Dr. Dobb's Journal September 2003
The International Consortium for Eiffel has relaunched the International Eiffel Programming Contest after a two-year hiatus. The "Eiffel Class Struggle 2003" judges applications and libraries on the basis of innovation and value to the community, portability among Eiffel compilers, portability among platforms, ease of installation, ease of use, elegance of construction, readability, clarity of documentation, use of the Design-by-Contract principles, and amount of apparent effort put into the code.
You can submit any number of entries. Applications must target Linux, FreeBSD, or Windows NT/XP (and garner more points if they target all three). All source code must be freely licensed for public use.
A total of nine prizes are available for winning entries. Three cash prizes of $1400, $800, and $400 will be distributed; software prizes and conference registrations will also be awarded. Entries are due by October 31, with results announced in December or January. For more information, see http://www.eiffel-nice.org/eiffelstruggle/ 2003/index.html.
The 21st edition of the "Top500" list of the world's fastest supercomputers has been released at the International Supercomputer Conference in Heidelberg, Germany. Japan's Earth Simulator still tops the list. Its 35.86 Teraflops-per-second performance (as measured by the Linpack benchmark) is more than twice that of the second-place ASCI Q system at Los Alamos National Lab. At 13.88 Tflops/sec., ASCI Q is still the only other computer to break 10 Tflops/sec.
Most of the systems on the list were built by Hewlett-Packard or IBM. The number of ranking supercomputers using Intel processors doubled in the last six months; a related surge in the number of clusters was also reported. The Intel Xeon-based MCR cluster at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, manufactured by Linux Networx, came in third—the highest position a cluster has ever attained. The score was, however, partially due to a technicality: ASCI White, the fourth-ranking supercomputer on the list, had too heavy a workload to be tested under the revised Linpack implementation, and was scored by an old measurement. If the same benchmark implementations were used for both systems, ASCI White would probably outperform the MCR cluster.
While 92 percent of all the Top500 supercomputers were produced in the United States, only 51 percent are installed in the U.S. Seven of the top 10 systems are in the U.S. A new Japanese system built by Fujitsu and installed at Japan's National Aerospace Lab debuted at seventh place. The tenth place position is held by an HP system at France's Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique. The complete list is at http://www.top500.org/lists/2003/06/.
The Object Management Group's Analysis and Design Task Force has completed its work on Version 2.0 of the Unified Modeling Language. The language update consists of separate UML 2.0 Infrastructure, Superstructure, Object Constraint Language, and Diagram Interchange specifications, which also had to be correlated with a revision of the MetaObject Facility spec.
According to the OMG, UML 2.0 has simpler syntax and semantics, and a more organized structure. The language has gained a first-class extension mechanism so you can define your own metaclasses, and it now has built-in support for component-based development. The OMG also promises that UML 2.0 will do a better job representing relationships, improving modeling of inheritance, composition and aggregation, and state machines. Also, improved behavioral modeling provides better encapsulation and scalability, allows better mapping of activity graphs to state machines, and improves Sequence diagram structure. For more information, see http://www.omg.org/technology/uml/index.htm.
The U.S. Department of Defense has announced plans to migrate to IPv6 as part of its net-centric warfare strategy. As of October 1, all new networking equipment bought by the DOD must support IPv6, while retaining backwards compatibility with IPv4 systems. An IPv6 testbed for the new equipment is in place, according to the Defense Information Systems Agency. The Pentagon estimates that, by the year 2008, almost all Internet traffic will be carried by IPv6.
The IPv6 announcement is part of the DOD's Global Information Grid program—an initiative to link the military's sensors, weapons, aircraft, central computer systems, and the digital devices carried by its troops into a flexible distributed network. To support this project, the DOD requires not just many more IP addresses, but also IPv6's updated security and quality of service features. See http://www.defenselink.mil/ releases/2003/nr20030613-0097.html.