Dr. Dobb's Journal December, 2004
By Shannon CochranIBM claims its Blue Gene/L has wrested the title of World's Fastest Supercomputer away from NEC's Earth Simulator, which has held the title for the last two years. Earth Simulator blazed past IBM's ASCI White in 2002 to claim the highest spot on the TOP500 list, a set of supercomputer rankings published biannually since 1993.
The Top500 list uses the Linpack benchmark to rank supercomputers. Earth Simulator clocks in at 35.86 teraflops—that's 35.86 trillion operations per second—but IBM says Blue Gene/L is already capable of 36.01 teraflops, even though the system is only in its prototype stage. It currently consists of 16,250 processors taking up eight racks of space, but will grow to 130,000 processors and 64 racks when it's installed in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. At that time—early 2005, according to schedule—IBM predicts Blue Gene/L will have a peak performance of 360 teraflops.
Blue Gene/L will be used to model cosmological phenomena including the behavior of stellar binary pairs, to simulate laser-plasma interactions, and to investigate the behavior and aging of high explosives. Though IBM isn't hesitating to claim bragging rights, the benchmark results won't be official until the TOP500 list is updated in November. For more information, see http://www.research.ibm.com/bluegene/.
Richard Wallace's chatbot A.L.I.C.E. (Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity) won this year's Loebner prize for human-like conversation. Founded in 1990 by Hugh Loebner, the Loebner Prize honors software designed to pass the Turing Test—to produce output indistinguishable from what a human might produce. A grand prize of $100,000 and a gold medal awaits the first program to succeed at this task. Although the grand prize is still unclaimed, an annual prize of $2000 and a bronze medal is awarded each year to the most human-like conversational software.
A.L.I.C.E. won the prize in 2000 and 2001, but lost in 2002 to Kevin Copple's Ella (see http://www.ellaz.com/AI/), and in 2003, to Juergen Pirner's Jabberwock (see http://www.abenteuermedien.de/ jabberwock/). Both of these systems seek to "learn" from previous conversations. In contrast, A.L.I.C.E. is largely stateless, instead relying on keywords and sentence patterns to parse input in to one of 25,000 predefined categories for which it has stock responses. The A.L.I.C.E. Artificial Intelligence Foundation web page is at http://www.alicebot.org/.
Because it rewards programs like A.L.I.C.E., which make no attempt to construct a complex language comprehension model, the Loebner prize has inspired controversy in the AI field. In 1995, Marvin Minsky called it an "obnoxious and unproductive annual publicity campaign." The Loebner Prize web page is at http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html.
The Free Standards Group has released Version 2.0 of the Linux Standards Base, a specification designed to prevent fragmentation among Linux distributions. The latest version adds a new application binary interface for C++ as well as support for new hardware architectures, including the IBM PowerPC 64, S390, and S390X platforms, and Advanced Micro Device's 64-bit Opteron chip. Support has also been added for pthreads and the Posix 1003.1-2001 and SUSv3 specifications.
A number of vendors have pledged to support the LSB, including: AMD, Conectiva, Covalent Technologies, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Linux International, Mandrakesoft, Miracle Linux (which bills itself as "the fastest growing provider of Linux in Japan"), Novell, The Open Group, Progeny, Red Flag, Red Hat, Sun Wah Linux Limited, Thizlinux, and Turbolinux. The industry consortium OSDL, which focuses on Linux adoption in the enterprise, has also thrown its weight behind the LSB. See http://www.linuxbase.org/ for the full specification.
Robotics experts at the University of the West of England in Bristol are building a self-sustaining robot that generates electricity by catching and digesting flies. EcoBot II is the latest in a line of robots to generate power via "digestive" processes: The first, "Gastronome," was created by Stuart Wilkinson at the University of South Florida in 2000, and actually consumed E. coli bacteria.
Currently, EcoBot must be hand-fed a diet of rotten fruit or dead flies, but researchers hope to eventually make the robot predatory, attracting flies with the scent of sewage. In documentation posted at http://www.ias.uwe.ac.uk/, the team notes: "By judicious choice of different food/flora combinations, the techniques envisaged will be capable of exploiting any organic food source on land and sea."
The Trellis Project, led by University of Alberta Assistant Professor Paul Lu, has developed an infrastructure to create virtual supercomputers that span many different universities. The aggregated power of the virtual supercomputer can then tackle problems that would otherwise be too large for one research group or institution. Its most recent project was to combine the computational power of about 4000 computers across Canada to solve 20 years worth of different computational chemistry problems in just 48 hours. In particular, project leaders were examining how a protein folds on itself; improper protein folding contributes to Alzheimer's and mad cow diseases. For a technical description of the Trellis Project; see http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~paullu/ Trellis/Papers/tsi.hpcs.2004.pdf.
Donald J. Smith and his father, the late Frank J. Smith have been awarded the 2004 Ig Noble Prize in Engineering for patenting the combover (U.S. Patent #4,022,227), "a method for styling hair to cover bald areas using only the individual's own hair, comprising separating the hair on the head into several substantially equal sections, taking the hair on one section, and placing it over the bald area, then taking the hair on another section and placing it over the first section, and finally taking the hair on the remaining sections and placing it over the other sections whereby the bald area will be completely covered" (http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/ netahtml/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=4,022,227.WKU.&OS=PN/4,022,227&RS=PN/4,022,227). Ig Noble prizes are awarded annually and "intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative—and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology" (http://www.improb.com/ig/ig-top.html).