[m] Supercomputing 2005

I firstly noticed a blogspot edit box change: arbitrarily choice of publishing date is no longer allowed. Is this a measure to call for blog owner's timely inputs, or a feature change after some G engineers investigated MSN space? (The M guys are actually allowing flexible publish time setting at present). Never mind, I was lazy and should be solely responsible for the delay of posts, no matter they were caught or not :P.

Supercomputing 2005 was great, partly because of, but definitely much more than, the Bill Gates show. Some people are laughing at Bill, yet we have to think why supercomputing became such attractive as Mr. Gates feel obligated to do a on-site promotion of MS Windows 2003 cluster.

In my opionion, during the past decade (or 12 years, count from the birth of Linux in 1991), the two elements of computer science - computer and data - has undergone drastic changes. Free operating systems like Linux has became open to public and of comparable quality as commercial ones, thus greatly relieved the budget concern of building up computation power. The most recent news I read, is the Ultimate Linux Lunchbox. The accessibility of supercomputing to general public is not a dream but very true fact now.

The characteristics of data, in volume, dimension and interestness, are changing rapidly. The first annual KDD conference was in 1993, still mainly concerntrated in data manipulation in databases. Nowadays everybody has the access to the world's biggest database - the web - and new "database" companys as Google and Yahoo are taking the positions used to be occupied by Oracle and Sybase. Everyone became a data consumer, more or less, aware or unaware.

Then, as a young computer scientist, how should I adapt to the changes? That's really an interesting topic to be thought about thoroughly.