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Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally
for machines to execute
-- Abelson and Sussman
We can't just construct the fastest possible machines; we must build
comprehensive programs around those machines to address all aspects of the
supercomputing enterprise. We are now entering a new era in
computing—the petascale computing era. The US National Science Foundation has funded
a petascale computing system at the University of Illinois that is expected to sustain
a petaflops i.e., a quadrillion (1015) arithmetic operations per second on real world
science and engineering applications. National Center for Supercomputing Applications
(NCSA) at the University of Illinois, working with IBM and the Great Lakes Consortium
for Petascale Computation (GLCPC) embarked on Blue Waters project. Developing
software for highly scalable systems with nearly a million processors or cores raises
unique challenges. To succeed, application developers must reconsider both their
code's structure and the tools they use to develop, tune, and run that code. Key metrics
have been developed over the past 15 years which discuss the development process
of scientific applications that subsequently run on petascale architectures.
Global competitiveness requires a
21st century approach to educate students
and preparing them to exploit next generation technologies. The Blue Waters project
aims at revolutionizing the undergraduate and graduate education by promoting
new educational resources, models and methods that transcend traditional boundaries
of discipline and institution.
The paper, "Detection of Unsolicited E-mails and Summarization by
Keyword Extraction", by Shanmugasundaram Hariharan, has investigated several
integrated approaches to detect spam mails. Also, in this paper, detailed mechanisms to
summarize the mail contents is proposed.
The paper, "An Analysis of Some Prime Generating Sieves", by Alok
Chakrabarty and Bipul Syam Purkayastha, has discussed some commonly used techniques
of generating prime numbers employing sieve theory.
Here, they begin with the famous Sieve of Eratosthenes.
Then, they have discussed some of its efficient
extensions. They have also provided an overview of Pritchard's wheel sieve technique.
Finally, a comparative complexity analysis of the Sieve of Eratosthenes and its
quoted extensions are provided.
The paper, "ANN Model for Coconut Yield Prediction Using Optimal
Discriminant Plane Method at Bay Islands", by M Balakrishnan and K Meena, has investigated
a distributed neural network to forecast production in Andaman and Nicobar Islands
using weather parameters.
The paper, "Similarity Measures for Real World Data Mining", by Nagalakshmi H
S and Suhasini M, has explored application of clustering technique to the field of
real world data, especially the data which is of varying size and consists of multiple
values. The proposed similarity measures aim at capturing the extent of alikeness
exists between the data considered. The study done in this paper and the clusters
obtained can be utilized to extract meaningful hidden information in real world data, and
serves as a tool to realize the automation of thinking similar to human
interpretation/observations which play a key role in the field of data mining.
The paper, "Mizoram Butterflies Data Storage Retrieval Using
Client-Server Technology", by Brindha Senthilkumar, has presented taxonomical data organization
of Mizoram Butterfly species. The project is developed based on client-server
technology. This is the pioneer work on developing database for Mizoram Butterflies.
The paper, "The Knight's Reach Puzzle", by Pinaki Chakraborty, P C Saxena and C
P Katti, has introduced a puzzle called the Knight's Reach Problem where the main
task is to determine the set of squares that a knight can reach after n moves on an infinite chessboard.
-- C R K Prasad
Consulting Editor |
