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The TeraGrid is the NSF flagship for grid computing - be it good or bad.

The Grid.org people are some of the former SETI@home people gone more general purpose.

And of course, there is The Global Grid Forum which is meeting in Chicago in a week or so. GGF is the standards behind the Globus enabled grid.

We could ask why CERN/etal couldn't have come up with a slightly more imaginary name?

We can also ask why NSF are such suckers for the last 20 years of hype from the people who have run the national supercomputer centers in the USA? Ditto congress. But that is a (sad) story for a different day.

And finally we can ask what Top500.org is going to do when people begin reporting HPL benchmarks using these things? That HPL became the standard that people are designing supercomputers around argues just how totally screwed up high performance computing really is at the moment.

-- Multics

If you believe the technology will advance so that any disease can be cured, don't you believe also that they will be able to grow your body again from a DNA sample. Memory, and brains might be a bit more of an task - but saving around 1500 cm^3 and the DNA sample takes much less space anyway. Here's a related article about brain mapping.

Most sexy belongs to the Thinking Machines CM-5 "Blinking Machines":

(Nice big CM5)
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/MetaComp/Imag es/CM5_lg.jpg


Makes the SGI Origins (see below) look like freakshows:

(128 CPU Origin 2000)
http://gepard.cyf-kr.edu.pl/GRIZZLY/or2.jpg

(A cluster of [many] 128 CPU O2K's)
http://www.ccic.gov/pubs/blue00/local_images/blue_ mountain.jpg

(A 256 CPU O3K, a 16 CPU O2K, and some RAIDs)
http://www.cines.fr/images/IRISetMINERVE2.jpg

I wonder what they mean by "commercial implementation of a Linux operating system".

the FBI is likely to use is "open source can't be trusted".

This is going to be difficult considering the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee published a report (Covering letter) recommending the use of open source for high-end computers, and suggesting government-funded development(IIRC)

The article is just quoteing the cover letter to the report.

here

I can't really blame the article for reprinting the summary that the reports authors used.

Yeah, the article is broken. It's got the wrong URL on the link to the PDF.
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The article seemed a bit hysterical in tone, given the actual content of the report. Goal 3 isn't "agreeing upon a single common licensing agreement", but rather includes "the use of common licenses should be encouraged". There's a huge difference.

I think we can all agree that using common licenses is generally good. Specifically, it's good when our license is compatible with someone else's license, since then we can share/merge code etc. The government encouraging this behaviour isn't to be feared. Horrors! The fed wants us to be good neighbors! Oh wait, that's the point of OSS, isn't it...

Also, the committee may not have RMS as a member, but it does have ESR, one of the other big TLAs. Why didn't ESR share this upcoming review with the OSS community? Who knows. Perhaps we should ask him. As to why the report didn't mention him, well, perhaps because it's not about the history of OSS? Sure, RMS will continue to have influence, but he's definitely not important in the scheme of a fedgov strategy. They're talking about ideas, not specifics. People are specifics.

The committee included people from many different places, such as Michael Tiemann from Redhat, Tim O'Reilly from, well, O'Reilly... people from NCSA, Microsoft, Collab.net, NASA, DOE, the EU (international concerns, international committee, if only somewhat), LANL, SGI, NSA, Intel, IBM, MITRE, NSF, and many other great acronyms.

So the committee surely isn't omitting any great group, except perhaps "the common man", if such exists in OSS. And many of the names are recognizable even to me, and I've only been interested in OSS for a couple years, and hardly involved. "All the usual suspects", as the article says. No fears here.

All in all, the report looks like a Good Thing for the OSS community, on the whole.
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The report from PITAC's letter on Open Source Software makes three recommendations

First, the Federal government should aggressively encourage the development of open source software for high end computing. Adopting this recommendation will require a technical assessment of the software needs for high end computing as well as an innovative management plan and funding model for supporting this development.

This is the way it should always have been. Scientific endeavour has always been a group effort with advancements being made from the pool of common knowledge. It has always amazed me that large complex systems have therefore not been Open Sourced by default. In my opinion it is OK for rinky dink little programs to close their source especially since they can be written by anyone of capability (Instant Messengers, MP3 players, etc) but large complex systems (Operating Systems, large-scale distributed applications, etc) should be Open Sourced so that they can be subject to peer review and also so that they can add to the general body of knowledge instead of forcing us to constantly reinvent the wheel solving problems that have already been repeatedly solved.

I especially feel that code written with the benefit of my tax dollars should be Open Sourced so myself and others can have access to the fruits of our labor. After all, government funded research projects are open.

Second, a "level playing field" must be created within the government procurement process to facilitate open source development.

Too true, currently government requirements computer systems are usually exact specifications that can only be filled by closed source software. A loosening of the specificity in the specifications would be a boon to the adoption of Open Source software in government.

Third, an analysis of open source licensing agreements is needed, with an ultimate goal of agreeing upon a single common licensing agreement for open source software applications.

Again I have to be in agreement. After reading the recent spate of articles on who is not in compliance with the GPL(NASM, Phython, and until recently KDE) even though their projects are Open Source, I have strongly come to believe that the GPL is the worst license for any entity that expects to use software freely to use. The GPL (and RMS) is becoming a Borg-like in the way it is trying to usurp the intentions of authors of Open Source software everywhere by forcing them to assimilated. The quickest thing that will cool the government's ardor for Open Source software will be all the innumerable license incompatibilities caused by the GPL.

In my opinion, a BSD style license is the best license for governments, corporations, researchers and students. Users of BSD software can contribute to a common pool of knowledge and yet can modify the software without releasing changes when they see fit. This is true freedom. This is especially true when one realizes that Bruce Perens and RMS are currently in the process of updating the GPL so that even internally distributed software may count as software being distributed and hence should be Opened (this is from reading Bruce's comments from the past few weeks, if I have misinterpreted them, I apologize). I frankly do not believe that any entity, be it government, corporate or individual should release internally sensitive pieces of code simply to satisfy some pseudo-communistic ideal for software sharing.

If I give away software, it is with no strings attached because I want to improve the pool of general knowledge and share with my users, not to force the entire world into some college professors myopic view of what the world should be.
These are my opinions

Only the GPL and BSD licenses are mentioned in the text of the report, though it does not explicitly exclude others.

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the correct link to the report is http://www.ccic.gov/ac/pitac_ltr_sep11. html. Not to bash tony for getting his article up infront of everybody but the link in the article on /. doesn't goe where it implies it will go.

Being an IBM employee, I feel the need to stand up for the good Mr. Ayd :).

Aww, talk about sour grapes! They've hurt IBM's feelings, because IBM sells really smokin' computers too.

Seriously, I think David misclassified GRAPE 6 quite a bit. I don't think it's quite David's fault, because the article writers don't know the difference between 'supercomputer' and 'attached processor'. ABC News didn't really apply the term 'supercomputer' correctly either.

The term 'supercomputer' is more of a marketing term than anything else. Technical people only use it when they want to describe a general capability. AFAIK there is no concrete definitions of 'supercomputer', and if there were they would likely change daily. GRAPE 6, from the information I can see, is really an attached processor.

Attached processors can be an ARM chip on your network card to a GRAPE 6. Interanally, GRAPE 6 is a full custom, superscalar, massively pipelined, systolic array (say that 5 times fast). That basically means that data comes in one side of the board, and after n clock cycles the answer comes out the other side. There is no code other than a program running on the host computer which generates and consumes data, and every piece of the algorithm is done in hardware.

"What happens when the algorithm changes?" you might ask. Well, then you're screwed. You have to do a whole new board. Many boards use programmable chips as their processing elements, and can reprogram them when bugs or features get added, but these guys appear to be using ASICs. Great for speed, bad for flexibility.

Even though David Ayd was mistaken about the architecture, this idea has been around for quite a while also. The SPLASH 2 project was one of the first successes with this idea. There is also a commercial company selling boards using that idea but with completely up to date components (compared to SPLASH).

Still, in July of 1995, the GRAPE 4 became the world's fastest computer, breaking the 1 teraflop barrier with a peak speed of 1.08 TFLOPS.

Well, we really can't argue with that, can we, Mr. Ayd?

This architecture lends itself to extremely high throughput. It's no surprise that these perform so well. NSA uses architectures just like this to do it's crypto crunching. Brute forcing doesn't look so bad after trying one of these :).

Seymour Cray's final product involved the fastest switching technology ever activated in a super computer, which was then coupled into a massively parallel computing system. The Cray-3/Super Scalable System had a revolutionary GaAs control processor with potentially tens of millions of computing memory elements. This system (an adaptation of the original GaAs Cray-3) was financed by the NSA. Seymour Cray accepted this funding in a last-ditch effort to save his company and when I visited the Colorado Springs office, I was actually given the impression by one of their executives that they had a working model and would consider commercial sale of the device. Cray Computer Corporation went bankrupt shortly thereafter in the first business failure of Cray's phenomenal career. About a year later, Cray was killed in a jeeping accident. Having cut my teeth on his machines at the CDC/Urbana PLATO project, I knew Cray was unhappy with the direction his technology had been taken by "the spook shops" from before the day he left CDC to found Cray Research on his farm in in Wisconsin.

Recent revelations of RSA's vulnerability come as no surprise. The NSA, despite the fact that it is run by unaccountable bureaucrats embedded in a dough ball of Federal funding, is probably far beyond a cabal of private hackers in their capabilities.

Lest hackers and civil libertarians get the idea that now is the time for civil disobedience in protest of regulations against unlimited key sizes, you should probably be aware that Federal officials are so embolden by their lack of accountability that some of them have slipped up and are explicitly threatening suspects with prisoner gang rape. Given the prevalence of HIV infection in the prison systems, and the efficiency with which the virus is transmitted during gang rape, such threats amount to murderous sexual sadism as punishment for civil disobedience. In one of the most outrageous examples, Assistant U.S. attorney Gordon Zubrod from Harrisburg, PA made the following statement in a broadcast statement to 3 suspects who fled to Canada (this statement was captured for the public record during a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interview):

"You're going to be the boyfriend of a very bad man if you wait out your extradition."

If you think the use of murderous sexual sadism against protesters who engage in civil disobedience is unrealistic, or somehow so low risk as to be inconsequential, you should read Torture In The American Gulag before taking any personal risks.