Sallyport - The Magazine of Rice University - Spring 2002

Information Technology - 2001 Report of the President
Spring 2002
VOL.58, NO.3
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Before the 1990s, the total amount of collected information tended to
double every four or five years. By 1999, electronic data was quadrupling
every semester. Consequently, we have become accustomed to thinking of
the information revolution primarily in terms of the explosion in
information. From the vantage point of the year 2001, however, the
information revolution is best seen more broadly as a knowledge
revolution, wherein new ways of marshaling and utilizing knowledge debut
each month.
The potential impact of this technology is perhaps best understood by
reviewing what has already been wrought by the information revolution.
It is news to no one that the rate of technical change in communications has
been accelerating in the past half century. Thirty-eight years were required
for radio to reach 50 million users. Television required only 16 years to
reach this plateau, personal computers only 13. But the World Wide Web
reached 50 million users in four years, and the wireless Internet needed just
Researchers at Rice are
helping to fashion a vast
Grid that ultimately will
link an array of
distributed computing
capabilities, enabling us
to use the global
information system as a
computational as well as
an information resource.
one year. 1 And by midyear of 2001, more than half of U.S. households had
a personal computer. The economic effects have been striking.
Until just a few decades ago, the economies of nearly all nations were very
heavily dependent on human brawn and nature s resources in producing
corporeal products: steel, lumber, cotton, grain, and so forth. A flowering of
scientific insights into the laws of nature has allowed ideas increasingly to
substitute for brawn and material bulk. As a result, a very large share of
world commerce is now dominated by virtually weightless conceptual
products: information, services, computational capacities, and the like.
Consider that the real Gross National Product of the United States in 1999
was more than 20 times the real GNP of 1900, but as Alan Greenspan is
wont to say: If we could weigh today s GNP and also the GNP of 1900, we
would likely find that the physical weight of today s GNP is only modestly
higher than it was a hundred years ago. Technological advances account for
almost all this phenomenon.
Computing has indeed come a long way from 1945, when rudimentary
computers were used in B-29 bombers to control gun turrets. Progress after
that has been exponential, from megaflops to teraflops. A megaflop is one
million floating point operations per second. By the year 2000, a tabletop
PC costing U.S. $2,000 could match the performance of a 100 megaflop
computer of the 1970s that was as big as a house and priced at more than U.
S. $25 million. Where one teraflop of capacity (one trillion floating point
operations per second) was once unimaginable, a 30 teraflop computer is
scheduled to be operational by 2003, while 100 teraflop machines are on
the drawing boards.
Super-high-performance computers are but one facet of the information
revolution. Recent advances in networking technologies promise to alter
forever the way we utilize computing. Researchers at Rice are helping to
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