Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2024
From Schneier on Security
Ross Anderson
Ross Anderson unexpectedly passed away Thursday night in, I believe, his home in Cambridge.
I can’t remember when I first met Ross. Of course it was before 2008, when we created the Security and Human Behavior workshop. It was…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 31 2024)
Large language models (e.g., ChatGPT) do better at legal questions that lawyers: Our empirical analysis benchmarks LLMs against a ground truth set by Senior Lawyers, uncovering that advanced models match or exceed human accuracy…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Fast and concise probabilistic filters in Python
Sometimes you need to filter out or filter in data quickly. Suppose that your employer maintains a list of forbidden passwords or URLs or words. You may store them in a relational database and query them as needed. Unfortunately…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: The Geopolitics of Eating Squid
New York Times op-ed on the Chinese dominance of the squid industry:
China’s domination in seafood has raised deep concerns among American fishermen, policymakers and human rights activists. They warn that China is expanding…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
New SIAM Report Explores the Challenges Facing the Future of Computational Science
In 2023, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), an affiliated professional society member of CRA, commissioned a task force to craft a strategic vision for arising challenges in the future of computational…
From Schneier on Security
Lessons from a Ransomware Attack against the British Library
You might think that libraries are kind of boring, but this self-analysis of a 2023 ransomware and extortion attack against the British Library is anything but.
From insideHPC
Photonic Fabric Company Celestial AI Closes $175M Series C
SANTA CLARA, Calif.– Celestial AI, creator of the Photonic Fabric optical interconnect technology platform, announced it raised $175 million in its Series C funding round led by Thomas Tull’s U.S. Innovative Technology Fund (USIT)…
From insideHPC
Asmeret Asefaw Berhe Issues Letter of Farewell as Director of DOE Office of Science
Following the news last week of her departure as director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science since May 2022, Dr. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe has issued a letter of farewell to her agency and White House colleagues.…
From insideHPC
Lightning AI Announces Availability Compiler for PyTorch
New York – March 28, 2024 – Lightning AI today announced the availability of Thunder, a source-to-source compiler for PyTorch designed for training and serving the latest generative AI models across multiple GPUs. Thunder is
…
From insideHPC
Advania Expands into Second atNorth Data Center in Iceland
Reykjavík, Iceland– March 26th, 2024 – HPC and AI colocation atNorth announced an expansion of its partnership with Nordic IT services corporation, Advania, providing additional capacity at its state of the art ICE03 site in
…
From insideHPC
Zapata AI and Andretti Acquisition Corp. Announce Closing of Business Combination
BOSTON & INDIANAPOLIS, March 28, 2024 – Industrial generative AI company Zapata Computing, announced today that it has completed its business combination with Andretti Acquisition Corp. (NYSE: WNNR), a special purpose acquisition…
From insideHPC
SydeLabs Raises $2.5M for GenAI Security
SAN FRANCISCO – March 28, 2024; Today, security and risk management startup SydeLabs announced a seed funding round of $2.5 million to build solutions aimed at securing GenAI systems for enterprises. The funding round was led…
From insideHPC
ALCF Announces Online AI Testbed Training Workshops
The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility has announced a series of training workshops to introduce users to the novel AI accelerators deployed at the ALCF AI Testbed. The four individual workshops will introduce participants…
From insideHPC
Amazon Adds $2.75B to Stake in GenAI Startup Anthropic
Amazon announced it has made its biggest-ever investment, $2.75 billion, in OpenAI/Chat-GPT competitor Anthropic, another indication that the generative AI phenomenon continues to heat up. Today’s news follows Amazon and Anthropic…
From insideHPC
Updated MLPerf AI Inference Benchmark Results Released
Today, MLCommons announced new results from its MLPerf Inference v4.0 benchmark suite with machine learning (ML) system performance benchmarking. To view the results for MLPerf Inference v4.0 visit the Datacenter and Edge results…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Pangrams Anyone?
Regular readers of this blog know that I have been doing the New York Times Spelling bee (Computer Science Teacher: Spelling Bee Solver Project). Actually, I do it with my wife who gets most of the words. Anyway, one of the special…
From insideHPC
Oriole Networks Raises £10m for Faster LLM Training
London, 27 March 2024: Oriole Networks – a startup using light to train LLMs faster with less power – has raised £10 million in seed funding to improve AI performance and adoption, and solve AI’s energy problem. The round, which…
From insideHPC
Alice & Bob and Partners Granted €16.5M to Cut Quantum Costs
PARIS — March 27, 2024 — Alice & Bob, a fault tolerant quantum computing hardware developer, and academic partners ENS de Lyon and Mines Paris – PSL, announced the receipt of a €16.5 million ($17.8 million USD) grant, a France…
From insideHPC
XConn Releases Silicon Samples of Apollo CXL 2.0 Switch
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – March 26, 2024 – HPC and AI interconnect company XConn Technologies today announced the release of early production samples for its “Apollo” CXL 2.0 switch, which the company will demonstrate with Samsung…
From insideHPC
ACM and IMS Release First Issues of Journal of Data Science
New York, March 27, 2024 – ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, and IMS, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, have announced the publication of the first issues of the ACM/IMS Journal of Data Science (JDS), a peer…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC @ AAAS 2024: Large Language Models: Helpful Assistants, Romantic Partners, or Con Artists? Part Two
CCC supported three scientific sessions at this year’s AAAS Annual Conference, and in case you weren’t able to attend in person, we will be recapping each session. Today, we will summarize the highlights of the Q&A portion of…
From Computational Complexity
The Softening of Computing Jobs: Blip or Trend?
Tech companies are performing exceptionally well, driving the S&P 500 to new heights with their soaring stock prices. However, the tech sector, apart from AI, expects a job decline to persist throughout the year, accompaniedtougher…
From insideHPC
NTT Research PHI Lab Scientists Achieve Quantum Control of Excitons in 2D Semiconductors
Sunnyvale, Calif. – March 26, 2024 – NTT Research, Inc., a division of NTT (TYO:9432), today announced that scientists from its Physics & Informatics (PHI) Lab have achieved quantum control of exciton wavefunctions in two-dimensional…
From insideHPC
Activeloop AI Database Raises $11M Series A
March 26, 2024. Mountain View – Calif. – Database AI company Activeloop has raised $11 million in Series A funding from Streamlined Ventures, Y Combinator, Samsung Next, Alumni Ventures, and Dispersion Capital. The round brings…
From insideHPC
EuroHPC JU Energy Efficiency Project REGALE Comes to End
Munich, 26 March 2024 – This March marks the end of REGALE, a European project, funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, which has carried out research into the development of new software for high performance computing (HPC)…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC @ AAAS 2024: Large Language Models: Helpful Assistants, Romantic Partners, or Con Artists? Part One
CCC supported three scientific sessions at this year’s AAAS Annual Conference, and in case you weren’t able to attend in person, we will be recapping each session. This week, we will summarize the highlights of the panelists…
From Schneier on Security
On Secure Voting Systems
Andrew Appel shepherded a public comment—signed by twenty election cybersecurity experts, including myself—on best practices for ballot marking devices and vote tabulation. It was written for the Pennsylvania legislature, but…
From Schneier on Security
AI and Trust
Watch the Video on YouTube.com
A 15-minute talk by Bruce Schneier.
From insideHPC
At GTC 2024: Liqid UltraStack Servers with up to 20 NVIDIA GPUs
At GTC 2024 we caught up with Sumit Puri, co-founder of composable computing company Liqid, to discuss the company’s GPU-power UltraStack, which he said transforms 2U servers into high-density GPU systems powered by NVIDIA L40S…
From insideHPC
Exascale Computing Project: Leveraging HPC and Neural Networks for Cancer Research
By Sally Johnson, contributing writer, on behalf of the Exascale Computing Project What happens when Department of Energy (DOE) researchers join forces with chemists and biologists at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). They…