Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
December 2016
From insideHPC
Supercomputing Sandstorm Forecasts at BSC
"Over the past 15 years, a number of factors have resulted in an increase in the frequency, intensity, and operational impact of sand and dust storms in the Middle East and surrounding areas,” said Bob Richard, vice president…
From insideHPC
Altair Moves Forward with Open Source PBS Pro and PBS Cloud at SC16
In this video from SC16, Bill Nitzberg provides an update on the Open Source release of PBS Professional workload management software. After that, Jeremie Bourdoncle announces the new Altair PBS Cloud. "Altair is excited to announce…
From insideHPC
Cray Collaborates with Microsoft & CSCS to Scale Deep Learning
Today Cray announced the results of a deep learning collaboration with Microsoft CSCS designed to expand the horizons of running deep learning algorithms at scale using the power of Cray supercomputers. "Cray’s proficiency in…
From The Eponymous Pickle
GE Makes an Techno Alexa Lamp
An odd thing, but will it match your decor? Techno geek looking. Lots of folks jumping into the Alexa intelligence thing. Form meets function, they say. Now if you could float a hologram screen into the center of the circle…
From Phys.org Technology News
Time to set limits: Business owners suffer tech overload
Three years into being a business owner, Becky Davis knew she needed to break the hold technology had on her.
From insideHPC
GPUs & Deep Learning in the Spotlight for Nvidia at SC16
In this video from SC16, Roy Kim from Nvidia describes how the company is bringing in a new age of AI with accelerated computing for Deep Learning applications. "Deep learning is the fastest-growing field in artificial intelligence…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Digital Assistants Changing us
A pretty old and general argument. Our servants, games, machines, media, conveniences, advertising will fundamentally change us. Now is this entirely new? In Wired.
From Schneier on Security
WWW Malware Hides in Images
There's new malware toolkit that uses stegaography to hide in images: For the past two months, a new exploit kit has been serving malicious code hidden in the pixels of banner ads via a malvertising campaign that has been active…
From insideHPC
DDN and IBM Team on 50 TB per Day, Inter-Continental Active Archive Solution
Today DDN announced that Yahoo Japan has deployed an active archive system jointly developed by DDN and IBM Japan. The new system allows Yahoo! JAPAN to cache dozens of petabytes of data from its OpenStack Swift storage solution…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Jambaar for Video Content Management
Brought to my attention:
.... Jambaar is your co-creator in driving better video content results. Our subscription model makes it faster and more affordable than any other solution. ...
• 100% Faster and more cost effective
•…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Embodied Cognition
Looks to be an interesting talk, as many in this series are. A look at what is going on in Cognitive AI. I have pointed some of these talks to my students at Columbia.
Dear Professors, Students, IBMers and others,
This a reminder…
From insideHPC
Call for Sessions: Open Fabrics Workshop 2017 in Austin
The OpenFabrics Alliance Workshop 2017 has issued their Call for Sessions. The event will take place March 27-31, 2017 in Austin, Texas. "An ongoing collaboration between OpenFabrics Software (OFS) producers and users is necessary…
From insideHPC
How Researchers Will Benefit from Canada’s National Data Cyberinfrastructure
"Individual institutions or organizations will have opportunities to deploy storage locally and can federate their local repository into the national system,” says Dr. Greg Newby, Compute Canada’s Chief Technology Officer. “This…
From insideHPC
Cobham Opera Simulation Software Moves Tokamak Closer to Fusion Energy
The Cobham Technical Services Opera software is helping Tokamak Energy to reduce the very high costs associated with prototyping a new fusion power plant concept," said Paul Noonan, R&D Projects Director for ST40. "After we have…
From insideHPC
HPE Apollo 6500 for Deep Learning
"With up to eight high performance NVIDIA GPUs designed for maximum transfer bandwidth, the HPE Apollo 6500 is purpose-built for HPC and deep learning applications. Its high ratio of GPUs to CPUs, dense 4U form factor and efficient…
From Computational Complexity
A students unusual proof might be a better proof
I asked a student to show that between any two rationals is a rational.
She did the following: if x < y are rational then take δ << y-x and rational and use x+δ
This is correct though more complicated then what I had in mind…
From XRDS
Tending To Infinity
What kind of thoughts does the word ‘infinity’ evoke in your mind? Do you visualize a never-ending expanse that stretches in all directions? Or maybe a straight line extending in both directions beyond visual perception. Some…
From Phys.org Technology News
Expectation versus reality in the acceptance of self-driving cars
As interest in the development of automated cars increases, public and media attention has focused on the speculative benefit of having an abundance of in-vehicle work and leisure time that would otherwise be spent driving. Although…
From insideHPC
Increasing the Efficiency of Storage Systems
Have you ever wondered why your HPC installation is not performing as you had envisioned ? You ran small simulations. You spec’d out the CPU speed, the network speed and the disk drive speed. You optimized your application and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Do Smart Speakers Need a Screen?
The rash of smart speakers and voice drive smart home control systems continues. But using them with advanced features, like recipe systems, or searches that could be augmented with pictures or diagrams, seem to beg for an…
From Schneier on Security
International Phone Fraud Tactics
This article outlines two different types of international phone fraud. The first can happen when you call an expensive country like Cuba: My phone call never actually made it to Cuba. The fraudsters make money because the last…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Don’t assume that safety comes for free: a Swift case study
Most modern languages try to be “safer” by checking runtime values in the hope of producing more secure and less buggy software. Sadly, it makes it harder to reason about the performance of the code. And, sometimes, the costContinue…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Go Tests Effort-less Buying
In the isle, without checkouts. But tracking I am sure. So this can detect aspects of movement and context that take us to purchase. What are the patterns that make us buy? We tested similar approaches which modeled all…
From insideHPC
Supercomputing Drug Discovery to Combat Heart Disease
Using a unique computational approach to rapidly sample proteins in their natural state of gyrating, bobbing, and weaving, a research team from UC San Diego and Monash University in Australia has identified promising drug leads…
From Schneier on Security
Voynich Manuscript Facsimile Published
Yale University Press has published a facsimile of the Voynich Manuscript. The manuscript is also available online....
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Reviews the SC16 Student Cluster Competition Configurations & Results
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews the results from SC16 Student Cluster Competition. "This year, the advent of clusters with the new Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs made a huge impact, nearly tripling the Linpack record…
From insideHPC
NVIDIA Launches Deep Learning Teaching Kit for University Professors
"With demand for graduates with AI skills booming, we’ve released the NVIDIA Deep Learning Teaching Kit to help educators give their students hands on experience with GPU-accelerated computing. The kit — co-developed with deep…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Standardizing Predictive Influence Measures
Determining influence is a very frequent need for analytics in business. It can often guide us towards data collection. It is often a prelude to further analysis. Always thought it would be useful to have a more standard
In…
From insideHPC
NIH Powers Biowulf Cluster with Mellanox EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand
Today Mellanox announced that NIH, the U.S. National Institute of Health’s Center for Information Technology, has selected Mellanox 100G EDR InfiniBand solutions to accelerate Biowulf, the largest data center at NIH. The project…
From insideHPC
Kx Streaming Analytics Crunches 1.2 Billion NYC Taxi Data Points using Intel Xeon Phi
"The complexity and high costs of architecting and maintaining streaming analytics solutions often make it difficult to get new projects off the ground. That’s part of the reason Kx, a leading provider of high-volume, high-performance…