BREAKING NEWS

The software giant, which sells more than 800 products, including many dated Cobol and
Assembler programs, will send its most experienced engineers at no cost except travel
expenses, said Michael Miller, senior vice president and general manager for North
American sales.

“A lot of our clients will be going through crises because of a stone left
unturned,’’ Miller said.

CA’s Millennium Watch program offers the services on a prioritized basis to sites
with maintenance and support agreements.

The Millennium Watch program includes telephone help and a Web site, http://www.cai.com/2000.

The National Weather Service will install a 750-node IBM RS/6000 Scalable Parallel
supercomputer this year to advance its modeling of the atmosphere and oceans.

Based on a new 64-bit, 200-MHz Power3 processor from IBM Corp., the SP will handle the
most sophisticated models ever, said Carl Staton, director of NWS central operations at
Camp Springs, Md.

The Power3 processor runs 50 percent faster than the Power2 for about the same price,
said IBM’s Mike Henesey, director of RS/6000 scientific marketing. Over the next 24
months, IBM will build advanced copper circuitry and silicon insulation into the Power3
chip.

The two-way symmetric multiprocessing chip also will go into a
10-trillion-floating-point-operations/sec computer that IBM will deliver next year to
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under the Energy Department’s Accelerated
Strategic Computing Initiative.

The Energy Department wants to add newer and faster supercomputers to it collections of
screaming systems to help scientists design fuel-efficient cars, more accurately predict
the weather and discover new medicines.

The president’s fiscal 2000 budget proposal earmarks $70 million for the
department’s Scientific Simulation Initiative.

Next year Energy wants to buy computers with a capacity of 5 trillion floating-point
operations per second and a 40-teraFLOPS computer by 2003, Energy undersecretary Ernest
Moniz said.

Moniz detailed the initiative last month. “I’m pretty excited about this
initiative and want to push it,’’ he said.

Energy expects the fast systems to help in the design of automobile engines with
reduced emissions, climate models that make regional predictions and gene function models
of the human body.

President Clinton last month nominated Cheryl L. Shavers, an Intel Corp. executive, as
the next undersecretary for technology at the Commerce Department.

If confirmed by the Senate, Shavers will serve as the principal adviser to Secretary
William M. Haley and as the department spokewoman on science and technology.

In the post, she will develop and promote federal technology programs that foster
innovation and improvements in the U.S. industry’s competitiveness.

At Intel, Shavers works as a senior manager and head of the microprocessor products
sector in the corporate business development division.

She previously was group manager of the advanced technology operation in Intel’s
technology and manufacturing group. 

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Internet woes continued last month when a hacker
broke into the agency’s Web site and defaced the home page.

BLS staff members detected the attack almost immediately and removed the page from the
Web, according to an internal memo from BLS commissioner Katharine G. Abraham. No
sensitive data was compromised by the incident, the memo said, and the site was up and
running the following day.

The Web site has been the source of recent turmoil for BLS. In two incidents before the
attack, one just two weeks prior, BLS mistakenly posted financial data on its site before
its official release [GCN, Jan. 25, Page 3, and Nov. 23, 1998, Page 1].

BLS is investigating the Web site hack, agency spokeswoman Kathy Hoyle said.

GTE Corp. wants to sell off its $1.4 billion government systems subsidiary and focus
exclusively on commercial business. Officials said the decision has nothing to do with a
proposed merger with Bell Atlantic Corp.

“All the signs in the industry point to growth in the commercial sector,” GTE
spokesman Rob Doolittle said. “Government business doesn’t fit in there.”

GTE Government Systems of Needham, Mass., has 7,000 employees, and GTE wants potential
buyers to agree to keep them. The division’s 1998 revenues of $1.4 billion represent
about 5 percent of the parent company’s revenues. There is no timetable for the sale,
which Doolittle said could take up to six months.

GTE Government Systems has hundreds of contracts in more than 20 countries.

NCI Information Systems Inc. of McLean, Va., will provide network and systems
management facilities for the Seat Management Program task order that the General Services
Administration set in January with Litton PRC Inc.

Through this first Seat Management project, GSA will hand off to Litton management of
3,900 PCs and 5,000 network devices.

NCI uses CA-Unicenter TNG network and systems management software from Computer
Associates International Inc. NCI plans to deploy CA-Neugents, a neural network
technology, for the GSA task order, said NCI’s principal systems engineer, Yousef
Lasi.

CA’s first prebuilt Neugent application is a Microsoft Windows NT Server and
Workstation performance agent. The CA-Neugent can set dynamic performance thresholds
without the need for custom scripts to run at different times of day.

The Social Security Administration has agreed to expand by 10,000 the number of PCs it
will buy through its Intelligent Workstation/LAN contract with Unisys Corp.

The PCs will be more powerful than the 100-MHz Pentium machines specified in the
original contract, but neither SSA nor company officials would comment on brand,
configuration or price.

“We did negotiate for 10,000 additional workstations through the changes clause of
the contract,” SSA spokesman John Trollinger said.

T.J. Miller, a Unisys vice president who took over management of IWS/LAN in January of
last year, said his company is supplying the faster machines at “fiercely
competitive” prices.

SSA awarded IWS/LAN in June 1996. Through the $280 million contract, Unisys so far has
installed about 48,000 PCs throughout SSA.