Science & Engineering
- Purdue Builds New Campus Supercomputer in Less Than a Day
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5/7/2008
Staff members at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN had hoped to build the school's largest campus supercomputer in just a day Monday, May 5. But it didn't take that long. The team of 200 university employees, who started unpacking equipment boxes at 7 a.m., was done by lunch. According to a campus article, by 1 p.m. 500 of the 812 nodes that make up the high-performance computing cluster (HPCC) from Dell were already running 1,400 research jobs from across campus.
- Maple 12 Enhances Math Engine, Builds on Engineering Tools
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5/6/2008
Math software developer Maplesoft has released Maple 12, a long-anticipated update to the company's flagship math application for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and Solaris. The new version features an enhanced mathematics engine, new tools for engineers, and features that are designed to make the program easier to use in instructional settings.
- Strangeloop Device Addresses Web App Performance Pains
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5/6/2008
Strangeloop Networks has introduced a product the company is billing as the first appliance designed specifically to accelerate enterprise applications in service-oriented architectures. The new WS1000 Web Services Accelerator is aimed at the growing number of organizations employing Web services to integrate disparate applications and databases, to extend their mainframe applications and to deal with performance challenges associated with dynamic Web apps.
- OpenSolaris and NetBeans Featured at CommunityOne
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5/5/2008
Sun Microsystems plans to make several product and partner announcements today at its CommunityOne Developer event. CommunityOne is a "pre-event" that precedes the annual JavaOne conference, which is happening this week in San Francisco. CommunityOne focuses on a variety of open source communities, both Sun and non-Sun.
- Report: STEM Gap Widens for Underrepresented Minorities
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5/2/2008
It probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise to our readers, but research released this month shows an expanding ethnicity gap for Americans pursuing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers. A new report from the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) reveals that the number minority students pursuing STEM degrees and careers has flattened out or even declined in recent years.
- Stanford Lab Tackles Parallel Computing
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5/2/2008
Stanford University and a consortium of technology companies are announcing a joint effort to build a Pervasive Parallelism Lab. The initiative pools the efforts of many Stanford computer scientists and electrical engineers with support from Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia, IBM, HP, and Intel.
- Web 2.0 Event Draws the Bleeding-Edge Cloud Crowd
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4/30/2008
Tim O'Reilly woke up his end-of-the-day audience when he took the stage at the Web 2.0 Expo, held April 22-25 in San Francisco. The publisher of the popular "In a Nutshell" computer books series declared that the Internet is fast becoming "a global platform for everything," and an "amazing tool for harnessing collective intelligence."
- Convergence Idea Gets Serious with Live Mesh, Analysts Say
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4/29/2008
Analyst reaction last week to Redmond's "Live Mesh" initiative can be deciphered in one of two ways. On the one hand, it's an old idea, namely "convergence," with new buzzwords. On the other, it means that industry leader Microsoft has become serious about playing hard ball with its more nimble competitors, working to simplify the end user experience in a Web 2.0 era.
- Live Mesh: An 'Open Platform' for Developers
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4/28/2008
Amit Mital, general manager of Microsoft's Live Mesh group, had a message for developers attending the Web 2.0 Expo April 22-25 in San Francisco: Think open platform.
- East LA College 'Flips Switch' on Solar Electric System
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4/28/2008
As part of its Earth Day celebrations last week, East Los Angeles College began running a new 1.2 megawatt solar electric generating system at the school's Monterey Park campus.
- Indiana U and Fujitsu Collaborate on Optical Communications Research
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4/24/2008
Indiana University (IU) and networking company Fujitsu Network Communications are collaborating on research about the effects that Polarization Mode Dispersion (PMD) can have on specific wavelengths traveling at 40 gigabits per second or more. This collaboration experience, which was facilitated by their active involvement with Internet2, will be the model for future research networking experiments between Fujitsu and other research and education institutions.
- The Unfair Advantage at RIT: Sponsored Research Services
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4/24/2008
When Bill Destler was named president of Rochester Institute of Technology in March 2007, he summarized his vision for the Rochester, NY school this way: "Take advantage of your unfair advantages."
- Students Attempt To Give Up Technology for a Week and Mostly Fail
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4/24/2008
A professor at the University of Central Florida challenged her students to unplug and live a technology-free life for five days, and most discovered they were incapable of doing so. "It's something I'm doing to get us in touch with where our humanity is," said faculty member Mary Ann Murdoch in coverage in the Orlando-Sentinel. "Are they really in charge of these devices, or are all these devices in charge of them?"
- Conference Focuses on 'The Mobile Future'
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4/23/2008
Carnegie Mellon University's West Coast Campus and UC Berkeley's Fisher IT Center at the Haas School of Business partnered to hold a conference Tuesday of this week in Santa Clara, CA, on "The Mobile Future: Technology Revolutionizing Our Lives." CT talked with James H. Morris, dean of CMU West and a professor of computer science, about the unique conference that brings together both academics and industry leaders.
- NASA Gets Serious about Educational Gaming
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4/23/2008
NASA this week moved a step closer to branching into educational gaming. The agency presented its vision of a science education-focused massively multiplayer online game to more than 200 potential software development partners in a workshop Monday sponsored by NASA Learning Technologies, an educational technology incubator project.
- Stanford U Prof Gets ACM-Infosys Award in Computing Sciences
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4/23/2008
Infosys Technologies and the Association for Computing Machinery have given the first ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in Computing Sciences to Daphne Koller, Ph.D., a leading researcher and student mentor at Stanford University.
- Students Get Taste of Real-life Cyber Defense in National Championship
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4/22/2008
Texas A&M University looked to defend its National Champions title against five teams at the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (NCCDC) this weekend but lost out to Baker College of Flint, MI. The third-annual NCCDC was hosted by the University of Texas at San Antonio's Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security (CIAS), a cyber security education and research center.
- Conference Focuses on 'The Mobile Future'
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4/22/2008
Carnegie Mellon University's West Coast Campus and UC Berkeley's Fisher IT Center at the Haas School of Business partnered to hold a conference Tuesday of this week in Santa Clara, CA, on "The Mobile Future: Technology Revolutionizing Our Lives." CT talked with James H. Morris, dean of CMU West and a professor of computer science, about the unique conference that brings together both academics and industry leaders.
- Imagine Cup '08 Heads to Los Angeles
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4/17/2008
American college and university students will have a chance next week to show off their technology skills as the U.S. finals for Microsoft's 2008 Imagine Cup head for Los Angeles. More than 16,000 students from 125 campuses in the United States registered for this year's event, in which they compete in categories ranging from software development to interface design. Winners will have a chance to go on to Paris this summer for the global finals, facing the best from 100 countries.
- U Tennessee Wins $65 million National Science Foundation Supercomputing Grant
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4/16/2008
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $65 million to the University of Tennessee (UT) to build and operate one of the world's most powerful supercomputers and lead a nationwide partnership to put it to use.
- Autodesk, Innovation First Launch Robotics Curriculum
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4/11/2008
Robotics developer Innovation First has teamed up with software developer Autodesk to develop a new curriculum for robotics education. The curriculum will be included in the Vex Robotics Classroom Lab Kits and will also be available separately this spring.
- Mainsoft Java Interop Platform Adds ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Support
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4/9/2008
Milpitas, CA-based Mainsoft, known for its development-related interop software, released a new 2.2 version of Mainsoft for Java EETuesday that offers "full support" for ASP.NET 2.0 components for AJAX-type Web applications. The solution provides a "cross-platform development framework for the Java Virtual Machine [VM]," according to the company's announcement.
- AT&T Calls on Higher Ed To Develop Mobile Apps
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4/2/2008
AT&T this week kicked off its first-ever Big Mobile On Campus Challenge, a competition that calls on college and university faculty and students to develop apps for mobile devices (yes, including the iPhone). The top prize includes $10,000 and a trip to Educause 2008 for the winning individual or team.
- NASA Education Grant Focuses on Promotion of STEM
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3/31/2008
NASA has awarded Oklahoma State University a one-year grant to help out with the agency's effort to promote science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) among high school students and encourage them to pursue science-related careers.
- Earliest Human Voice Recording Debuts Online
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3/31/2008
This weekend, Stanford University hosted the first public performance of the earliest known human voice recording--one that predates Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph by 17 years. The organization that made playback of the sound possible, First Sounds, has also posted the recording online for the public.
