Google has announced that it will start to offer broadband service that can route Internet traffic at 1 Gbps–double the speed of most U.S. cable and telephone companies–in certain test markets. By highlighting a super-fast broadband network, the company underlines its push for enhanced consumer applications and demonstrates support for the Obama administration’s proposal to make broadband Internet access available to all U.S. homes. The announcement is one in a spate of moves Google has made “to help the Internet juggernaut leapfrog the existing technology establishment to position itself for the future,” according to the Washington Post. This week the company debuted Google Buzz, which intends to consolidate various social networks into a single collective. Google says that such efforts are intended to spur innovation in hopes of expanding Internet use, although these initiatives may come at the expense of the company’s central Internet search focus.
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Australia’s federal government has been given sensitive data from utilities, banks, and other organizations for the Critical Infrastructure Protection Modeling and Assessment (CIPMA) program. “Identifying, tracking the cascading effects of [critical infrastructure (CI)], and quantifying these consequences is a key rationale for establishing the CIPMA program,” says a spokesperson from the Federal Attorney General’s department. “Direct relationships with industry means that there is a high level of trust to enable the provision of accurate data for modeling and analysis.” Approximately 4 TB of CI data will be warehoused in central databases, making it unnecessary to retrieve information from knowledge experts who may not be accessible in a disaster. System dynamic models are employed to analyze stock and flow data in CI, such as network connectivity and the energy output of generators, to produce an amalgamated output to be fed into a People, Building, and Infrastructure profile. Data is then deconstructed into demographic, economic, and business profiles, and into statistical divisions to generate novel disruption footprints. The CIPMA program is one of numerous actions that authorities have recently taken to counter increasing numbers of cyberthreats.
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China is increasingly worried about threats to its security and political stability posed by the Internet. Both Chinese and U.S. political analysts and technology experts say China’s attempts to tightly control the Internet are partly fueled by the conviction that the West is trying to foment unrest in China and weaken the country from a military standpoint through the use of a wide range of communications innovations. U.S. experts say China’s cyberdefenses are more riddled with holes than those of the United States. New policies are being set up to replace foreign hardware and software with domestic systems, while officials also are broadening the reach and resources of state-controlled media outlets so they reign over Chinese cyberspace with their blogs, videos, and news. Unrest in Xinjiang and elsewhere, allegedly stoked by online warfare from the West, has prompted Chinese leaders to step up new efforts, including the closure of thousands of Web sites, tightening censorship of text messages for objectionable content, and planning a convergence of China’s Internet, phone, and state TV networks. They also are nurturing domestic alternatives to foreign computer technologies and foreign-based Web sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
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Microsoft Research India announced its involvement in the Unique Identification of India (UIDAI) project at TechVista 2010 in Bangalore. The project seeks to provide valid identities to India’s population of more than a billion people. “I am looking forward to working with researchers on technologies like multilingual computing and biometrics,” says UIDAI chairperson Nandan Nilekani. Microsoft Research India also launched a portal for the computer science community called ResearchAndYou.com. The portal is designed to bridge the gap between computer science researchers and the large pool of potential research talent in India. The Web site will provide students with an interactive forum where they can connect with researchers to ask questions and explore research opportunities. The site also will act as a single source of information for resources in different disciplines. TechVista 2010 also brought together a panel of ACM A.M. Turing award recipients, including Barbara Liskov, Tony Hoare, Butler Lampson, and Tony Hey, to discuss the future of computing.
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University of California, Berkeley researchers recently discussed their progress in finding new parallel programming models for multicore processor architectures. Parallel Computing Lab professor Kurt Keutzer described seven applications researchers have produced with the new Pallas parallel methodology, and noted that work has started on a more general parallelism framework called Copperhead that could be used by a broader spectrum of programmers. The Pallas approach involves graduate students implementing complex algorithms from domain experts. They start by producing software architectures specific to the algorithms that maximize their employment of computational and structural patterns, then map those architectures on to parallel processors. The Copperhead framework being co-developed with NVIDIA concentrates on producing rapid executable code for data-parallel applications. It will interoperate with both NVIDIA’s Cuda and OpenCL environments.
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