ACM Queue - audiocasts: Recent Episodes
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In this interview, Hanrahan and Shaw discuss Shaw’s latest project at D. E. Shaw Research: Anton, a special-purpose supercomputer designed to speed up molecular dynamics simulations by several orders of magnitude. Four 512-processor machines are now active and already helping scientists to understand how proteins interact with each other and with other molecules at an atomic level of detail. Shaw’s hope is that these "molecular microscopes" will help unravel some biochemical mysteries that could lead to the development of more effective drugs for cancer and other diseases. If his track record is any indication, the world has a lot to be hopeful for.
To those with even a passing interest in the history of the Internet and TCP/IP networking, Van Jacobson will be a familiar name. During his 25 years at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and subsequent leadership positions at Cisco Systems and Packet Design, Jacobson has helped invent and develop some of the key technologies on which the Internet is based. He is most well known for his pioneering contributions to the TCP/IP networking stack, his seminal work on alleviating congestion on the Internet, his leadership in developing the MBone (multicast backbone), and his development of several widely used IP networking tools, such as trace-route, pathchar, and tcpdump.
In the July/August 2008 issue of ACM Queue we published part one of a two-part discussion about the practice of software engineering. The goal was to gain some perspective on the tools, techniques, and methodologies that software engineers use in their daily lives. Three members of Queue’s editorial advisory board participated: Steve Bourne, Eric Allman, and Bryan Cantrill, each of whom has made significant and lasting real-world contributions to the field (for more information on each of the participants, see part one). In part two we rejoin their conversation as they discuss XP (Extreme Programming) and Agile.
In part one of a two-part series, three Queue editorial board members discuss the practice of software engineering. In their quest to solve the next big computing problem or develop the next disruptive technology, software engineers rarely take the time to look back at the history of their profession. What’s changed? What hasn’t changed? In an effort to shed light on these questions, we invited three members of ACM Queue’s editorial advisory board to sit down and offer their perspectives on the continuously evolving practice of software engineering.
Mike Vizard from ACM Queue talks with Oracle’s Mike Olson about the changing architecture of network-enabled applications. Olson explains the thinking behind the company’s new focus on embedded database and middleware technology. He explores the technical, business and economic forces shaping this fast-growing market. Tune in to learn how Oracle plans to serve customers way outside the enterprise.
A piecemeal approach to building data centers that relies on commodity servers, switches and systems management software only leads to inefficient systems that add unnecessary cost and management overhead to IT operations. In an interview with Queuecast host Mike Vizard, Liquid Computing CTO and co-founder Mike Kemp offers a fresh approach to enterprise computing.
As developers move to build applications that span service-oriented architectures, many of them underestimate the testing challenges associated with building and maintaining applications that can comprise hundreds of different Web services. Developers need a robust set of testing tools and a systematic approach to testing to prevent errors from being introduced or, worse yet, propagated throughout the system. Wayne Ariola, vice president of corporate development for Parasoft, in a conversation with Queuecast host Mike Vizard, highlights some of the more common miscues associated with SOA and discusses best practices for building SOA applications.
Companies building applications in an SOA environment must take care to ensure seamless interaction and make certain that any changes to their applications won’t negatively impact other applications. In an interview with ACM Queuecast host Mike Vizard, John Michelsen, CTO of iTKO, a Dallas based provider of testing tools for SOA applications, discusses the need for companies to recognize this delicate balance.
Although Google remains relatively mum about its ambitions in the area of speech recognition, Mike Cohen, head of the company’s efforts in this area and a co-founder of Nuance Communications, says that speech recognition will increasingly play a bigger role in all Web-based applications going forward. But for developers to be successful in this space, they will need to get in touch with their inner persons more than ever if they hope to create applications that ordinary people will actually use.
As vice president of server technologies for Oracle, Amlan Debnath is one of the few people who can synthesize Oracle’s software infrastructure plans. In an interview with ACM Queucast host Mike Vizard, Debnath provides some insights to how Oracle’s strategy is evolving to simultaneously embrace service-oriented architectures alongside the demands of new and emerging events-driven architectures.