Dr. Dobb's Journal July, 2005
Los Alamos National Labs and the Eclipse Foundation have announced the Parallel Tools Platform Project (http://www.eclipse.org/ptp/), an Eclipse project aimed at creating better open-source software tools for parallel computers. Los Alamos will lead the project and collaborate with organizations to develop an open-source platform that lets their products operate on a wide range of parallel computing platforms. Plans call for support for a wide range of parallel architectures, an integrated parallel debugger, and developing an infrastructure to assist in the integration of other parallel tools. A separate, but related, component of the project will add Fortran support to the Eclipse IDE. A key project goal of the project is to transform current practice into best practice for parallel application development, while providing support for software vendors to bring their proprietary computing tools into the larger open-source computing environment.
Chinese and Russian students took the top honors in this year's ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/). Students from Shanghai Jiaotong University—the "home team," as the challenge was held in Shanghai—solved eight out of ten problems in the five hours given. Five other teams managed to solve seven problems, and were ranked in order of the time taken to complete their solutions: Moscow State University students won second place, and a team from the St. Petersburg Institute of Fine Mechanics and Optics took third. The U.S.'s highest-ranked team, the University of Illinois, solved five problems. According to the ACM, tens of thousands of students from 1582 universities in 71 countries competed in this year's contest, and 78 teams made it to the finals. The competition, sponsored by IBM, offers $10,000 to the champion team and lesser prizes to the runners-up.
In a milestone for scientific grid computing, eight major computing centers successfully completed a challenge to sustain a continuous data flow of 600 megabytes per second on average for 10 days from CERN in Geneva, Switzerland to seven sites in U.S. and Europe. The total amount of data transmitted during this challenge—500 terabytes—would take about 250 years to download using a typical 512 kilobit/second connection. This exercise was part of a series of challenges designed to test the global computing infrastructure for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) being built at CERN to study the fundamental properties of subatomic particles and forces. The goal of LHC computing is to use a world-wide grid infrastructure of computing centers to provide sufficient computational, storage, and network resources to fully exploit the scientific potential of LHC experiments. During the LHC operation, the major computing centers involved in the Grid infrastructure will collectively store the data from all four LHC experiments. Scientists working at over 200 other computing facilities in universities and research laboratories around the globe will access the data via the Grid.
Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley have created a superlens that can overcome a limitation in physics that has historically constrained the resolution of optical images. Using a thin film of silver as the lens and ultraviolet light, a team led by associate professor Xiang Zhang recorded the images of an array of nanowires and the word "NANO" onto an organic polymer at a resolution of about 60 nanometers. In comparison, current optical microscopes can only make out details down to 1/10 the diameter of a red blood cell, or about 400 nanometers. The breakthrough opens the door to technological advances in nanoengineering that could lead to DVDs that store the entire contents of the Library of Congress, and computer processors that can quickly search through such a huge volume of data, the researchers said. With current optical microscopes, scientists can only make out relatively large structures within a cell. With a superlens, optical microscopes could one day reveal the movements of individual proteins traveling along the microtubules that make up a cell's skeleton, the researchers said.
Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a method known as "scattered photon extraction" (SPE) to get significantly more light from white LEDs (light-emitting diodes) without requiring more energy. Commercially available white LEDs combine a light-emitting semiconductor with a phosphor, a rare earth compound, to produce visible white light. However, more than half of the light produced by the phosphor is diverted back toward the LED where much of it is lost due to absorption. This reduces the LED's overall light output. A research group, led by Nadarajah Narendran, developed a method to extract the backscattered photons by moving the phosphor away from the semiconductor and shaping the LED lens geometry. When combined, these changes let the photons that would typically be absorbed inside the LED escape as visible light. Compared to commercial white LEDs, prototypes of the new SPE LED technology produced 30-60 percent more light output and luminous efficacy-light output (lumens) per watt of electricity. This means more visible light is produced without increasing energy consumption.
While Sun has yet to announce a firm date for its open-source Solaris release, the company has established a five-person community advisory board responsible for guiding the fledgling OpenSolaris community (http://www.opensolaris.org/) toward self governance. Three of the five board members were appointed by Sun, and two elected by the pilot OpenSolaris community. Along with technology evangelist Simon Phipps and senior Solaris engineer Caspar Dik, Sun chose Roy Fielding, cofounder of the Apache HTTP Server Project. Fielding also serves on the board of directors of The Apache Software Foundation. The elected members of the board are Solaris developers Al Hopper and Rich Teer. The board is hammering out the details of how OpenSolaris source code will be managed and updated. Meanwhile, Sun is delaying its OpenSolaris release until the provenance of the code can be fully established. The code will be available under Sun's Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which Phipps describes as "the Mozilla Public License but in template form." Like the MPL, the CDDL requires that the source of any modifications be made available, but allows executables to be distributed under a different license.