Mauritius, an island nation off the eastern coast of Africa, intends to complete a wireless network that spans coast to coast (a sum distance of 40 miles) by year end, according to the Chicago Tribune. Sixty percent of the country already has a wireless signal available, serving 70 percent of the nation’s 1.2 million people.

Apparently the Indian Ocean isn’t such a bad spot to make a go of such things:

“Remote Mauritius is in many respects well-placed to win the high-tech investment it wants. An undersea broadband fiber-optic cable, completed three years ago, gives the island fast and reliable phone and Internet links with the rest of Africa and with Europe, India and Malaysia….The government’s efforts have brought in investment by players like Microsoft, Oracle, Accenture and India’s Infosys Technologies and created about 2,000 jobs in the past two years.”

Cray announced today that the Cray XT3 and Cray XD1 have posted leading overall results on the HPC Challenge benchmark tests. With the XT3, they’re claiming victory on seven of the 10 tests. According to Cray:

In comparing customer-reported HPC Challenge results for three large-scale systems of about the same size, an 1,100-processor Cray XT3 supercomputer had the best scores on seven of the 10 “condensed results” tests, compared to an SGI Altix 3700 system with 1,008 processors and an IBM Blue Gene system with 1,024 processors. In the seven tests, the Cray XT3 typically outperformed the next-best system by a factor of two to five times, and was up to 17 times faster than the third-ranking system.

Today’s Computing Research Policy Blog contains an appropriations update for NSF, NASA, and NIST with lots of details and links. Because of the way the appropriations process is now configured, and the way the rules in the U.S. House are structured, apparently those agencies now compete for their funding against the interests of state and local law enforcment agencies. A valuable read for those who want to understand the conditions currently helping to determine our nation’s investment in science and engineering research.

In case you didn’t know about it, the Pan European research and education network, aka GÉANT2, is having a launch celebration this week for what is being promoted as the next generation of research and educational networking in Europe. Touting 500 Gbps performance, this enormous meta-network is managed by the non-profit, UK-based DANTE (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe), which is charged with building and maintaining networks in Europe and globally for the research and education community. GÉANT2 consists of 30 national research and education networks (NRENs) that link as many as 34 countries and enables collaboration not just across Europe, but also around the planet. In fact, according to this very informative article about the network from the European site EduBourse,

it provides the highest capacity and offers the greatest geographic coverage of any network of its kind in the world.

Such a network represents a giant step in linking global research institutions, which should go a long way toward providing resources and services to those researchers who previously didn’t have access. And it should open up a new “data highway” for the ability to share the massive volumes of data being created with these new resources.

Visit the GÉANT2 website http://www.geant2.net for more information.

John Markoff, the New York Times San Francisco Bureau Chief who has documented the birth of the Web and the rise and fall of the dot-coms as well as high-performance computing, has decided to document the historical roots of the computing industry in his new book, What the Doormouse Said. It might come as no surprise that some of the most creative and outrageous minds that made the personal computing industry possible were based in Northern California and part of the 60s counterculture movement. My guess is that Markoff’s book is an interesting read. Check out the review in American Scientist.

Dan Atkins, chair of the NSF Blue Ribbon panel on Cyberinfrastructure and one of the main author’s of what is now commonly referred to as “the Atkin’s report,” has cranked up his own blog. As one of the driving forces behind the development of collaboratories over the past decade or more (he was a founder of UARC, one of the earliest and best known collaboratories), he is one of a small handfull of people who could rightfully claim (or be charged with, depending on how you view it) paternity for the cyberinfrastructure movement. He’s obviously someone we CTWatchers think is worth paying attention to.
A tip of the hat to the Forum on Information Technology and Research Universities, the news and information blog of the National Academies.