Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2016
From insideHPC
Astronomers Using iRODS to Wrangle Massive Survey Data
Astronomers are using iRODs data technology to study the evolution of galaxies and the nature of dark matter. "By partnering with data specialists at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) who develop the integrated…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Crowdsourcing for Big Business
Interesting play for the enterprise. Especially for consumer facing goods. " ... Crowdfunding platform Indiegogo has officially launched its Enterprise division to bring high-end products to market by allowing backers to "vote…
From insideHPC
Five Supercomputing Predictions from Cray’s Barry Bolding
"There are a number of exciting technologies we should see in 2016, and a leader will be Intel’s next-generation Xeon Phi coprocessor – a hybrid between an accelerator and general purpose processor. This new class of processors…
From insideHPC
Reserved Cores in the Intel Xeon Phi
"In the case of the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, although 60 cores are commonly used for computation, there is another core that is available, but not traditionally used as part of a simulation. Experiments using the 61st core…
From BLOG@CACM
A New Framework to Define K-12 Computer Science Education
Computing leaders ACM, Code.org, and CSTA are launching an effort to guide educators and state and district policy makers about K-12 computer science.
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Mapping of Machine Intelligence
Thoughtful, visual, piece in O'Reilly:The current state of machine intelligence 2.0Autonomous systems and focused startups among major changes seen in past year.by Shivon Zilis December 10, 2015Cartographical representation of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Induction and Data Science
All business uses this method, if they know it or not. But rarely systematically. Good presentation:" .... Data science is about finding signals buried in the noise. It’s tough to do, but there is a certain way of thinking…
From Schneier on Security
Straight Talk about Terrorism
Nice essay that lists ten "truths" about terrorism: We can't keep the bad guys out. Besides, the threat is already inside. More surveillance won't get rid of terrorism, either. Defeating the Islamic State won't make terrorism…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Wisdom
From CACM and Berkely Research: Seeking data wisdom. Somewhat of a squishy term. But it implies data in context, here neuroscience,. " .... “In computational neuroscience, it is important to gauge how much variation there…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Announcing a New Framework to Define K-12 Computer Science Education
Computing Leaders ACM, Code.org, and CSTA Launch Effort to Guide Educators and State and District Policy Makers About K-12 Computer Science For most states and school districts, the notion of computer science for every student…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Breakthrough Technologies of 2015
In February, the MIT Technology Review published their list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2015. Recently they released their follow up list, detailing how those technologies have advanced since then. Some computing-related…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Teaching Looping as a Concept
I’m introducing loops to my Freshmen this week. I’m trying a couple of new things. I thought I might put them out there in hopes of getting feedback but also possibly hearing how others introduce the concepts.
I’ve talked for…From insideHPC
New Version of RDMA-Spark Runs Native InfiniBand and RoCE
Fans of High Performance Data Analytics got a boost today with news that the High-Performance Big Data (HiBD) team at Ohio State University has released RDMA-Apache-Spark 0.9.1.
The post New Version of RDMA-Spark Runs NativeinsideHPC…From The Eponymous Pickle
Gartner Quadrant Reports for Business Intelligence
Just reread the 2015 Gartner reports on Business Intelligence for BI planning purposes, provided by a vendor, " ... Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms ... " nicely done, largely concur. I have…
From insideHPC
DDN Announces Winners of the 2015 Pioneer Awards
Today DDN announced the winners of the 2015 Pioneer User Awards. The awards recognize and celebrate visionary individuals, organizations and/or multiple people who are embracing leading-edge high performance computing technologies…
From Computational Complexity
Rūsiņš Freivalds (1942-2016)
From insideHPC
Iceotope Showcases ExaNeSt Cooling Technology for Exascale
In this video from SC15, Peter Hopton from Iceotope describes the company's innovative liquid cooling technology for the European ExaNeSt project. “ExaNeSt will develop, evaluate, and prototype the physical platform and architectural…
From insideHPC
Interview: How de-HPC.org is bringing the Student Cluster Competition to India
"HPC in India is getting noticed on a different scale today. Starting with lot of initiatives across, the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) gives clear HPC roadmap with assert confidence of dominating HPC in India. The student…
From insideHPC
How HPC is Helping Solve Climate and Weather Forecasting Challenges
Data accumulation is just one of the challenges facing today weather and climatology researchers and scientists. To understand and predict Earth’s weather and climate, they rely on increasingly complex computer models and simulations…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Malice vs Competence in Real Worlds
In Engadget: Stephen Hawking: 'The real risk with AI isn't malice but competence'. For now, but malice can quickly follow. As a physical scientist, what he studies is usually not trying to fool him.Not the case in the 'real'…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Customer Experience and Knowledge Management
Saw this recently interacting with cable company. The answer I needed was embarrassingly simple and easy. In fact they had all the data to predict I would have the problem. Yet, it ended up in hours of delay and figuring…
From Putting People First
The power of the nudge to change our energy future
Sebastian Berger, Assistant Professor of Organization at the University of Bern, writes in the Scientific American how the default option, a simple change based on psychology, will increase use of renewable energy. In a recent…
From Schneier on Security
How the US Is Playing Both Ends on Data Privacy
There's an excellent article in Foreign Affairs on how the European insistence on data privacy -- most recently illustrated by their invalidation of the "safe harbor" agreement -- is really about the US talking out of both sides…
From Putting People First
[Book] Service Design for Business
Service Design for Business: A Practical Guide to Optimizing the Customer Experience Ben Reason, Lavrans Løvlie, Melvin Brand Flu Wiley Publishers December 2015, 208 pages Abstract Service Design for Business helps you transform…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Pac-Man running at 1 million frames per second
In What does technology want?, Kevin Kelly argued that technology is on an evolutionary path. In some real sense, technology is alive and growing. It seeks out to improve itself at an ever faster rate. And it seems that technology…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Robots For Teaching Programming
One of my most popular posts has been a collection of links to block programming (drag and drop programming) tools and languages. The other day it occurred to me that a similar list for programming with robots might be useful…
From Schneier on Security
1981 CIA Report on Deception
Recently declassified: Deception Maxims: Fact and Folklore, Office of Research and Development, Central Intelligence Agency, June 1981. Research on deception and con games has advanced in the past 25 years, but this is still…
From insideHPC
SC16 Workshop Proposals Due Feb. 7
SC16 is now accepting full- and half-day Workshop Proposals for SC16. "SC16 will include full- and half-day workshops that complement the overall Technical Program events, with the goal of expanding the knowledge base of practitioners…
From insideHPC
Gordon Supercomputer Aids Search for New Antibiotics
Researchers using the Gordon Supercomputer at SDSC have identified a class of possible antibiotics with the potential to disable previously drug-resistant bacteria. In essence, these new agents were found to attack the bacteria…
From insideHPC
Nimbix HPC Cloud Moves to 100 MW Dallas Datacenter
Today Nimbix announced plans to use Infomart Dallas to support the infrastructure needs of its upgraded HPC cloud platform, JARVICE 2.0. Infomart Dallas provides Nimbix with a high-density data center complete with industry-leading…