trials with the aid of a robotic surgical system called "Da Vinci." Manufactured by the Intuitive Surgical company, Da Vinci consists of a surgical arm unit with detachable instruments designed to operate through keyhole incisions. A minute camera relays high-definition 3D images back to the human surgeon, who controls the instruments from a console located outside the operating room.
In a description of the Da Vinci system at http://www.masc.cc/davinci.htm, Argenziano suggests that the next advances in robotic cardiac surgery will depend more on peripheral technology—such as better cardiovascular support devices or more stable and maneuverable cameras—than on improvements in the robots themselves.