Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
November 2016
From Phys.org Technology News
After off-mark polls, some question value of 'big data'
For an American public that relies on data for everything from where to find the best taco to the likely victor in a baseball game, Election Day offered a jarring wake-up: The data was wrong.
From Apophenia
Media: End Reporting on Polls
We now know that the polls were wrong. Over the last few months, I’ve told numerous reporters and people in the media industry this, but I was generally ignored and dismissed. I wasn’t alone — two computer scientists whom I deeply…
From Computational Complexity
Our Role and Responsibility
It's Trump but not just Trump. Brexit. Right-wing politicians gaining power in France, Netherlands, Austria and beyond. We worry about the future of our country and the whole world at large.
From Schneier on Security
Ultrasonic Hacking
Ad networks are surreptitiously using ultrasonic communications to jump from device to device. It should come as no surprise that this communications channel can be used to hack devices as well....
From insideHPC
Custom Liquid Cooling to Support Canada’s Largest Radio Telescope
“We chose to work with CoolIT Systems because their solutions are modular and robust, and as a result the most flexible and efficient for our situation,” says Keith Vanderlinde, Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto…
From insideHPC
DOE to Showcase Leadership in HPC at SC16
Researchers and staff from the U.S. Department of Energy’s national laboratories will showcase some of DOE’s best computing and networking innovations and techniques at SC16 in Salt Lake City. "Computational scientists working…
From insideHPC
Intel Omni-Path Architecture Fabric, the Choice of Leading HPC Institutions
Intel Omni-Path Architecture (Intel OPA) volume shipments started a mere nine months ago in February of this year, but Intel’s high-speed, low-latency fabric for HPC has covered significant ground around the globe, including
…
From insideHPC
OpenHPC now available on ARM at SC16
Over at the ARM Connected Community, Darren Cepulis, writes that the popular chip platform is now part of the OpenHPC community. As one of a series of strategic moves, the effort should help bolster ARM as a platform for high…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Too Many CS Teaching Resources
The Bring IT, Together conference is taking place this week in Niagara Falls, Canada. I’m not there but I have been seeing some social media updates today. It looks like a great conference and on some level I really wish I were…
From insideHPC
Maximize Parallelization with Threading On A Core
To get maximum parallelization for an application, not only must the application be developed to take advantage of multiple cores, but should also have the code in place to keep a number of threads working on each core. A modern…
From insideHPC
Exascale Computing Project Awards $34 Million for Software Development
Today the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) today announced the selection of 35 software development proposals representing 25 research and academic organizations. “After a lengthy review, we are pleased…
From insideHPC
Slidecast: Mellanox Announces 200Gb/s HDR InfiniBand Solutions
In this slidecast, Gilad Shainer from Mellanox announces the world’s first HDR 200Gb/s data center interconnect solutions. "These 200Gb/s HDR InfiniBand solutions maintain Mellanox’s generation-ahead leadership while enabling…
From Phys.org Technology News
America's aging voting machines managed to survive another election
During this year's voting, the vast majority of states used outdated voting machines perilously close to the end of their projected lifespan. Back in April, we warned that 42 states use machines that are at least a decade old…
From Schneier on Security
Regulation of the Internet of Things
Late last month, popular websites like Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit and PayPal went down for most of a day. The distributed denial-of-service attack that caused the outages, and the vulnerabilities that made the attack possible…
From insideHPC
Salt Lake City Guide – A Wonder of the West
With the SC conference returning to Salt Lake City next week, we’d like to share some of the reasons why we think SLC is one of the most underrated American cities.
The post Salt Lake City Guide – A Wonder of the West appeared…
From The Eponymous Pickle
L'Oreal Virtual Reality
We also tried lots of virtual reality in beauty ... but it was never very successful. Will better quality result in better results?
L'Oreal tries virtual reality.
" ... Animators spent decades trying to make hair look fully realistic…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Perspective on Cognitive
Dear Professors, Students, IBMers and others,
This a reminder about our Cognitive Systems Institute Group Speaker Series tomorrow, Thursday, November 10, 2016 at 10:30 am ET US (7:30 am PT). Our presenter is Frank Stein, Director…
From insideHPC
Free to Attend: StartupHPC Summit Monday, Nov. 14 in Salt Lake City
Today StartupHPC posted their final agenda for their Workshop at SC16 in Salt Lake City. StartupHPC is focused on fostering entrepreneurship in high performance computing,” said founding member Shahin Khan of OrionX. “The StartupHPC…
From insideHPC
Tackling HPC Storage Bottlenecks with Bull Director for HPSS
Today Atos announced Bull Director for HPSS, Data Management software dedicated to High Performance Computing. Bull Director for HPSS optimizes current large scale storage solutions and frees up compute time for users. "In a
…
From Schneier on Security
Whistleblower Investigative Report on NSA Suite B Cryptography
The NSA has been abandoning secret and proprietary cryptographic algorithms in favor of commercial public algorithms, generally known as "Suite B." In 2010, an NSA employee filed some sort of whistleblower complaint, alleging…
From Apophenia
I blame the media. Reality check time.
For months I have been concerned about how what I was seeing on the ground and in various networks was not at all aligned with what pundits were saying. I knew the polling infrastructure had broken, but whenever I told people…
From insideHPC
ECI to Demo 400G Optical Backbone on SC16 SCinet
Today ECI announced plans to demonstrate a 400G backbone at SCinet, the world's largest and fastest high-performance network at SC16 in Salt Lake City. "ECI was delighted to receive the invitation to participate in this exciting…
From insideHPC
Cray Joins iEnergy Oil & Gas Community
"By joining iEnergy, Cray can offer Landmark processing customers access to its high-performance hardware platform to help software users maximize their benefits from the SeisSpace processing system,” said Steve Angelovich, SeisSpace…
From Schneier on Security
Self-Propagating Smart Light Bulb Worm
This is exactly the sort of Internet-of-Things attack that has me worried: "IoT Goes Nuclear: Creating a ZigBee Chain Reaction" by Eyal Ronen, Colin OFlynn, Adi Shamir and Achi-Or Weingarten. Abstract: Within the next few years…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Digital Strategies
In MIT Sloan: Thinking Digital Strategies. " ... To succeed today, companies need a a unique value proposition that incorporates digital technologies in a way that is difficult for competitors to replicate. ... "
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Exploration Tutorial
A Comprehensive Guide to Data Exploration
Posted by Emmanuelle Rieuf ...
This article on a complete tutorial on data exploration, was posted by Sunil Ray. Sunil is a Business Analytics and Intelligence professional with deep experience…
From Schneier on Security
Election-Day Humor
This was written in 2004, but still holds true today....
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Unskewing the Election
Not the polls but voter impulse this time Cropped from source Nate Silver has gone out on a limb. Four years ago we posted on how the forecast of his team at FiveThirtyEight jived with polls and forecasts by other poll aggregators…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Swarming, Folding Robotics
Quite a trick to consider:
Harvard Building Swarm of Self-Folding Origami Robots
One of the challenges with swarms of robots is manufacturing and deploying the swarm itself. Even if the robots are relatively small and relatively…
From insideHPC
Slidecast: How SGI is Meeting Manufacturing’s Need for Production Supercomputing
In this slidecast, Tony DeVarco from SGI describes how the company delivers Production Supercomputing for SMEs. “As the trusted leader in high performance computing, SGI helps companies find answers to the world’s biggest challenges…