Newsletter of Computer Science Association, BITS Pilani
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ISSUE 1 OCTOBER 9 2009 THE TEAM: Newsletter of Computer Science Association, BITS Pilani Anirudh Mangipudi Dharmik Kumar The news so far Google has announced a new open Joyneel Acharya source development platform called Google Wave, which will be available K.A.R. Shyam Sunder next year. Wave was created by Jens and Lars Rasmussen, the Australian Karthik Sriram brothers who developed Google Maps. This Web application Mihir Patil from Google Inc. combines elements of e-mail, chat, Wiki documents, blogs Saurabh Khanna and photo-sharing sites to create a form of Internet communication called Shivam Rai a "hosted conversation" or a "wave". Google demonstrated Wave at the Google I/O developer conference in Tanay Upadhyaya San Francisco, California, in May. Tech bloggers have largely cheered the release of the product. One of the questions which resounded from Umang Dhawan all their blogs is “What will Google Wave mean to SharePoint?” SharePoint can be used to host web sites that access shared work- spaces, information stores and documents, as well as host defined appli- cations such as wikis and blogs. All users can manipulate proprietary WAVE POINTS controls called "web parts" or interact with pieces of content such as lists and document libraries. Users can chat about certain sections of Wave documents in real time, where all users Wave is early in its evolution, but there is some stiff competition for MS's see what a person is typing as much lauded business collaboration platform, SharePoint. However, de- it is typed. spite all the hype that is prevailing, Wave is not going to challenge Share- Point anytime soon. Although consumer markets jump at every new inno- If a person comes to the con- vation, business markets are known to be cautious and drag their feet. versation late, they can replay So it will be a while before enterprises actually use Google Wave. everything they've missed! Will Wave replace Twitter? You can embed Google Wave No. And for one very good reason – Gadgets. Gadgets like iPhone apps conversations on any blog. will allow us to run our favorite programs inside our waves. Since gadg- ets are open source (OS) we will see tons of plug-in programs that work with Google Wave. You would be running your Twitter gadget inside Google wave window but never will stop tweeting. But the four decade INSIDE THIS ISSUE old email may be gone before you know it! IBM Tech Day .................... 2 Waves in Pilani! A Byte from History ........... 3 The Web 2.0 generation in BITS Pilani will no doubt be awaiting with Gaming Consoles ............... 4 bated breath to have a go at this all-new cool Google product. Indeed many of the BITSians using the micro-blogging site Twitter are real des- Hawkeye Technology ......... 5 perate to get a Google Wave invite. Many of them claim to have regis- Football Manager ............... 6 tered on the Wave website in the summer itself so as to give it a try be- Bitsmail01 Zimbra Switch..7 fore anybody else but with no luck. However, it is always good to keep trying: Only 100,000 accounts will be issued, demand one Coding Problem ................. 7 at: wave.google.com. Don’t be left out :) CSA corner ......................... 8 IBM TECHNOLOGY DAY KEY PLAYER IN IBM RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT Date: 18th September, 2009 The IBM Technology Day was a part 2. Vivek Kumar: “High Perform- of the many University Relations ance Computing” which IBM has with various universi- 3. Manish Gupta (Jr.): “Cloud Com- ties across India. BITS Pilani has puting” been a host to several of their talks Ambuj Goyal including the one on Cell Architecture 4. Kinjal.B.Shah: “Rational Soft- ware Architect Essential” Responsible for setting IBM's last year. This was an event organized by CSIS faculty and associations . long-term research direction in 5. (Audio conference) Kris Singh: computer sciences, as well as Speakers and their topics: transitions taking place in the IT ensuring that the best emerging sector, data handling, cost and technologies contribute to IBM's 1. Manish Gupta: “Building a different layers of IT sector. services offerings and software Smarter Planet” products. “If you were ploughing the field would you need two strong oxen or 1024 chicken?” Blue Gene: - Massive parallelism - Chicken instead of Oxen ODIS: On Demand Innovation THE LECTURE Services Mr. Manish Gupta was the leader of the team which developed software for the EBO: Emerging Business fastest super computer “Blue-Gene”. He explained about the past innovations of IBM Research Lab in Delhi, India. His talk was not only interesting, inspiring Opportunities and informative but also innovative. Some of the success mantras given were: FOAK: First of A Kind 1. Develop technical depth in your areas of interest and a certain level of breadth RISC: Reduced Instruction Set Appreciation of problem and learning how to apply knowledge to solve Computer these problems. LINPACK is a collection of NEC's SX-9 supercomputer was the world's first vector Fortran subroutines that analyze and solve linear equations and processor to exceed 100 gigaFLOPS per single core. linear least-squares problems. IBM's supercomputer dubbed Blue Gene/P is designed to GUPS: Giga-Updates per Second Some of the cell applications which were highlighted once again were: Finance FLOPS: FLoating Aerospace Amazing image rendering (hence used Point Operations Per Second Medical Imaging in PS3) 2 CLOUD COMPUTING: A DISRUPTIVE NEW PARADIGM SOME CLOUD SERVICES A new model for consumption and delivery of IT-based services. MS Azure Enhanced user-experience (self-service UI) Google Application Engine Flexible Price Enables flexible deliver and sourcing models (private, public and hybrid) Spoken Web: The “Spoken Web” project aims to transform A BYTE FROM HISTORY: SEYMOUR CRAY how people create, build and interact with e-commerce sites A supercomputer refers to the class of most powerful computer systems on the world wide web using world-wide at the time of reference. the ‘spoken word’ instead of the The term supercomputer was first applied to the Cray-1 computer. Super- written word. Farmers need to computers can cost in the billions and look up commodity prices; have extremely vast capabilities. Fishermen need weather info In 1958, Seymour Cray built the first before heading out to sea; etc completely transistorized supercom- puter for the Control Data Corpora- tion. In 1964, he developed the CDC 6600, which was the first architecture to use functional parallelism. Widely considered to be the founder In 1972, Seymour Cray founded Cray of supercomputing, Seymour Cray Research to design and build the was known for his passion for tech- world's highest performance general- nological creativity and his constant purpose supercomputers. His Cray-1 search for new ideas. computer established a new standard in supercomputing upon its introduc- All of Seymour's systems were tion in 1976. masterpieces of technology and The first Cray-1™ system was installed esthetic design. To him elegance of at Los Alamos National Laboratory in physical design was as important 1976 for $8.8 million. It boasted a as reaching the performance world-record speed of 160 million goals. FLOPS (160 megaflops) and an 8MB When told that Steve Jobs bought main memory. In order to increase the a CRAY to help design the next speed of this system, the Cray-1 had a Apple, Seymour Cray said, "Funny, unique "C" shape which enabled inte- grated circuits to be closer together. I am using an Apple to simulate No wire in the system was more than the CRAY-3." four feet long. To handle the intense heat generated by the computer, Cray developed an innovative refrigeration He died in 1996 in Colorado system using Freon. Springs, Colorado, from injuries suffered from a car accident. “Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.” – Seymour Cray 3 TERMINOLOGY X-BOX Console: electronics control panel: The console features a unique accept an Ethernet cable, 20GB a desk, table, display, or keyboard IBM PowerPC-based CPU unit hard drive, 802.11a/b/g wireless onto which the controls of an complete with three 3.2GHz networking adapter or cordless electronic system or some other cores, each sporting two hard- controller with equal ease, models machine are fixed ware threads. A custom 500 MHz are obviously manufactured with ATI graphics processor capable of hardcore gamers' and gadget Processor: the central processing supporting 48p shader pipelines freaks' every need in mind. a pair unit that performs the basic op- and pushing four times as many of USB ports hidden behind a erations in a microcomputer, polygons as the original Xbox. All hinged flap enables one to con- consisting of an integrated circuit contained on a single chip systems further feature an im- nect and communicate with MP3 pressive 512MB of RAM. All players, PDAs, digital cameras, ATI: ATI Technologies Inc. was A games are 720p minimum and laptops and other portable gadg- supplier of graphics processing optimized for 16:9 widescreen ets! units and motherboard chipsets viewing. Online gaming? Check. Streaming video? Yep. Ready to GPU: Graphics Processor Unit Hardware threads: Implementa- tions of Hybrid Threads that run as separate cores on the system WII bus. t has been tagged as a "next-generation" console. However, the de- Polygons: Element of computer I graphics: a building block of com- vice's custom IBM-designed, PowerPC-based Broadway processor puter graphics and ATI Hollywood GPU won't go toe-to-toe with PS3 or even Xbox 360. On the plus side – physical gesture-powered athletics featur- Ethernet cable system: is used for ing baseball, boxing, bowling, golf and tennis challenges played by exchanging messages between computers on a local area network mimicking actual racquet swings or strike-scoring scooping motions.