Your entry puts the onus on leadership and management of the society to recognize this and adapt. Having been part of an organization that went bankrupt due to changing conditions and an inability to recognize and adjust, this entry needs to be seen and acted upon in the ACS.

I will use this as an example of unintended consequences of following the party line. Where in the 1960s-80s the ACS policy could have been realistic. In the 21st century it has much less bearing on actions and behaviors. Partnering, the economy of free, understanding the impact of scale free networks and other fast-moving trends need to be adapted to for survival.

I commend your entry.
Dan

Sorry for naive question: is there some sort of democratic mechanism in ACS which can eventually lead to change? I understand people who’ve left ACS – who wants their membership dues to be spent on lawsuits?

Possibly a weakness of the challenge was the lack of a prior agreement as to the method of judging entries. Secondly, entrants didn’t reveal their methods, so it told us little about which techniques work best.

Similar blind prediction challenges have been carried out regularly in the field of computational organic crystal structure prediction, hosted by the CSD and published by Acta Cryst.

Such challenges are in my opinion a very good idea and bring a measure of independence to the assessment of different software and methodologies.

The cell processor is just not available enough for it to be productive, to be honest looking at the price of intel processors there not even viable anymore. At a cost of £1100.00/processor its stupid cost for that performance at that price.

FPGA offer such and amazing attractive package in 45nm and 40nm silicon metal gate providing much faster more density and amazing configurations to a developer and scientific persons. Above all reconfigurable and debuged to any spacific solution allowing outside the box development. The keys to the farrari are in the users hands.
With FPGA configurations data protocols are as fast as 100gbs and can be configured as and when needed, power modes can be configured as needed, processor cores added how ever many you want within constraint of the transistor limit of course. Powerfull SPU’s that the cell processor run on can be designed and programed by the user on an FPGA unlike being stuck with n amount n type.

GPU technology will always be fast its the high amount of funding research development teams not to mention the creative engineers who design these processors. They will always design more and more in this field as they get paid high, very high wages. Yes money fuels this area more than others.

Scalability is a very important part in this field but flexability is far more important, something intel, ibm and others seem to have forgoten about. I must add that sun micropsystems have paid attention to this area well mind you so one of them understand.