Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2015
From insideHPC
Video: High-Performance and Scalable Designs of Programming Models for Exascale Systems
"This talk will focus on programming models and their designs for upcoming exascale systems with millions of processors and accelerators. Current status and future trends of MPI and PGAS (UPC and OpenSHMEM) programming models…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tools for the Data Scientist
A look at the Data Science ecosystem. Nice to see it all in one place. By Lukas Biewald. Would like further to see what all the competing claims are. Though simply stating the claims will be controversial. And what the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Device Fingerprint Tracking in Europe
It is well known that all devices have their own fingerprint. Europe plans increased use. " ... Europe’s next privacy war is with websites silently tracking users. .... European data protection watchdogs publish guidance…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Good ideas are overrated
As a college student, I was convinced that the most important part of science and engineering was to have good and original ideas. If you contemplate Einstein, it is not hard to come to this conclusion… The man had a never ending…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Best Practices in Evaluating Scholarship in Hiring, Tenure, and Promotion
A careful distinction between quality and quantity is key to promoting the future growth of the computing and information field. Toward that end, Batya Friedman, Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington…
From insideHPC
insideHPC Guide to Open Computing
The Open Compute Project, initiated by Facebook as a way to increase computing power while lowering associated costs with hyper-scale computing, has gained a significant industry following. This guide to Open Computing is design…
From insideHPC
Video: Slim Fly – A Cost Effective Low-Diameter Network Topology
"We introduce a high-performance cost-effective network topology called Slim Fly that approaches the theoretically optimal network diameter. Slim Fly is based on graphs that approximate the solution to the degree-diameter problem…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of March 23
March 24 Hearing: The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee will hold a hearing on “Continuing America’s Leadership: Advancing Research and Development for Patients.” 10 a.m., 430 Dirksen Building The House Ways…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Juji: Behavior-based Individuality Analysis
Michelle Zhou brought to my attention their new personality analysis startup that creates people profiles from Twitter and Facebook streams. I gave it a try and was impressed by its ease of use. The idea of this kind of…
From Schneier on Security
Reforming the FISA Court
The Brennan Center has a long report on what's wrong with the FISA Court and how to fix it. At the time of its creation, many lawmakers saw constitutional problems in a court that operated in total secrecy and outside the normal…
From insideHPC
UK Atomic Weapons Establishment Signs up for SGI ICE XA Supercomputer
Today SGI announced that the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) will be one of the first customers to install SGI's record-breaking SGI ICE XA supercomputers.
The post UK Atomic Weapons Establishment Signs up for SGI ICE XA…From insideHPC
Video: Lustre Based Enterprise Storage – Tuning Clients for Optimal Performance
"The architecture of the ClusterStor product line builds on 25 years of experience with storage systems, Seagate (formerly Xyratex) and Lustre on a parallel open source high performance storage system that is commonly used for…
From insideHPC
Microsoft Update on RDMA
In this video from the 2015 OFS Developer’s Workshop, Tom Talpey from Microsoft presents: Microsoft Update on RDMA.
The post Microsoft Update on RDMA appeared first on insideHPC.
From insideHPC
Is Europe Leading the Energy Efficiency Race?
Europe is notorious for its high energy costs. In the first of three articles on energy efficiency in high-performance computing, Tom Wilkie from Scientific Computing World asks if that’s why so much of the initiative appears…
From insideHPC
Petroleum Geo-Services to Acquire 5 Petaflop Cray XC40
Today Cray announced a contract to provide Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS) with a 5 Petaflop Cray XC40 supercomputer. The system will be one of the largest supercomputers ever deployed in the commercial sector.
From Putting People First
Ethnographic research drives IKEA’s global success
In a long Fortune Magazine article on IKEA’s successful global expansion, author Beth Kowitt devotes quite a few paragraphs to the importance of qualitative, ethnographic research: “Today research is at the heart of Ikea’s expansion…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Madeup: a Programming Language for Making Things Up
One of the things I have been wondering about is how to make a real connection between 3D printing and learning computer science. Sure most 3D printers are attached to computers and CAD software is used to create models for printing…
From Putting People First
Presentations online of IEA energy efficiency behaviour workshop
The 11th and 12th of March, the International Energy Agency [IEA] in Paris hosted a workshop on energy efficiency and behaviour in the buildings sector. The goal of this workshop was for representatives from IEA member countries…
From insideHPC
Video: Dimensioning Data Centre Resiliency at CSCS
"The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) offers a range of computing and storage services to Swiss and international research communities. These services are provisioned by an array of solutions including leading edge…
From insideHPC
Video: Welcome to the 2015 HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference
In this video, Gilad Shainer and Hussein Harake kick off the 2015 HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference. The event will focus on High-Performance Computing essentials, new developments and emerging technologies, best practices…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Computational Thinking With Wolfram Language
An excellent transcript (with pictures) of the talk and detailed demonstration given by Stephen Wolfram at the recent SXSW on their Wolfram Language. We looked at Wolfram Alpha when it was released, but I have not looked at…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Leading with Strategic Thinking at Gillette
Via José Ignacio Sordo Galarza:I hope this note finds you in good health and spirits! If you recall right, almost 10 years ago, in early 2005 P&G agreed to acquire Gillette in an effort to combine many of the world’s top brands…
From Putting People First
Doctors are now inviting patients to help design their own medical treatment
In many hospitals and clinics around the [USA], oncologists and surgeons simply tell cancer patients what treatments they should have, or at least give them strong recommendations. But [at UC San Francisco], under a formal process…
From insideHPC
Video: Adaptive Routing for Scalable Topologies
"Adaptive Routing has been added to the static routing capability available in previous switch families. InfiniBand supports moving traffic via multiple parallel paths. Adaptive routing dynamically and automatically re-routes…
From Putting People First
UK report on consumer problems in the mobile phone market
Calling the shots? is the title of a new Citizens Advice Bureau report that analyses consumer problems in the mobile phone market and explores opportunities for stronger consumer protections. From the executive summary: “The …
From Putting People First
Measuring experience
Over the summer of 2014, Northstar, in collaboration with the London School of Economics, conducted an ethnographic study at the Royal Academy of Arts, exploring the Summer Exhibition audience and their motivations. The study…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Future of Visualization
In Flowingdata: A short talk on visualization. Keeping people in the loop. Using their visualization skills. Well done. Key further is the direct connection to other basic forms of analytics
From The Eponymous Pickle
Personal Blogs
Despite many people running off to simpler models like Twitter and Tumblr, I still like personal blog. I can even to be said to collect them. Here is an example just brought to my attention:A Blog by Edward B. Rockower, Ph.D…
From insideHPC
Mellanox Demonstrates Next-Gen 100Gb/s LinkX Cables & Silicon Photonics Transceivers
Today Mellanox introduced three new LinkX 100Gb/s solutions with a live demonstration at the OFC 2015 Conference (Booth 2419).
From insideHPC
Video: RSC Technologies – Leading Energy Efficient Supercomputing to Exascale
In this video from the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference, Alexander Moskovsky from RSC presents: Leading Energy Efficient Supercomputing to Exascale.