ZDNet has an interview with Gordon Moore on the 40th birthday of his law.

On possible replacements for silicon…

Some of these other things, quantum dots and nanotechnology and that kind of thing–I will admit to being a skeptic around those things replacing mainstream digital silicon. You can clearly make a tiny little transistor by these techniques with potentially great high frequency, but can you connect a billion of them together?

On the competitiveness of the US technology industry…

We (face) very formidable competition in the world–I think the impact of China in particular is just beginning to be felt; 1.1 or 1.2 billion people are going to have a dramatic impact. In the next 20 years, we’re going to see how that plays out, I’m expecting the U.S. will still be a successful player, but I don’t think it’ll enjoy the position it had in, say, the past 20 years.

If you’ve heard of Internet2 and wondered what it is but never bothered to check, Forbes.com has published a nice introductory arcticle about it. This advanced Internet initiative serves as a prime testbed for institutions and organizations researching next generation Internet technologies and infrastructure components. Similar in some ways to the government’s Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative from several years ago, Internet2 is a growing consortium of university, government, and commercial entities.

An Associated Press story today reports on Oak Ridge National Lab’s installation on Jaguar, a Cray XT3 supercomputer that could be a 100-teraflop system by the end of the year. I read the Associated Press story at Forbes.com. An excerpt from the article:

“Cray and the lab are hoping to “marry” the technologies of both systems into a next-generation machine, to be called “Rainier,” that could deliver 250 teraflops, or 250 trillion calculations per second, in 2007. ”

Some people may think the US is losing ground in science and technology, but for the time being at least, it’s still setting the pace in supercomputing. BlueGene/L, which was already number one on the latest Top 500, nearly doubled its performance after doubling its processor count. Back in mid-February, truckloads of components began arriving at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), which operates the IBM built system for the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), and the folks at LLNL added another 32,000 processors to the equal number already installed. Well, the early results are in. Roughly as expected, BlueGene/L can now crank away at 135.3 trillion floating point operations per second (teraflops), up from the 70.72 teraflops it was doing at the end of 2004. BlueGene/L now has half of its planned processors and is more than half way to achieving its design goal of 360 teraflops.

[CORRECTION] In the last sentence above, we mistakenly said that BlueGene/L “is more than half way to achieving its design goal of 360 teraflops.” Thanks for pointing out our error and thanks for the comments.

The economics of supercomputing power and usage continue to evolve. Utility and on-demand computing aren’t new concepts, but for the first time IBM is making a large chunk of computing capacity available to its customers via its Blue Gene supercomputer in Rochester, NY. It’s unclear how well this cost recovery model will work for IBM using this machine, but it further demonstrates that there is a market for serious computational power without the need to own it.

A research fellow at Fujitsu, speaking in InfoWorld, says that the company is the first chip manufacturer to commit to using carbon in place of copper. Nanotubes carry mitigate electrons’ tendency to leak out of copper wires, transmit electrons 10 times faster, and dissipate heat more readily, according to Fujitsu’s Yuji Awano.

More on the company’s nanotech strategy from the house magazine.