Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2016
From insideHPC
DWD Weather Service in Germany Upgrades Cray Systems
Today Cray announced a contract to upgrade the supercomputers at Germany’s National Meteorological Service – the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD). Located in Offenbach, Germany, DWD is one of the world’s premier numerical weather…
From insideHPC
Video: Seagate Exascale HPC Storage
"Traditionally, storage have been using brute force rather than intelligent design to deliver the required throughputs but the current trend is to design balanced systems with full utilization of the back-end storage and other…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Qlik Sense Stories
Via Qlik Sense:" ... Charts and graphs may be some of the most commonly used tools for bringing data sets to life, but Narrative Science wants you to consider another one: stories.Companies that use Qlik Sense data-visualization…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Principal Component Analysis using R
Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was a favorite technique of ours for a long time, because it addressed the dimensionality of a problem, So important for problems that had many socially influenced dimensions. These problems…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Enterprise Splunk
Splunk, A package that I used for an application some time ago, for datastream analysis, but is relatively little known, reports their enterprise version 6.4. Adds new visualization capabilities.
From Computational Complexity
Are Perfect Numbers Bigger than Six initial sums of odd cubes (answered)
(NONE of this is my work. In fact some of it is on Wikipedia.) In my last blog I noticed that 28 = 13 + 33 496= 13 + 33 + 53 + 73 noting that 28 and 496 are the 2nd and 3rd perfect numbers. I asked if 8128, the next perfect…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Datawheel to Visualize Open US Data
This looks to be a very good idea. Automatically generated visualizations. In Datanami: New Platform Visualizes Open U.S. Databy George LeopoldFederal agencies are sitting on tons of data, particularly in areas like healthcare…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Forty Thousand Dollar Coin Flipper Program
Have you heard about the $47,400 piece of software that randomly points an arrow left or right? TSA says its Randomizer app only cost $47,400 This doesn’t seem very complicated so why/how could it possibly cost so much. I spent…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Lifelogging Pauses
Gordon Bell was a big proponent, but has stopped doing Lifelogging. Has the ubiquitous smart phone taken over for the approach? Only if you automated periodic picture taking and recorded keystrokes. And made sure the phone…
From Schneier on Security
Data and Goliath Sale
I have a bunch of extra copies of my book Data and Goliath, and I am selling them at a discount. Details here....
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Global City Teams Challenge Expo- June 13-14, 2016
The 2016 Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC) Expo will take place in Austin, TX at the Austin Convention Center June 13-14, 2016. The Expo will showcase GCTC Action Clusters and will feature speakers and panelists on a wide range…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New on IFTTT This Month
A number of new channels on IFTTT this month. For those that might want to sculpt out the operation of their smart home (or even smart office). Including from Daikin AC controllers and GE Clothes Dryers. See their many LG…
From The Eponymous Pickle
MIT Media Lab Changes Software Default to Encourage Open Source
MIT pushes free and open source, in Medium:The MIT Media Lab is part of an academic ecosystem committed to liberal sharing of knowledge. In that spirit, I’m proud to announce that we are changing our internal procedures to encourage…
From insideHPC
Supermicro Showcases New GPU SuperServer at GTC 2016
"Supermicro’s new SuperServer and SuperBlade platforms optimized for next generation GPU technology offer the most flexible architecture for the future of extreme parallel computing,” said Charles Liang, President and CEO of …
From insideHPC
Texas A&M is the Latest Intel Parallel Computing Center
Texas A&M University’s High Performance Research Computing (HPRC) center is the latest Intel® Parallel Computing Center. "HPRC is proud to be recognized as an Intel Parallel Computing Center,” said Honggao Liu, director of High…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Spectral Clustering and Decision Process Improvement
Good, detailed piece in DSC on motivation for Spectral Clustering. Not a method we used in the enterprise, never getting beyond K means and forest methods, but the case is made that better clustering methods can get you closer…
From Computational Complexity
Are perfect numbers bigger than 6 initial sums of odd cubes?
I pose two questions today (Monday April 4). I will post the answers tomorrow (Tuesday April 5). Feel free to comment about the answers. If you don't want clues look at the comments. If I need to clarify something I will do…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings – Week of April 4
Thursday, April 7, 2016 Field Hearing: Cyber Preparedness and Response at the Local Level House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies 12 pm | Austin College- Sherman…
From insideHPC
Penguin Computing Accelerates OpenPOWER-based Magna Servers
Today Penguin Computing announced Open Compute Project (OCP)-based systems that reinforce both its continued collaboration with NVIDIA and new options in Penguin Computing’s Magna family of OpenPOWER-based servers. "Customers…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Could virtual-reality make us smarter?
When the web initially took off, there were major concerns that it was “dumbing us down”. There are similar concerns with e-books making us dumber. I am quite sure that when we first started to use the written word, there were…
From insideHPC
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Expands HPC Portfolio
As high performance and webscale applications become mainstream, HPE's continued focus on this market is yielding positive results for our customers," said Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC, Big Data and IoT…
From insideHPC
Mellanox Rolls Out EDR InfiniBand Routers
Today Mellanox announced a new line of InfiniBand router systems. The new EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand Routers enable a new level of scalability critical for the next generation of mega data-center deployments as well as expanded capabilities…
From Phys.org Technology News
Why lightsabers would be far more lethal than George Lucas envisioned
Research is an unpredictable process. Sometimes you end up making a really cool discovery that you didn't see coming. I recently uncovered a fundamental property of lightsabers (that's right – the awesome weapons from Star Wars)…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Machine Learning Empowering the Smart Phone
Makes sense, we are already seeing voice integration and the gathering and assembly and analysis of sensor data. Better virtual assistants for given contexts should follow. In Fastcompany:Three Ways Google Predicts Your Smartphone…
From Phys.org Technology News
Aging voting machines threaten election integrity
Imagine you went to your basement and dusted off the laptop or mobile phone that you used in 2002. What would happen if you tried to turn it on? We don't have to guess. Around the country this election year, people are going…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Improvisation and Virtual Onboarding
We experimented with this, but it was never implemented, perhaps for cultural reasons. Found it to be be fascinating approach, especially the process involved. And how will we be onboard with the use of virtual assistants?…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Technical Revolution in the Ear
In Co.DesignThe Next Big Tech Revolution Will Be In Your EarExperts in UX, AI, and product design weigh in on the next big modality in computing. ..
From insideHPC
Why New Intel® Xeon Processors Make Sense for HPC Applications
Through the microarchitecture improvements, increased core counts, and faster memory speeds of the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family based on the “Broadwell” microarchitecture, you can increase your HPC application…
From insideHPC
The Lustre Parallel File System—A Landscape of Topics and Insight from the Community
Since its beginnings in 1999 as a project at Carnegie Mellon University, Lustre, the high performance parallel file system, has come a long, long way. Designed and always focusing on performance and scalability, it is now part…
From Phys.org Technology News
Drone company demos how blood air-drops will work in Rwanda
Drone delivery might be years away in the U.S., but it's becoming a reality in Rwanda this summer.