Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2009
From insideHPC
Folding for
My pals at NVIDIA sent me an email today letting me know about a special way this month that you can take part in the fight against cancer. Scott Sherman’s 13 year old daughter Stephanie has Hodgkins Stage 4B cancer, which is…
From insideHPC
SiCortex matriculates at
(No, I used it right. I looked it up.) Today HPC vendor SiCortex announced that they’ve sent their boy to college, old world style The SiCortex system at the University of Cambridge will power computational chemistry research…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Caring About Blog Traffic
I do follow my blog's traffic using Google Analytics. I watch hits and and try to figure out why what I have written creates certain changes. I am a stats compulsive. But Amber Naslund has some good thoughts about what we…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bayes and Business Intelligence
A very well one piece on Bayesian modeling and Business Intelligence. Now part 1, and just published part 2. Anyone that does BI should understand the basics of this kind of model.
From insideHPC
Intel Parallel Studio
Intel’s Parallel Studio, about which I wrote in this article for HPCwire, is now available in beta. From Intel Intel Parallel Studio, a suite of development tools for C/C++ developers using Microsoft Visual Studio, is now available…
From insideHPC
Cloud computing in plain
Rich at Sun’s HPC Watercooler went movie diving at YouTube, and came back with a gem. “Cloud computing in plain english” does a good job explaining cloud computing in a way even my sister could understand. And what with the paper…
From insideHPC
Sun HPC development tools
Our buddies at Sun’s HPC Watercooler have posted info on a new webinar from Sun HPC Development Solutions: Sun Studio and HPC Clustertools In this webinar, you will learn how Sun Studio Compilers and Tools and Sun HPC ClusterTools…
From insideHPC
Startup launches virtualized shared memory
Earlier this week startup RNA Networks announced that it has launched a software platform that aggregates memory among servers and makes it available to all the servers as a shared memory pool. The company was founded 18 months…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Visualizing Target Growth
From Flowing Data, a visualization of the growth of Target Stores throughout the US.Links to a display of the US, which shows year by year how Target grew. A very simple animation. I have seen many examples of this kind of…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
E-Verify Contractor Rule Delayed; Program Could Appear in Stimulus Package
The E-Verify program, a proposed national electronic employment verification system, continues to stagger toward full implementation. As we noted last fall, some federal contractors and subcontractors were supposed to start…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Singularity University
Ray Kurzweil has launched the Singularity University. More on a technological Singularity. A futurist view driven by technological developments.
From The Eponymous Pickle
On Microsoft's BI Strategy
Tableau Software's view of Microsoft's new Business Intelligence strategy.
From insideHPC
Fast Forward to 2012: IBM Breaks
The US Department of Energy has just announced a program awarded to IBM that will birth a 20 Petaflop supercomputer by the year 2012.
From Putting People First
What the heck is user experience design??!!
Audio interview with Jesse James Garrett, president and co-founder of Adaptive Path. Some describe it as making things easy and enjoyable to use. Others describe it as all the elements that impact someone’s perception of a product…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Action Alert! Urge Your Representatives to Support Science
A very important message to the Computing Research Advocacy Network (CRAN) is now on the CRA Government Affairs Blog. We are asking our members to contact their representatives in Congress now to request support for science funding…
From Putting People First
Book: The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices
The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices By Rich Ling, Scott Campbell (editors) Published by Transaction Publishers, 2008 ISBN 141280809X, 9781412808095 304 pages Google preview Summary One of the…
From Putting People First
Book: Mobile Technologies - From Telecommunications to Media
Mobile Technologies - From Telecommunications to Media Editors: Gerard Goggin; Larissa Hjorth ISBN: 978-0-415-98986-2 (hardback) 978-0-203-88431-7 (electronic) Series: Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies Google preview…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Compressed bitmaps in Java
A bitmap is an efficient array of boolean values. They are commonly used in bitmap indexes. The Java language has a bitmap class: BitSet. Unfortunately, the Java BitSet class will not scale to large sparse bitmaps
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
One of the fathers of academic blogging is back
Seb Paquet resumed blogging. Why should you go subscribe to his new blog?
At some point, he was one of the most read bloggers in the world. He is one of the first Computer Scientists to write a Ph.D. thesis on the Social Web…From insideHPC
Altair Releases Personal
HPCWire: Altair released a new version of their popular batch scheduling software package, deemed Personal PBS.
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Geek Chic
A recent article in the New York Times In 'Geek Chic' and Obama, New Hope for Lifting Women in Science offered hope that the new administration would act on efforts to attract and retain more women in science. Though the author…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bullish
With lots of fear mongering and money being thrown around it is good to see that some companies are still pushing private enterprise and being bullish about ad spending.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Advice to upcoming Ph.D.s
As a comment to my previous post, Steven wrote: Any advice for someone that thought a Ph.D. in Computer Science was a good idea in 2004 that plan to graduate in 2010? A fair question. I currently supervise two Ph.D. students …
From insideHPC
Cray Clears Common Criteria
Cray has announced that their Cray Linux Environment [CLE] has just been certified under the Common Criteria Evaluation and Validation Scheme.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Success in Open Innovation
In a recent review post of the book: Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe I mentioned P&G's use of Innocentive for open innovation. A competitor of Innocentive is NineSigma, which is only briefly mentioned in the book. Ninesigma has…
From insideHPC
BYO Supercomputer. Worth
NetworkWorld posted a feature article this morning on Bruce Allen, astrophysicist turned supercomputer manufacturer.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Age Perception Game
An age perception game: How Old are You?. Testing several things: How well can a person determine the age of a person from varying styles of images? And how good are they at estimation? I would have liked the author Bryant…
From insideHPC
Supercomputing in the US Senate stimulus
A PAC called the Senate Conservatives Fund, who according to their website are “dedicated to electing true conservatives to the United States Senate,” is highlighting what it calls “disguised earmarks” in the Senate version of…
From insideHPC
Getting more from your power dollar in the
Article in EE Times last week on the inefficiencies of power delivery in datacenters these days, particularly supercomputing data centers. The problem? Conversions and cooling and distribution loss. Commenting on the problem…
From insideHPC
Intel launches ScienceSim virtual world for education and visualization, ties in with
In a post on Intel’s Research blog late last week, John Hengeveld announced an open invitation for ScienceSim Today we are publically [sic] inviting others to come to ScienceSim and investigate its use for building collaborative…