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March 22, 2003
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Texas Computing Center Buys IBM Supercomputer Cluster
The Texas Advanced Computing Center, or TACC, is buying a supercomputing cluster from IBM, the latest announcement in a busy month for supercomputer purchases.
Housed at the University of Texas at Austin, the center will use the cluster to help model surface and subsurface flow in hopes of improving oil-drilling techniques. IBM officials on Friday declined to release the price of the deal.
TACC, which last year bought a cluster of IBM Power4 systems armed with 64 processors, is purchasing another cluster of 32 eServer pSeries servers, each holding four 64-bit Power4 chips, and a 32-way p690 for jobs that require a lot of shared memory, according to IBM, of Armonk, N.Y.
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Feds To Test Bioterror Alerts On PDAs
The federal government is looking for tools to communicate more quickly with doctors and other frontline clinicians in the event of a biological attack. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said Friday it will test a system that uses PDAs to send emergency information about biological agents. It will use the privately run eProcates network to send test messages to up to 700,000 clinicians, including 250,000 physicians, to evaluate how and when they download urgent information and whether they find it useful.
The pilot is the first approved under a Health and Human Services initiative begun last year to look at private-sector health efforts to see if they can improve bioterrorism preparedness or public health overall. The program is run by the Council on Private Sector Initiatives to Improve the Security, Safety, and Quality of Health Care.
The test message will contain a memo about the highest-level threat of biological agents, including anthrax, botulism, plague, smallpox, tularemia, and viral fevers such as Ebola. It will include Web links for additional information on diagnosis and treatment of people exposed to biological agents; the information can be saved on a PDA for future reference.
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Nintendo Releases Game Boy Advance SP
Nintendo's Game Boy, the hand-held video game player that has sold more than 142 million copies worldwide since its 1989 introduction, has received a major facelift.
The new Game Boy Advance SP, which goes on sale Saturday in Canada, is smaller, brighter and comes with a rechargeable battery. Nintendo hopes the new $149.95 Game Boy will bring older gamers back into the hand-held market.
The flip-up Game Boy Advance SP weighs about 140 grams, folds into a square about 2.5 centimetres thick and plays the same games as Game Boy Advance, which came out in June 2001, and older Game Boy models.
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Micron Shares Jump on Sales Report
Shares of Micron Technology, the world's second-biggest maker of computer memory chips, rose 11 percent today after the company said second-quarter sales rose 22 percent.
Micron also predicted a 10 percent to 15 percent increase in so-called bit shipments this quarter, and analysts said its inventory dropped to the lowest level in about four years.
Sales increased to $785 million in the quarter ended Feb. 27 from $645.9 million a year earlier, Micron said late Thursday, beating the $690.5 million estimate of analysts in a survey by Thomson First Call.
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Device: Arabic In, English Out
Soldiers can't prevent the diplomatic misunderstandings that breed warfare, but the Pentagon hopes a handheld electronic interpreter in GIs' packs can prevent language barriers from claiming lives on the battlefield.
To be successful, such a gadget has to go way beyond the electronic phrase books and generic tourist directories available today.
A new device being tested at the Office of Naval Research shows a lot of promise, according to Joel Davis, a neurobiologist there. "We have good ones now; they'll be better in a few years, and eventually fantastic," he said.
Over the past several years, the Navy has pumped about $4 million into Davis' program to develop simultaneous machine translation and interpretation. On Friday, the Senate Armed Services Committee will see a demonstration of the choice fruit of that effort, a blend of voice recognition, speech synthesis and translation technologies called Interact.
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LA Police Build Wireless LANs
Believing that heightened homeland security requirements demand higher-bandwidth communications systems for public safety agencies, the Los Angeles Police Department plans to install 27 wireless local area networks (WLANs) at police stations throughout the city in the next three months, according to Roger Ham, deputy chief for communications at the LAPD.
Ham says he plans to equip police cars with handheld computers from Symbol Technologies. The handheld devices will be equipped with 802.11b WLAN cards that communicate in the unlicensed 2.4-GHz band with access points installed in police stations at a raw data rate of 11 megabits per second-far faster than the 19.2-kilobits-per-second throughput in the department's 800-MHz wide area network (WAN) installed by Motorola two years ago and covering the city.
Ham said he eventually wants to develop an interface between the WLAN radio in the Symbol handheld and the Motorola radio in the police car. This will allow officers to use the handheld as a remote unit connected to the citywide system while outside their vehicles. Smaller California police departments, including the city of Glendale, have deployed similar WLAN-to-WAN systems.
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GDDR2 getting ready for the big show
Confined for now to a high-end niche market, GDDR2 SDRAM is expected to stage a significant ramp late this year following the anticipated adoption of an industry standard that will open up the graphics memory to a wider audience.
If approved in a July ballot by the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association of the Electronic Industries Alliance, the impact of the new standard would first be felt by increasing GDDR2 volumes and lowering prices, analysts and chip makers said.
As they await a standard, three companies are offering different versions of what each terms GDDR2 memory - Hynix Semiconductor, Samsung Electronics and Winbond Electronics.
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Gates provides details of Microsoft .NET Compact Framework
Bill Gates made several announcements about Microsoft's .NET Compact Framework at this week's Mobility Developer Conference.
Gates said the framework will allow smart devices to access Web services and rich data and will allow the creation of applications across the range of Windows platforms using Visual Studio .NET 2003, a single unified tool set. He also said the .NET Compact Framework and the Visual Studio .NET 2003 will include support for XML, rich device emulator support, visual dragon drop forms designer and simplified application deployment.
In addition, Microsoft is promoting the Viewsonic V37 device as a platform by offering it free to developers who sign up for Visual Studio.NET 2003.
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Dell lines up its first printers
Dell Computer will jump into printers next week as it continues its plan to think out of the box--the PC box, that is.
The Round Rock, Texas-based PC maker intends to launch its first three printers next week--two laser jets as well as an inkjet that can print, fax and copy documents. The multifunction printer, one of the hottest types of printers on the market nowadays, will largely be aimed at consumers and small businesses.
Dell has two goals for its printer push: boost its own sales and hurt archrival Hewlett-Packard. Printers, including printing cartridges, remain the crown jewel in HP's product arsenal. At one time, Dell was one of the largest resellers of HP printers.
The prices of Dell's new printers will likely undercut or match HP's prices. Dell is expected to sell its multifunction printer for between $150 and $200, or close to the price of HP's similar PSC 2110, which sells for $199.
In the past year, Dell has also entered the PDA market, increased the size of its services operation, pushed its own line of communications products and expanded into storage by striking an alliance with EMC. Some of the actions have angered former partners.
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