Campus Briefs
CMU voices: Now heard online.
Supercollaboration Yields Big Computing Cycles.
A cross-campus consortium of scientists, researchers, and technologists at
Princeton University (NJ) have pooled their resources to acquire
and share an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer on
campus. CIO Betty Leydon comments on the collaboration: “Having OIT, the
Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering, the School of
Engineering and Applied Science, and several individual faculty members all
contribute to the cost shows that we all recognize the value of working together
to build the best possible IT infrastructure to support research at Princeton.”
Since its launch ceremony in late November, the system stands ready to tackle
complex computations for diverse projects in areas like astrophysics, engineering,
chemistry, and plasma physics.
Floating to the Top.
The
Tokyo Institute of Technology or Tokyo Tech (Japan) will
soon be home to one of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The machine is
expected to easily secure one of the 10 highest positions on the Top500 List (based
on the LINPACK Benchmark)—initially realizing 85 trillion floating-point
operations per second (teraFLOPS), with the potential to speed past a dazzling
100 trillion teraFLOPS threshold after adjustments for peak performance. Standard
industry components and technology expertise from partners including
Advanced
Micro Devices,
Sun Microsystems, and
NEC
factor into a rapid rollout this coming spring.
Great Hopes for HOPI.
As part of its mission to build an advanced network infrastructure that will meet
the rising expectations of the global research and education community,
Internet2
is operating the Hybrid Optical and Packet Infrastructure (HOPI) nationwide testbed
that investigates next-generation optical and packet technologies. The latest
milestone reached: a demonstration of on-demand optical networking that connected
three radio telescopes in far-flung corners of the world to make electronic Very-Long-Baseline
Interferometry (eVLBI) observations such as precise measurements of continental
drift or motions of the moon… Now, that’s
big science.
Anita Borg Vision Award.
UC-Berkeley’s Pamela Samuelson capped 2005 with honors, receiving the
year’s prestigious Anita
Borg Institute Women of Vision Award for Social Impact, for her work bridging
technology, the law, and community. Prof. Samuelson holds a joint appointment
in the School of Information Management Systems and the School of Law.
Polling on Campus Values.
At
Carnegie Mellon University (PA), the twice-yearly “Campus
Conversations” poll uses online deliberative polling to determine student
opinions about life, learning, and values. The next campuswide poll, to be held
in the spring, will incorporate the PICOLA online deliberative polling software
developed at CMU.
Warning: There are No Secrets Here!
Stevens Institute of Technology’s (NJ) Assistant VP for
Student Services David Sheridan, a frequent speaker on financial aid, is determined
to protect the innocent and most vulnerable in the college admissions and financial
aid process: He’s presenting a strong public message to families seeking
financial aid, urging them to take advantage of routine, free services and not
fall prey to consultants who, while often charging exorbitant fees, claim they
can guide clients in the “secrets” of financial aid.