Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2016
From BLOG@CACM
Wax Woz, Stan Lee, and 30,000 Close Friends
Last weekend, Steve Wozniak and Stan Lee launched the first annual Silicon Valley Comic Con.
From Blog@Ubiquity
Your Smartphone Can Kill You
Niall McCarthy of Statista.com uses data from Priceonomics to define a new category of accidental death by smart phone—the “selfie-fatality.” Forty-nine people have died because of selfies over the past three years, exposingRead…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Maturing of the Data Lake
Very good introductory article in CACM: Lots of players and directions mentioned. Note the mention of needing 'loosely coupled data' to be better understood. This gets back to the idea of enhancing data as an asset when…
From insideHPC
Co-Design Architecture: Emergence of New Co-Processors
"High performance computing has begun scaling beyond Petaflop performance towards the Exaflop mark. One of the major concerns throughout the development toward such performance capability is scalability – at the component level…
From Schneier on Security
1981 US Document on Encryption Policy
This was newly released under FOIA at my request: Victor C. Williams, Jr., Donn B. Parker, and Charles C. Wood, "Impacts of Federal Policy Options for Nonmilitary Cryptography," NTIA-CR-81-10, National Telecommunications and…
From insideHPC
A Quick Look at the 2016 Ethernet Roadmap
Today the Ethernet Alliance unveiled its 2016 Ethernet Roadmap at OFC 2016. The roadmap highlights Ethernet’s breadth of speeds, current and next-generation modules and interfaces, PoE, and innovations like the OIF's FlexEthernet…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Online Cyber Security Competitions
Computer security has been in the news a lot lately with all the talk of the FBI and Apple going at it in court. Students are interested as well. In the last 24 hours or so information about two cybersecurity and computer science…
From insideHPC
Supercomputing Extreme Weather Events and Climate Change
A recent study conducted by the Barcelona Supercomputer Center suggests that calibrated model ensembles improve the trustworthiness of climate event attribution to extreme weather events. The study also found that current climate…
From insideHPC
Video: The Nvidia Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform
"Accelerated computing is transforming the data center that delivers unprecedented through- put, enabling new discoveries and services for end users. This talk will give an overview about the NVIDIA Tesla accelerated computing…
From insideHPC
Seeking Students and Instructors for the Blue Waters Intro to HPC Virtual Course
The Blue Waters project at the University of Illinois is offering a new graduate course entitled Introduction to High Performance Computing. The course will be offered as a collaborative, online course for multiple participating…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What the heck is interesting research?
I have long advocated that the world would be better off if more people did research. But what the heck is research? In simple terms, I know of two types of interesting research… The engineering path: Pick an unsolved problem…
From The Eponymous Pickle
SAP Addressing the Supply Chain
We worked on early, optimization based uses of SAP data to improve the operation of the enterprise supply chain. Note the mention of constraint based systems, key for supply chains. Also the integration of real time operations…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF WATCH Talk- The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work
The next WATCH talk, called The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work is Thursday, March 24, 2016 from Noon-1pm EDT. The presenter will be Phillip Rogaway, professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Leveraging Internet of Things for Competitive Advantage
Leveraging the Internet of Things for Competitive AdvantageIn collaboration with Dell, Mar 22, 2016 Operations Management Partner Collaborations Global FocusNorth America Internet-of-Things ... The Internet of Things (IoT) is…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Intelligent Voice Interfaces
From Mindmeld. Registration information is required." ... Did you know predictions are that, by 2020, 50% of web searches will be done using voice queries? If you have an app or connected device that requires search functionality…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Andrew Grove Dies
We hosted Andrew Grove, former Intel Chairman and founder, to our innovation centers several times. A short bio in CACM.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Confirmation Bias
Via Linkedin: Have seen this kind of bias in many parts of the enterprise. On challenging the idea.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Emerging Trends in Data Analytics
In DSC: On emerging trends in data analytics. " .... Data Science Central shared its predictions for 2016. More predictions can be found here. In this article, we share Scott Mongeau's predictions. The full version of this (long)…
From insideHPC
Intel MPI Messaging Paper Wins ISC 2016 Hans Meuer Award
Today ISC 2016 announced that a research paper in the area of Message Passing Interface (MPI) performance, has been selected to receive the 2016 Hans Meuer Award. The awarding will take place at the ISC High Performance conference…
From insideHPC
Tutorial on Deep Learning
Zaikun Xu from the Università della Svizzera Italiana presented this talk at the Switzerland HPC Conference. "In the past decade, deep learning as a life-changing technology, has gained a huge success on various tasks, including…
From Schneier on Security
Observations on the Surveillance that Resulted in the Capture of Salah Abdeslam
Interesting analysis from The Grugq: Bottom Line Up Front Intelligence agencies must cooperate more rapidly and proactively to counter ISIS' rapid and haphazard operational tempo. Clandestine operatives must rely on support networks…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Post Number 1000
About two weeks ago I realized that I was approaching 1,000 posts on this blog. Most of these have come in the last three and a half years since I left Microsoft. This is really the second version of the blog I started while …
From insideHPC
Seagate and LANL to Heat Up Data Archiving For Supercomputers
Seagate Technology and Los Alamos National Laboratory are researching a new storage tier to enable massive data archiving for supercomputing. The joint effort is aimed at determining innovative new ways to keep massive amounts…
From insideHPC
Liquid Cooling Doubles Compute Capacity at Cascade Technologies
Today CoolIT Systems announced it has enabled Cascade Technologies to increase their compute density by 2.5 times within their existing floor space, rack space, and air conditioning capacity by deploying liquid cooling. "Partnering…
From insideHPC
High-Performance and Scalable Designs of Programming Models for Exascale Systems
DK Panda from Ohio State University presented this talk at the Switzerland HPC Conference. "This talk will focus on challenges in designing runtime environments for Exascale systems with millions of processors and accelerators…
From insideHPC
Cooling Today’s Hot New Processors
Expected later in 2016, Intel will be releasing production versions of its Knights Landing (KNL) 72-core coprocessor. These next generation coprocessors are impacting the physical design of the supercomputers now coming down …
From Schneier on Security
iMessage Encryption Flaw Found and Fixed
Matthew Green and team found and reported a significant iMessage encryption flaw last year. Green suspected there might be a flaw in iMessage last year after he read an Apple security guide describing the encryption process and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Virtual Reality in the Enterprise
OK, for specialty hands-free applications, but for the usual knowledge worker? Course a decade plus ago would not have expected the mobile, always connected, image gathering and manipulating phone device either. In Techcrunch…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
2016 CSTA Board Election — One More Day to Cast Your Vote!
The 2016 election for five open positions on the CSTA Board of Directors runs through March 22. If you were a CSTA member as of February 16, you should have received an email from ElectionBuddy.com with a personalized link to…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Ranged random-number generation is slow in Python…
A colleague has been running simulations using a library written in Python. She has having serious performance problems… Her application is parallelizable, but Python does not make parallelization easy. She could switch to another…