Sun Fires Up Test Lab in Hopes of . . .

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November 28, 2005 (Computerworld) -- . . . halting its supercomputing slide. Five years ago, Sun Microsystems Inc. had 92 systems among the 500 fastest supercomputers worldwide, and its speediest machine was ranked 44th, according to the annual Top500 rankings. This year, Sun managed

$7B HPC market in 2004, says IDC

to place just four machines on the list, with its fastest cluster topping out in 141st place. Even little-known Atipa Technologies in Lawrence, Kan., was able to best Sun this year by getting five of its supercomputers on the prestigious list. John Fowler, executive vice president of Sun's network systems group, has been tasked with reversing the company's plunging fortunes in the high-performance computing market. One of Fowler's first projects was this month's unveiling of a supercomputing lab called the Sun HPC Solutions Center in Hillsboro, Ore. Fowler says that with about 10 days' notice, the center, which has its own 8.6-megawatt power plant to handle the massive electrical needs of supercomputers, can put 1 trillion floating-point operations per second (TFLOPS) of computing power at the fingertips of customers who want to test their applications. As almost any supercomputer techie will tell you, configuring an HPC cluster isn't trivial, but Fowler claims that his lab will turn it into "a routine activity, which will be dramatic in this space." The lab can currently handle the testing needs for applications requiring performance of up to 10 TFLOPS, and Fowler says 40 TFLOPS capacity isn't far into the future. Interestingly, he acknowledges that most of the test demands are coming from users who want Sun to deliver Linux clusters - not Solaris ones.
Speech-recognition apps behave . . .
. . . properly when listening. That's the trick Amit Desai says he has taught voice-recognition software from Voxify Inc. in Alameda, Calif. Desai, the company's chief technology officer, admits that heretofore, "speech recognition has talked a good game but not delivered." However, he claims that Voxify's Automated Agents technology is well schooled, not just in quickly matching sounds to words but in exhibiting good listening behavior as well. Desai says complex human conversations include cultural "affirmative behavior"

Desai teaches voice-recognition software to behave better.

traits, such as unconsciously muttering "uh-huh" in response to a statement. Traditional speech-recognition technology gets confused by such chatter, which can gum up human-to-machine interactions, he adds. So if voice technology is going to get an expanded role in self-service business applications, it has to adapt to what people utter. Desai says the Conversation Engine software used by Voxify's agents groks people's behavior and knows how to book plane flights, take catalog orders, process financial services transactions and do more over the phone. Health care is an untapped market that Voxify intends to exploit in 2006, he says. After all, Desai asserts, in the era of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, with people-to-people communications often pushed out of the equation, patients might receive more timely and detailed information from automated voice systems than they can get by waiting (forever) for their doctors to call back with test results.

Extra! Extra! Read all about . . .
. . . the news online. Inform Technologies LLC in New York has unveiled a beta version of its news aggregation site at www.inform.com. According to project manager Julian Steinberg, the company's News Intake software strips out all HTML code from online news stories and creates "a perfect string of text." From that, it culls the names of people, places and products as well as all manner of facts, then indexes the data for you to search. Unlike, say, Google, which ranks stories by how often they're accessed by Web users, Inform categorizes the news by how often the terms you're searching for are listed in a given story. You can create your own channel to constantly keep you apprised of changes to a breaking story or for ongoing research of your nastiest competitor. Although Steinberg claims that Inform "is not in a great rush to get out of beta," he says that a "significant release" is due in Q1 of next year. In the future, Inform will add video and audio search services, he says.
Use the dark side to put a stop to . . .
. . . malicious network attacks. Mirage Networks Inc. in Austin has developed a clever way to stop computer worms in their tracks: lure

Mirage's CounterPoint technology knows IP's dark side.

them to what it describes as your "dark IP addresses." According to Scott Olson, vice president of marketing at Mirage, the company's CounterPoint security software makes your unused IP addresses appear as "personalities," such as Windows XP machines or Linux servers. If a worm accesses one of the addresses, its source can be identified and quarantined, Olson says. He claims that Mirage's approach means there are zero false positives. Pricing starts at $10,000 for the software and a companion appliance; shipments are scheduled to begin on Wednesday.

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