Author Archive

Jonathan Ewing

Digital Government

Feds turn Y2K corner

The pendulum has begun to swing back, if only slightly, on opinions as to whether the government's systems will be ready come 2000. The latest report from Rep. Steve Horn (R-Calif.), a report from the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem and General Accounting Office testimony about the Defense Department's efforts were relatively optimistic compared with earlier assessments.

  • By Jonathan Ewing, GCN
Digital Government

Learn to speak the language of this blossoming technology field

Not sure of the difference between a data mart and a data warehouse? You're not alone. Federal users who look to data warehousing for information retrieval must struggle with a new lexicon. As they set up and learn to use the multimillion-dollar warehouses, they're often perplexed by shades of meaning. "You have to be alert because there are so many overlapping definitions and slight differences in meaning," said Wendel Yale, a technical manager at Oracle Corp.

  • By Jonathan Ewing, GCN
Digital Government

70 CPUs add up to big power

Researchers at the Energy Department's Los Alamos National Laboratory—tired of prohibitive pricing and long queues for supercomputing time—took matters into their own hands and wired 70 CPUs into one of the fastest and cheapest supercomputers in the world. Their homespun improvisation, called Avalon, can perform 20 billion floating-point operations per second (GFLOPS).

  • By Jonathan Ewing, GCN