Supercomputing Online reports that the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas, Austin has teamed up with Dell to research performance issues associated with high performance computing clusters. Citing the increased use of such clusters by the HPC community, the manager of TACC’s HPC group says in the article:

With Dell’s support, we will continue to investigate and improve the performance of applications when run in these clustered computing environments and explore new techniques and algorithms for improving performance.

The National Science Foundation announced yesterday that U.C. Berkeley will lead a multi-institution cybersecurity research project, dubbed TRUST (or the Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology), that will be backed by $19 million in NSF funding over the next five years.

According to information posted online at Berkeley, TRUST “will pursue a strongly coordinated research agenda in the areas of Security Science, Systems Science, and Social Science.”

A News.com report spells out NSF’s description of TRUST’s activities:

The National Science Foundation said the TRUST effort will specifically investigate the integration of computing and communication technologies across “critical infrastructures” in areas such as finance, energy distribution, telecommunications and transportation.

An article posted by the San Francisco Chronicle claims that the US had its worst performance this year in 29 years of the annual Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest. Is this further proof of a decline in science and math education in the US? Or is the poor US performance in this contest just that, a poor performance rather than any real indicator of overall educational deficiency?

In the article, Georgia Institute of Technology Professor Jim Foley says it’s the former, proclaiming

the educational system has done a demonstrably poor job of (teaching) technical, scientific and computing.

ZDNet has an interview with Gordon Moore on the 40th birthday of his law.

On possible replacements for silicon…

Some of these other things, quantum dots and nanotechnology and that kind of thing–I will admit to being a skeptic around those things replacing mainstream digital silicon. You can clearly make a tiny little transistor by these techniques with potentially great high frequency, but can you connect a billion of them together?

On the competitiveness of the US technology industry…

We (face) very formidable competition in the world–I think the impact of China in particular is just beginning to be felt; 1.1 or 1.2 billion people are going to have a dramatic impact. In the next 20 years, we’re going to see how that plays out, I’m expecting the U.S. will still be a successful player, but I don’t think it’ll enjoy the position it had in, say, the past 20 years.

InformationWeek reports today that HP and Intel are funding an effort to develop improved compilers for Itanium. The effort is being driven by the Gelato Federation and is led by University of Illinois professor Wen-mei Hwu.

According to the article:

Work will proceed on improving two software tools: the OpenImpact compiler developed by Hwu specifically to run on Itanium, and the Free Software Foundation’s more general GNU compiler collection. Commonly known as GCC, it’s a multi-platform set of compilers for C, C++, Fortran and other languages.

The first concrete milestone of the effort will be timed for May, when the Gelato Strategy Council is scheduled to meet in Cupertino, Calif.

In the most recent issue of Communications of the ACM, David Patterson, president of the ACM, makes his own comments on the funding shift at DARPA that we mentioned earlier in the week. He goes one better, discussing the general computer science and engineering funding picture. Among other things, he describes the phrase “very ambitious proposal” as “the kiss of death” when it appears in an NSF review and laments the dimishing funding for long-term research in industry.