About XRDS Staff

Unbreakable Cryptography in 5 Minutes

Posted on August 3, 2012 by XRDS Staff

What if I told you that unbreakable cryptography exists? What if I told you that this article has content which is illegal in certain countries, and may be under export control in the US? Well, that’s precisely what I’m about to tell you. Unbreakable cryptography exists. Cryptographic technology is illegal, or heavily restricted, in certain countries [0], and some forms remain under export control within the vagaries of US law [1].

This article will teach you: (1) a bit of the history of cryptography, and (2) how to implement unbreakable cryptography on your own in 5 minutes or less.
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Eyes Clouded by Distributed Systems

Posted on June 8, 2012 by XRDS Staff

You are probably reading this article with a dual- or quad-core processor, and perhaps with even more cores. Your computer is already a distributed system, with multiple computing components—cores—communicating with each other via main memory and other channels such as physical buses—or wires—between them. As you browse multiple web pages you are interacting with the largest distributed system ever created—the Internet. We recently celebrated IPv6 Day [0]: IPv6 is a new form of addressing devices connected to the Internet because its sheer scale has outgrown the previous standard IPv4’s list of addresses—all 4+ billion of them. Every Internet company depends on distributed systems, and, by extension, the economies of the world are now tied to them.

Companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon are all interested in building highly efficient large-scale distributed systems which power their businesses. Over the previous decade, Google has described their Google File System (GFS) [1]—a file system spanning thousands of computers to store more data than any single computer system, and a technology that has shaped almost every form of large-scale computing since publication: MapReduce [2]. MapReduce is distributed computing for the masses because it distills everything down to two functions—Map and Reduce—and once they are specified it handles all other aspects of coordinating thousands of computers on behalf of the programmer. Facebook has released open source projects such as Thrift [3] for implementing communication between programs in different programming languages. Amazon built the first, and largest, public cloud EC2 [4] by inventing new distributed systems designed to bring datacenter scale to the masses—with EC2 you can easily start 100 servers within minutes. Amazon has offered many other services to enhance their overall cloud such as a storage substrate called S3 [5]—think of it as a building block for a GFS—and CloudFront [6], a content distribution network (CDN) designed to distribute data around the world for low latency and high bandwidth access. Akamai [7] also helps deliver the web’s content with one of the largest CDN networks in the world. Netflix has their own distributed CDN [8] as they outgrew solutions provided by Akamai and Amazon.

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2012 ICPC World Finals

Posted on May 18, 2012 by XRDS Staff

Students from St. Petersburg State University of Information Technology, Mechanices & Optics take the Gold at IBM-Sponsored ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.

Out of 112 universities from around the world, St. Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics & Optics emerges as winner of “World’s Smartest Trophy”

The Winning Team - Andrey Stankevich (Coach), Eugeny Kapun (Contestant), Mikhail Kever (Contestant), Niyaz Nigmatullin (Contestant)

The competition begins…

Once a team solves a problem a balloon is tied to their workstation as a visual indicator of who has solved the most problems. Each problem has a certain color balloon. There are also live scoreboards projected on the wall, however during the last hour of competition the scoreboards are frozen so contestants don’t know the exact standings!

Top 12 Finishers

The Ending

The reading of results had everyone on the edge of their seats. It was announced that the University of Warsaw had successfully solved 9 problems, moving them ahead of St. Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics & Optics however St. Petersburg still had one question to be resolved.

After moments of heart pounding anticipation the last problem was resolved and it turned out that St. Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics & Optics had also solved 9 questions and since their time was 337 minutes shorter they became the first place World Champions!

About the Contest

The contest challenges students to solve the most computer programming problems in the least amount of time. Demonstrating their elite problem solving and programming skills, St. Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics & Optics successfully solved nine problems in five hours. The World Champions will return home with “The World’s Smartest Trophy,” as well as awards and a guaranteed offer of employment or internship with IBM.

“This is a sport. Many teams go to camps specifically to train; it’s mental gymnastics.”
– Sal Vella of IBM

Problem Set of the 2012 ICPC Finals, click here.
Official Results of the 2012 ICPC Finals, click here.

Coming soon..

We will have an interview with the winning team once they return home from Warsaw. Stay Posted!

2012 ICPC Winners

Posted on May 17, 2012 by XRDS Staff

Congratulations to the World Champions, St. Petersburg State University of IT, Mechanics & Optics. The hometown favorite, the University of Warsaw, place second. Tying with the gold medal team for the number of problems solved. In third place was the Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology. There were a total of 12 problems, only 9 of which were solved. Harvard University and the University of Waterloo were the only North American team to place in the Top Ten.

Here is a list of the final results.

Check back later for Shawn Freeman’s riveting recap of the competition.