Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
December 2015
From Schneier on Security
Using Law Against Technology
On Thursday, a Brazilian judge ordered the text messaging service WhatsApp shut down for 48 hours. It was a monumental action. WhatsApp is the most popular app in Brazil, used by about 100 million people. The Brazilian telecoms…
From The Eponymous Pickle
InHalio: Towards an Internet of Scent
From a long time co-participant in retail. Our innovation center tested a number of sensory interaction devices in retail environments using smell, touch, vision and sound. The data gathered during such interactions is also…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Modern Innovation Leadership.
Modern Innovation LeadershipSeptember 2, 2015 in Innovation PhilosophyLord Kelvin’s Ampere BalanceThere are two main typical approaches to leadership. Some people think that a leader is a person with strong convictions and an…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Top 10 Ways Intel Will Drive HPC Democratization in 2016
The use of High Performance Computing continues to grow in the enterprise and beyond. In this podcast, James Reinders from Intel describes how Intel will continue to drive HPC democratization in 2016. "At Intel, our passion to…
From insideHPC
Video: TACC Powers Stampede Supercomputer with Dell Servers and Intel Omni Path
In this video, Tommy Minyard from TACC describes how Dell helped develop the 9.6 Petaflop Stampede supercomputer for scientific computing. "The Texas Advanced Computing Center supports the University of Texas System and National…
From Blog@Ubiquity
Language Lessons from a Steam-powered Light Bulb
People who make a career in science, computers or otherwise, generally do so because they are naturally drawn to it. They find science fascinating and entertaining, and thus are usually very good at it.
This is both a blessing…From insideHPC
Is HPC Heading Towards Openness, Chaos, or a Split?
"To be successful in high-performance computing (HPC) today, it is no longer enough to sell good hardware: vendors need to develop an ‘ecosystem’ in which other hardware companies use their products and components; in which system…
From insideHPC
JYU Sets World Record for Pore-scale Flow Simulations
An interdisciplinary research team from JYU in Finland has set a new world record in the field of fluid flow simulations through porous materials. The team, coordinated by Dr. Keijo Mattila from the University of Jyväskylä, used…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The courage to face what we do not understand
Sadly, it is easy to forget that what we know is all but a tiny fraction of all there is to know. Human beings naturally focus on what they understand. The more you learn, the stronger this phenomenon tends to be. Irrespective…
From insideHPC
ESI Opens New European HPC Center
Today the French ESI Groupu announced the opening of its new European HPC Center. The datacenter is now based on the Teratec Campus, an ideal location to launch collaborative High-Performance Computing projects as it is in the…
From Computational Complexity
Guns and Crypto
“We believe it would be wrong to weaken security for hundreds of millions of law-abiding customers so that it will also be weaker for the very few who pose a threat,” said a spokesperson from Smith & Wesson on the recent calls…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Acquires Metanautix for Data Supply Chains
In CIO Today: Addressing the data supply chain. Not necessarily about company product supply chains, but about getting and delivering the right data to operations and analytics methodologies, Good concept, its often a major…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Interview with a GE Predictive Analytics Practitioner
A new esteemed colleague of mine, Matthew Pietrzykowski, who does predictive analytics at GE was recently interviewed by Predictive Analytics World. This does a nice job of answering the question: What do you do? Below is…
From insideHPC
Lustre and Persistent Storage
Lustre was originally developed as the fastest scratch file system for HPC workloads that supercomputer centers could get, but has over the years matured to be an enterprise-class parallel file system supporting mission-critical…
From Schneier on Security
More Writings on the Second Crypto Wars
Two things to read: "Wanting It Bad Enough Won't Make It Work: Why Adding Backdoors and Weakening Encryption Threatens the Internet," by Meredith Whittaker and Ben Laurie. "The Second Crypto War is Not about Crypto," by Jaap-Henk…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
FTC to Hold PrivacyCon on January 14
The FTC will hold PrivacyCon, a consumer privacy and security conference, on January 14 in Washington, D.C. The conference is intended for security researchers, academics, industry representatives, consumer advocates, and regulators…
From The Eponymous Pickle
GePhi Updates to version 0.9
I see that the Gephi Graph Analytics system has been updated to version 0.9 ... Creeping ever so slowly up to version 1.0 Used it for several structural analyses of supply chain designs. The popular, open source, free popular…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Machine Learning Marketing Trends
Christoper S. Penn talks machine learning and marketing. The technical future of marketing?" ... In this multi-part series, we’ll look at upcoming trends in marketing in 2016 you should be prepared to address. Today, we’re looking…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
NIST Seeks Public Comments on the Cybersecurity Framework
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) invites public comments on how its voluntary Cybersecurity Framework is being used, possible updates, and options for the long-term governance and management of the Framework…
From Schneier on Security
"The Medieval Origins of Mass Surveillance"
This interesting article by medieval historian Amanda Power traces our culture's relationship with the concept of mass surveillance from the medieval characterization of the Christian god and how piety was policed by the church…
From insideHPC
Video: Using OpenMP at NERSC
"This presentation will describe how OpenMP is used at NERSC. NERSC is the primary supercomputing facility for Office of Science in the US Depart of Energy (DOE). Our next production system will be an Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing…
From insideHPC
CentOS Comes to POWER8 Platforms
Alexandre Caldeira from IBM writes that CentOS is now available for the POWER8 platform. This is a big step for the OpenPOWER community, as the business world uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its twin CentOS for their…
From insideHPC
HPCG Benchmark Gains Traction for Ranking Supercomputers
The High Performance Conjugate Gradients (HPCG) benchmark continues to gain traction in the high-performance computing community. “HPCG is designed to complement the traditional High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark used as…
From insideHPC
Next Generation SDN Driven Systems for Exascale Data Intensive Science
Harvey Newman from CalTech presented this talk at the Mellanox booth at SC15. "We describe activities of the Caltech High Energy Physics team and collaborators, related to the use Software Defined Networking to help achieve fast…
From insideHPC
Lustre: This is Not Your Grandmother’s (or Grandfather’s) Parallel File System
"Over the last several years, an enormous amount of development effort has gone into Lustre to address users’ enterprise-related requests. Their work is not only keeping Lustre extremely fast (the Spider II storage system at …
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The virtuous circle of fantasy
It has long been observed that progress depends on the outliers among us. Shaw’s quote sounds a true today as it did in the past: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Robotic Vacuum Adds Security Functions
In Engadget: Was waiting for some of these kinds of obvious multitasking capabilities. Only way we will see their more general home use.
From The Eponymous Pickle
First Web Site is 25 Years Old
In Endgadget: I remember first seeing the concept being used by folks in research. I had used the Internet in the form of the Darpanet years before. The idea of having hyperlinks in documents had existed for some time, but…
From Computational Complexity
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From The Eponymous Pickle
Personalizing Maps
In the CACM:For individuals, or for commercial entities. Abstract:" ... Geographic maps constitute a ubiquitous medium through which we understand, construct, and navigate our natural and built surroundings. At the intersection…