Dr. Dobb's Journal February, 2005
After six years of development, the OASIS standards group has ratified the Universal Business Language (UBL) 1.0 specification (http://docs.oasis-open.org/ubl/cd-UBL-1.0/). UBL "is designed to provide a universally understood and recognized commercial syntax for legally binding business documents and to operate within a standard business framework such as ISO 15000 (ebXML)." It provides a library of XML schemas for common, reusable data components ("Address," "Item," and "Payment," for example); a set of XML schemas for business documents ("Order," "Dispatch Advice," "Invoice," and the like); and support for customization.
Google has launched the Google Scholar service, a new search facility that indexes academic research, including technical reports, preprints, abstracts, and peer-reviewed papers (http://scholar.google .com/). Participating groups include the ACM, IEEE, and the Online Computer Library Center. Google Scholar orders search results by relevance to your query. This ranking takes into account the full text of each article, along with the author, publication, and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. The search also analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results.
APL inventor Kenneth E. Iverson died in Toronto, Ontario at the age of 84. Among his distinctions were the U.S. National Medal of Technology and the Turing Award; he was also an IBM Fellow. It was as an assistant professor at Harvard in the 1950s that Iverson first began working on APL. The Iverson Notation, as it was originally known, was designed to express mathematical algorithms clearly and concisely.
At IBM in the 1960s, he and Adin D. Falkoff developed APL, short for "a programming language." In the early 1990s, Iverson and Roger Hui created the J language, which is based on APL as well as the FP and FL functional programming languages. Unlike APL, J requires no special character set; it uses ASCII characters for all primitives. Iverson worked with Jsoftware Inc. to document and promote this language.
Along with the National Medal of Technology and the Turing Award, Iverson was granted the Harry M. Goode Memorial Award, and was named a Computer Pioneer Charter Recipient by IEEE CS.
NEC's Earth Simulator, which topped the biannual Top500 rankings (http://www .top500.org/) of the world's most powerful supercomputers for two-and-a-half years, has finally lost its crown. The latest edition of the Top500 list puts IBM's Blue Gene/L in first place. Blue Gene/L—now located in Rochester, New York but destined for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California—clocked at 70.72 teraflops on the Linpack benchmark. IBM says it hopes to deliver a theoretical maximum of 360 teraflops next May, when the system is complete. It will comprise 64 racks carrying 65,000 dual-processor chips, but will consume only a fraction of the power that Earth Simulator requires.
The second-place supercomputer is also new: SGI's Columbia system at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, which performed at 51.87 teraflops. Columbia consists of 20 machines connected by InfiniBand. Each one has 512 processors and runs its own instance of Linux, although SGI is working to connect the machines into groups of four sharing an operating system.
Earth Simulator, a mammoth 32,500-square-foot system located in Yokohama, Japan, now holds third place on the Top500 list. That spot was formerly occupied by Virginia Tech's Mac-based System X, last year's surprise entry into the list. System X has since been upgraded to Apple Computer's Xserve G5 server, which improved its benchmark score by 19 percent; however, even its new 12.25 teraflop performance isn't enough to compete against the mightiest of the new supercomputers. System X has slipped to seventh place in the rankings. It's likely, however, that System X remains the winning system when performance is considered against price. It costs $5.2 million to deploy and $600,000 to upgrade to the Xserve G5—as compared to nearly $100 million for Blue Gene/L.
IBM, Intel, and NTT DoCoMo are promoting their "Trusted Mobile Platform," defining security-oriented hardware, software, and protocol requirements for mobile devices (http://www.trusted-mobile.org/). According to the companies, "The specification will help make advanced mobile devices/applications more secure and help protect against viruses and other threats...In addition, it defines a set of protocols that allow the security state of a device to be shared with other devices in the network, enabling device-level trust to be extended into the larger network."
NASA has awarded a $58 million grant to three professors at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute for the development and analysis of systems that are construction based, computer based, and logistical, respectively. Senior research scientist Wei Min Shen received $28 million for his "Modular, Multifunctional Reconfigurable Superbot" study, to build and analyze shape-shifting robot modules that are self reconfiguring and capable of autonomous connection to each other. John Damoulakis received $18.1 million for his "Fault-Aware, Modular, Reconfigurable Space Processor" project, to produce reliable space-computing systems capable of fault comprehension and self repair. Robert Neches received $15 million for "Coordinated Multisource Maintenance-on-Demand," which will examine ways to help the space agency use improved cost-benefit analysis as it relates to the expected requirements for equipment against the probability of malfunction.
The Classification System for Serial Criminal Patterns (CSSCP), a neural network-based system developed by computer scientists Tom Muscarello and Kamal Dahbur at DePaul University, examines crime case records, assigns numerical values to aspects of each crime (type of offense, perpetrator's gender, age, height, and type of weapon), then builds a descriptive profile of the crime. Unlike neural networks that require training, the CSSCP is based on Kohonen networks, which do not require training or human intervention. When CSSCP detects similarities between crimes, it compares the time and place to see if it is possible for the criminal to have committed both crimes.