Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2019
From The Eponymous Pickle
Removing Bias from Predictive Modeling
Podcast of interest from Wharton re Bias, Podcast at the link.
Wharton's James Johndrow discusses his research on removing human bias from predictive modeling.
Predictive modeling is supposed to be neutral, a way to help remove…
From insideHPC
Traverse Supercomputer to accelerate fusion research at Princeton
Princeton’s High-Performance Computing Research Center recently hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for Traverse, it’s newest supercomputer. Traverse is a 1.4 petaflop HPC cluster that ranks among the top 500 systems in the world…
From insideHPC
Visualizing and Simulating Atomic Structures with CUDA
In this video, John Stone from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign discusses the role of CUDA and GPUs in processing large datasets to visualize and simulate high-resolution atomic structures. CUDA does this by allowing…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Advancing Scientific Research with HPC
In this podcast, Dana Chang from Atipa Technologies joins Conversations in the Cloud to discuss Atipa’s Polaris High Performance Computing and Visualization (HPCV) platform. "Today’s scientists need faster insights and visualize…
From insideHPC
Bright Computing Powers Deep Learning at University of North Dakota
The University of North Dakota is using Bright Computing software to unify its newly designed clustered infrastructure, giving them more versatility, access to the cloud and to deep learning resources. “Bright software makes
…
From insideHPC
Video: What Can HPC on AWS Do?
Ian Colle from Amazon gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. "AWS provides the most elastic and scalable cloud infrastructure to run your HPC applications. With virtually unlimited capacity, engineers, researchers, and HPC system…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Learning More Efficient Allocation
Consider other possibilities for real time efficiency
Artificial intelligence could help data centers run far more efficiently
MIT system “learns” how to optimally allocate workloads across thousands of servers to cut costs, save…
From Schneier on Security
New Unpatchable iPhone Exploit Allows Jailbreaking
A new iOS exploit allows jailbreaking of pretty much all version of the iPhone. This is a huge deal for Apple, but at least it doesn't allow someone to remotely hack people's phones. Some details: I wanted to learn how Checkm8…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Quantum Supremacy? Yes and No!
In this podcast, the RadioFreeHPC team discusses the Google/NASA paper, titled “Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor”, that was published and then unpublished. "The tantalizing promise of quantum computers…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The price of a MacBook Air worldwide
Apple sells identical laptops worldwide. There might be small differences with respect to power adaptors and so forth, but the laptops are the same internally. Of course, there are differences in taxes but Apple quote pricesContinue…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Volkswagen and AWS Web Services
Back to how much we can share, remove silos, and get data efficiently to various kinds of analytical engines.
Volkswagen Group’s landmark project with Amazon Web Services will help to connect all its global factories, and eventually…
From insideHPC
Report: Mellanox ConnectX Ethernet NICs Outperforming Competition
Today Mellanox announced that laboratory tests by The Tolly Group prove its ConnectX 25GE Ethernet adapter significantly outperforms the Broadcom NetXtreme E series adapter in terms of performance, scalability and efficiency.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Normal Looking Smart Glasses
Perhaps one of the biggest problems with smart glasses, their appearance. This Indigogo project introduces Norm Glasses, which addresses that problem. With the usual warning about such funding efforts, they may never happen.…
From insideHPC
New Intel Xeon W and X-Series Processors Accelerate Workstation AI
Today Intel unveiled its latest lineup of Intel Xeon W and X-series processors, which puts new classes of computing performance and AI acceleration into the hands of professional creators and PC enthusiasts. "The professional…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Catalyzing Computing Podcast Episode 16 – Interview with Melanie Mitchell Part 2
A new episode of the Computing Community Consortium‘s (CCC) podcast, Catalyzing Computing, is now available. This is part 2 of Khari Douglas’ interview with Melanie Mitchell, a Professor of Computer Science at Portland State…
From insideHPC
Supercomputing Structures of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins
Researchers using the Titan supercomputer at ORNL have created the most accurate 3D model yet of an intrinsically disordered protein, revealing the ensemble of its atomic-level structures. The combination of neutron scattering…
From Computational Complexity
What comes first theory or practice? Its Complicated!
Having majored in pure math I had the impression that usually the theory comes first and then someone works out something to work in practice. While this is true sometimes it is often NOT true and this will not surprise any of…
From Schneier on Security
Edward Snowden's Memoirs
Ed Snowden has published a book of his memoirs: Permanent Record. I have not read it yet, but I want to point you all towards two pieces of writing about the book. The first is an excellent review of the book and Snowden in general…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Should Companies have to Pay for your Data?
Some work is going on to figure this out. But will we get all the freebees we have come to expect?
Should companies have to pay you to use your personal data? in Retailwire with expert comments
by George Anderson with expert…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI is not An Excuse
Internet founder Vint Cerf does a good job putting out a cautious view on the current use of AI. In theory good research, development and value should never be replaced by emergent Hype. But in reality research groups, enterprises…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mini Tutorial on Probability
A nicely done mini tutorial, very clearly done, essential stuff. The intro to the book and Bayesian also very useful.
How to Develop an Intuition for Joint, Marginal, and Conditional Probability by Jason Brownlee on September…
From BLOG@CACM
If We Want Women to Persist in Computing, Teach Them Programming – At Any Age
Two recent reports point to the important of teaching female students to program and that it's never "too late."
From insideHPC
Recent Research on using Public Clouds for HPC Workloads
Alex Norton from Hyperion Research gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. "Hyperion Research provides data-driven research, analysis and recommendations for technologies, applications, and markets in high performance computing…
From insideHPC
Supercomputing Earth’s Geomagnetism with Blue Waters
Researchers are using the Blue Waters supercomputer at NCSA to better understand geomagnetic variations and their underlying mechanisms, so that better forecasting models can be developed. "Without Blue Waters (or any comparable…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Increasing System Trustworthiness
An ultimate challenge, especially as systems start to morph into assistants with their own data, knowledge, and yes 'intelligence'. What are the the risks involved? In an era of increased external vulnerabilities? Where…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Gaming as a Service for Hospitality, Decisions? Defense?
Intriguing possibility. Branded gaming, say in a assistant device in a hotel. Or including gaming in an analytics sense to simulate multiple assistive options?
SMART Embedded Computing Releases PCIe Card to Enable Cloud Gaming…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Digital in Construction
Few engineering and construction companies have captured the full benefit of digital. Five practices can help E&C companies move…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What Will You get from the Blockchain?
Short, non technical view. Not quite enough support for the premise, but intriguing. Notable piece on the Blockchain. Worth a look.
How Do You Stand to Benefit From Blockchain and IoT Advances?
Blockchain expert Markus Levin…
From insideHPC
Use Cases for HPC in the Cloud
In this special guest feature, Robert Roe from Scientific Computing World looks at use cases for cloud technology in HPC. "In previous years there have been some concerns around security or the cost of moving data to and from…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Rebooting AI: The Future of General, Trustable AI
In the process of reading Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis' book: Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We can Trust. Nicely done, starting with a history of AI and its challenges. And then a real push back on what…