CSIRO (10/22/09) Finlay, Jo

Australia will continue to serve as a hub for research into wireless technologies as a result of new funding from the Science and Industry Endowment Fund.  An initial round of grants has been announced, and up to $10 million will go toward a project that will expand the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization's (CSIRO's) research into next-generation applications, including those that have the potential to support Australia's National Broadband Network.  The Science and Industry Endowment Fund will provide $2 million to help CSIRO and Macquarie University establish a joint professorial chair and associated appointments in wireless communications over seven years.  Also, $7.5 million will be provided over two to three years to establish up to 100 scholarships and fellowships in information and communication technology mathematics, engineering, and other scientific disciplines.  The scholarships and fellowships will help Australia address its skills shortage in areas such as computer science, electrical engineering, mathematical sciences, and physics.  "We are in a position to continue to deliver real benefits to Australia from research into high-speed wireless communications," says CSIRO group executive Alex Zelinsky.  CSIRO is providing the Science and Industry Endowment Fund with $150 million from the proceeds of its Wireless Local Area Network technology licensing program.

Source: http://www.csiro.au/news/Endowment-Fund-Research.html

InfoWorld (11/03/09) Krill, Paul

Development of HTML5 is progressing, but the highly anticipated upgrade to the Web language still faces some major hurdles, particularly its lack of a standard video codec, says the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) Philippe Le Hegaret.  HTML5 features new video capabilities, support for offline applications, and the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) specification.  It is scheduled to move to a candidate recommendation phase by the end of 2010, which would last two years before final adoption could occur, according to Le Hegaret.  "The underlying issue is finding a video format that is royalty-free," he says.  "So far, we haven't been able to provide one video format that can satisfy everyone."  Fallback scenarios could involve having a developer define a page to work in the Safari and Firefox browsers, and then provide two video formats.  Le Hegaret says HTML5's multimedia capabilities could give developers less reason to use proprietary technologies such as Microsoft's Silverlight or Adobe Flash, except that those technologies would still be more advanced than HTML5.  Although he praised SVG, which provides a language for describing two-dimensional graphics and graphical applications in XML, he said Microsoft's lack of support for SVG in Internet Explorer remains an "elephant in the room."  However, Le Hegaret noted that Microsoft has not released plans for Internet Explorer 9, which could include SVG support.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/d/developer-world/html-5-progresses-despite-challenges-817

Xinhuanet (China) (10/29/09) Fei, Yu; Ruixue, Bai; Yushan, Wang

China's National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) has unveiled the Tianhe supercomputer, the fastest supercomputer in China.  Tianhe runs at 563.1 teraflops on the Linpack benchmark and is theoretically capable of petaflop performance.  NUDT president Zhang Yulin says the system is expected to be used to process seismic data for oil exploration, perform bio-medical computing, and help design aerospace vehicles.  If Tianhe had been operational for the most recent Top 500 list, it would have ranked as the world's fourth-most powerful supercomputer.  NUDT says that approximately 200 computer scientists worked on Tianhe over two years.  The supercomputer was housed at the NUDT campus in Changsha, and is scheduled to be moved to the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin at the end of this year.  Tianhe features 6,144 Intel CPUs and 5,120 AMD GPUs.  "As far as I know, a combination of CPU and GPU is something new used to make a petaflop computer," says NUDT professor Zhou Xingming.  "After it's installed in Tianjin, we plan to add hundreds or thousands of China-made CPUs to the machine, and improve its Linpack performance to over 800 teraflops."  Tianhe also could be ranked as the world's fifth-greenest supercomputer on the Green500 List, which is compiled by researchers at Virginia Tech to rank the world's most energy-efficient supercomputers.

Source: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-10/29/content_12356478.htm