A special committee put together by the UC Board of Regents will conduct the search for a successor to UC President Richard C. Atkinson, who will retire Oct. 1, 2003.

The eight committee members will include Chairman John C. Davies, a 10-year veteran of the board; Vice Chair Judith L. Hopkinson, former chief operating officer of Ameriquest Capital; Sherry L. Lansing, chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures’ Motion Picture Group; Monica C. Lozano, president and chief operating officer of La Opinion; and George M. Marcus, founder and chairman of Marcus & Millchamp Co.

Gov. Gray Davis, who is the president of the Board of Regents, will also serve on the committee. Student Regent Dexter Ligot-Gordon, UC Board of Regents Chairman John Moores and Alumni Associations of the University of California President Fred B. Sainick will complete the committee.

The special committee will invite the Academic Council to appoint an academic advisory committee to assist the candidate screening process. Meetings of the special committee will be scheduled after the appointment of the advisory committee members.

Debate duo ranked fifth after first quarter

The UCSD debate team of Danny Cantrell and Clint Burr was ranked fifth in the nation in parliamentary debate out of more than 371 teams after heavy competition all quarter.

The teams are ranked on the number points they receive for reaching elimination rounds in tournaments. Burr and Cantrell reached elimination rounds and received top awards at all four Fresno, Azuza, Grossmont and Northridge tournaments this quarter. They also earned a 19-5 preliminary round record this season and are 40-16 over the past two years.

SD Supercomputer boasts fastest archive system

Thanks to its updated tape storage system, the San Diego Supercomputer Center now has the fastest data archive system in academia, with a data-transfer rate of 828 megabytes per second.

Part of the process to increase data-transfer speed at SDSC included expanding its disk storage capacity, adding new higher-density tapes and adding faster tape drives from Storage Technology Corp. The center also imported new technology, such as switches from Brocade Communications Systems, fibre channel adapters from Qlogic and end-to-end systems from Sun Microsystems.

SDSC is also replacing its 20-gigabyte-capacity tape cartridges with 200-gigabyte native capacity tape cartridges that are manipulated robotically in five silos with a total storage capacity of six petabytes.

The recent and planned improvements will enable the center to deliver the unprecedented data-management infrastructure required by the National Science Foundation’s $88 million TeraGrid Project, which will become the world’s largest, fastest distributed infrastructure for open scientific research in 2003. Of the five sites involved in the TeraGrid project, SDSC is the lead site for the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure.

Historian to give lecture on gentiles’ role in Holocaust

A free lecture on “”The Righteous Non-Jews Who Helped Jews During the Second World War”” will be given by historian Sir Martin Gilbert on Dec. 2 at 7 p.m. in Price Center Ballroom A.

In his speech, Gilbert will tell how many gentiles risked their careers and lives to conceal and rescue Jewish refugees while the Third Reich carried out its program to exterminate European Jewry. His stories about “”the righteous”” will include those of Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler, as well as less-famous historical figures.

Gilbert, the Herman Wouk Distinguished Visiting Professor in Judaic Studies at UCSD, is one of the 20th century’s foremost historians of World War II, the Holocaust and the founding of modern Israel. He has published two comprehensive general histories on both world wars. Gilbert has also published “”The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy”” and “”Jewish History Atlas,”” and he wrote the script of the Academy Award-winning film “”Genocide.””

In addition to these accomplishments, Gilbert became Winston Churchill’s official biographer in 1968 and published six volumes of Churchill’s biography.

For more information about the lecture, which is sponsored by Price Charities and the Judaic Studies Program, call (858) 534-4551.