Microsoft Live Labs researchers have developed Pivot, a tool designed to visually organize large data sets. Pivot presents data in the form of several images accompanied by textual data. Users can zoom into the images to study individual pieces of data, or zoom out to see items grouped according to certain criteria. Data collections can contain a few images with static data attached, or they can be large and connected to a feed of changing data. Pivot is based on Microsoft’s Seadragon, software designed for manipulating large amounts of visual information. Users can make their own collections of data by converting images to the Deep Zoom format used by Seadragon, and annotate them using a format based on extensible markup language. Pivot also could provide a better way to sort through Internet search results, because users could sort through thousands of results visually, instead of just looking a list of the top 10 search results.
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The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s John Shalf describes parallel programming languages as tools designed to program systems with multiple processors and thus multiple concurrent instruction threads. He projects that all future computer speed upgrades will be derived from parallelism, as chips’ clock frequencies are no longer increasing. Shalf says that a program that runs in parallel can be created using a sequential programming language, and notes that some of the most commonly used parallel programming strategies exploit the syntax of existing sequential languages. He is concerned “that serial languages do not provide the necessary semantic guarantees about locality of effect that is necessary for efficient parallelism. Ornamenting the language to insert the semantics of such guarantees … is arduous, prone to error, and quite frankly not very intuitive.” Shalf expects a resurgence in implicit parallelism and constructs formulated from functional languages, and says the most important development looking ahead is the migration of parallelism notions from an academic problem to a mainstream challenge. “This means it is even more imperative that we train future computer scientists to solve problems using parallelism from the get-go,” he says.
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Inspired by the sandfish lizard, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are collaborating with Northwestern University’s Paul Umbanhowar to develop a snake-like robot that can swim through sand. When the sandfish lizard is submerged in sand, the animal tucks its limbs into its sides and moves forward by wiggling from side to side. The researchers created a computer model of the sandfish lizard that showed a snake-like robot with seven body segments that could travel through a granular medium such as sand. The researchers built a robot that is 35 centimeters long and features seven aluminum segments linked by six motors, which are covered in spandex to prevent the motors from becoming jammed. When the robot undulates its body at a frequency similar to the lizard, it can move forward at speeds of up to 0.3 body lengths per wave cycle. The team would have to add more jointed segments to match the 0.4 body lengths per cycle that a submerged lizard can achieve.
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At the recent Usenix Annual Technical Conference, Georgia Institute of Technology researcher Vytautus Valancius described Transit Protocol, a system that would let cloud users customize the path their data takes as it travels through cloud computing platforms. Valancius says Transit Protocol enables users to set a path that matches the needs of a specific application. For example, he says Transit Protocol could let cloud providers connect to a variety of Internet service providers, and create a specially designed interface for customers to manage their access. Valancius says Transit protocol is currently being used to power several academic experiments at sites across the United States. “As cloud platforms mature to host increasingly complex and demanding applications, customers will want a greater degree of flexibility and control over these resources,” notes University of British Columbia professor Andrew Warfield.
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Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) researchers working on the eMadrid project are studying how to use three-dimensional (3D) virtual worlds for teaching. Three-dimensional virtual worlds must include teaching elements such as a training program, with a sequence of activities for students to acquire knowledge, as well as a methodology to evaluate previously defined learning results, to become a learning platform, says UC3M professor Carlos Delgado Kloos. “The 3D learning environments are not only appropriate for transmission of knowledge, but also for teaching competencies, and if they also include augmented reality elements for the manipulation of a three-dimensional world with real physical elements, even better results are obtained, as the barrier of a fictional world immersion is reduced,” Kloos says. The eMadrid project is working to achieve these standards by collaborating with researchers from other universities, including Autonoma, Complutense, Politecnica, Rey Juan Carlos, and the National Distance Education University of Spain. The researchers are developing defined standards and best practices for implementing teaching environments in 3D virtual platforms.
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U.S. President Barack Obama today will sign a memorandum that makes 500 megahertz of wireless spectrum, currently controlled by the federal government and private companies, available for auction. The memorandum is part of an administration effort to nearly double the wireless communications spectrum available for commercial use over the next 10 years. Most of the spectrum would be designated for commercial use in mobile broadband and similar applications, and proceeds from the auction would help finance better communications systems for public safety agencies. About 45 percent of the spectrum to be auctioned will come from federal agencies that will be asked to give up allocations that they are not using or could share. The remaining spectrum will come from unused spectrum already scheduled for auction or from broadcasters who would be offered incentives to relinquish part of their airwaves. “The administration’s strong actions on wireless broadband will move us significantly toward sustainable economic success, robust investment, and global leadership in innovation,” says Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski.
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European researchers working on the StratusLab project are developing software designed to improve distributed computing infrastructures in an effort to enable research and higher education organizations to pool computing resources. Trinity College Dublin (TCD) researchers are leading the development of a repository of virtual appliances that will make it easier to create grid systems. The virtual appliances repository is designed to facilitate the growth and availability of grid computing for researchers. “The StratusLab toolkit will make the grid easier to manage and will allow grids to tap into commercial cloud services to meet peak demands,” says TCD’s David O’Callaghan. “Later it will allow organizations that already provide a grid service to offer a cloud service to academic users, whilst retaining the many benefits of the grid approach.” The StratusLab project enhances the distributed computing infrastructure ecosystem by simplifying management, adding flexibility, and increasing maintainability, quality, energy efficiency, and resiliency of computing sites.
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The Magellan cloud computing testbed funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is dedicated to studying the advantages and disadvantages, in terms of cost and energy, of the cloud computing model as it applies to scientists working on government-funded initiatives. “What we’re exploring is the question of whether the DOE or other government agencies should be buying their own clusters … or whether those kinds of purchases should be done in a more consolidated way,” says the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Centers’ Kathy Yelick. She says the testbed’s areas of concentration in addition to genomics research will include applied mathematics, high-energy physics, and climate data analysis. In terms of the usefulness of the cloud to scientific computation, Yelick contends that “there’s a part of the workload in scientific computing that’s well-suited to the cloud, but it’s not the [high-performance computing] end, it’s really the bulk aggregate serial workload that often comes up in scientific computing that is not really the traditional arena of high-performance computing.” She observes that one of the findings Magellan has uncovered in its experiments is the fact that performance differences are evident even when operating fairly modest-sized applications across different cloud environments.
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Empa researchers have synthesized complex organic nanowires and attached them together with electrically conducting links, a development that could lead to the production of electronic and optoelectronic components. The researchers say the process for synthesizing organic nanowires is unique in that the substrate temperature, molecule flow, and substrate treatment can be precisely controlled to enable the organic nanowires to develop a previously unattained, perfectly monocrystalline structure. The process includes a step in which the nanowires growing on the surface are ornamented with silver nanoparticles by sputter-coating. The nanoparticles are bombarded with energetic ions, knocking off silver atoms that enter the gas phase and are deposited onto the nanowires. Finally, more nanowires are grown, due to the silver particles’ electrical contact with the original wires, which forms the basis of an electrical circuit on the nanometer scale. “This opens up the possibility of soon being able to manufacture organic semiconductor materials,” says Empa’s Pierangelo Groening.
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Researchers at the universities of Surrey and Birmingham have developed a voting system that integrates optical scanning, data processing, and encryption with the process of manually writing on a paper ballot. The Surrey/Birmingham system retains the use of a paper ballot that looks nearly identical to those currently in use, but with two key differences. First, the order of the candidates’ names is randomized and is not the same on every ballot as in current elections. Second, a perforated line will run down the middle of the paper ballot, with the candidates’ names on the left and the voting boxes on the right. Each voter, after casting their ballot, will use this perforation to tear the paper ballot in half. They then will use a shredder to destroy the left-hand half containing the list of candidates and feed the right-hand half into an optical scanner, which will immediately feed all the information to a central database that keeps a count of all votes cast. “Our system will combine the best of both worlds–providing secure electronic vote-counting that cuts the cost and complexity of running elections but doesn’t require big changes to the actual voting process,” Surrey professor James Heather.
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