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Giving Thanks to the Tech Gods

© Adam Hughes

In this frantic world we call home, it's sometimes important to step back a bit and reflect on all the good things we have in our lives. With the holiday season upon us, the timing for such introspection couldn't be better. This particular helping of thanks, though, will be a little different than what we usually think of when passing the "grace" baton at the Turkey Table each November. Given that anyone in this "room" has some interest in scientific computing, here are five technological bounties we can all be grateful for :

1) We should be grateful for the widespread availability of Unix workstations. As has been discussed here many times before, Unix gives scientists great flexibility in and control over their work. In addition, Unix is a generally very stable environment, with few crashes on a day-to-day basis. A good place to start learning about Unix is http://www.unix.com.

2) We should be grateful for the Internet. Obviously the greatest boon to communication that many of us have ever seen come down the pike, the Internet was developed as a research tool. While it has grown by leaps and bounds and profoundly touched nearly every segment, it's originally conceived intent is still alive and well as scientists routinely conduct geographically-distributed collaborative research.

3) We should be grateful for Java. This programming language seems to be the greatest thing since green, folding bread. Java brings object-oriented design to developers on any computer platform, and it lets them easily use each other's work. It's vast library of available classes is continually growing, making programmers' jobs even easier! THE place on the Web to learn about Java is http://java.sun.com.

4) We should be grateful for supercomputers. As computational scientists, we must face the fact that we are resource hogs. We need lots and lots of computer cycles to complete all of our exciting calculations. In many cases, without the use of supercomputers, we'd be up a creek, with virtually no hope of computing our calculations in our lifetimes. Talk about a legacy to leave future generations!! If you want to start to get an idea of what supercomputers can offer Have a at one of my favorite supercomputer sites (OSC) : http://www.osc.edu

5) We should be grateful for the PC. Now, I know this seems to kind of contradict number 1) above, but hear me out. The great popularity of the PC and the relative ease-of-use

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