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
Cray Moves Minnesota Offices from St. Paul to Mall of America
"After a careful consideration of all our options, we have made the decision to leave our current location in downtown St. Paul and relocate our employees to The Offices @ MOA complex," said Fred Kohout, chief marketing officer…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Processor Runs from Ambient Radio Waves
In Extremetech: Consider the Internet of Things or Wearable implications" .. A new research initiative between a University of Washington team and TU-Delft in the Netherlands has created a microprocessor that can power itself…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Knowledge for Discovery
Brought to my attention, a topic always brought up that we also experimented with:Accelerating Discovery: Mining Unstructured Information for Hypothesis Generationby Scott Spangler ( Principal Scientist for Watson Health Innovations…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Boosting Scientific Discovery CSI Talk
Dear Professors, Students, IBMers and others, Just a reminder about our Cognitive Systems Institute Group Speaker Series on Thursday April 28, 2016 at 10:30 am ET US (7:30 am PT US). Our presenter this week is Xiaolin (Andy)…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Council Member Kevin Fu Comments on FDA’s Postmarket Cybersecurity Guidance
Contributions to this post were made by Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member Kevin Fu, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. Kevin also co-founded Virta Labs, a healthcare cybersecurity company. A…
From insideHPC
Panasas Joins IRODS Consortium to Bolster Life Sciences
Today Panasas announced that it has joined the iRODS Consortium as a contributing member. The iRODS Consortium leads development and support of the Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS), free open source software for data…
From XRDS
An Introduction to Gamification in Human-Computer Interaction
User experience (UX) is a field within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) that studies the whole experience of a user with a product, system, or service. UX focuses on issues such as usability, ergonomics, cognitive load, andContinue…
From insideHPC
TYAN Servers and Motherboards Add Support for Broadwell Processors
Today TYAN announced support for the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family (Broadwell). Incorporating Intel’s new processor technologies allows TYAN to offer the latest performance and power savings features available…
From insideHPC
Optalysys Wins DARPA Grant for Optical Computing
Today Cambridge University spin-out Optalysys announced that the company has been awarded a $350k grant for a 13-month project from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The project will see the company advance…
From insideHPC
Flow Science Expands to Latin America
Today Flow Science announced that it has formed a new subsidiary, Flow Science Latin America SAS (FSLA), to sell and support Flow Science’s suite of computational fluid dynamics software products throughout Central and South …
From The Noisy Channel
Hari Seldon, Data Scientist
Like many people who grew up reading science fiction, I idolized Hari Seldon. For those unfamiliar with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series…
From insideHPC
Leveraging HPC for Alzheimer’s Research and Beyond
"In this presentation, Joe Lombardo will discuss specific NSCEE projects that leverage HPC workload management to increase speed and performance for compute-intensive work. Lombardo will highlight results from an Alzheimer’s …
From Schneier on Security
People Trust Robots, Even When They Don't Inspire Trust
Interesting research: In the study, sponsored in part by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the researchers recruited a group of 42 volunteers, most of them college students, and asked them to follow a brightly…
From insideHPC
Interview: LANL’s Gary Grider on the new MarFS Object Storage Project
"We wanted to get away from the complexity of POSIX for data, yet retain the parts of POSIX that people are used to (metadata manipulation). By divorcing ourselves from the complications of ensuring a completely POSIX data flow…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Hands On with the BBC Micro:Bit
Recently a padded envelop showed up in the mail. No return address. No identifying information. Inside was a BBC Micro:Bit. Now I have played with one once or twice and of course tried out software in emulation at the official…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Omnichannel Complicates Demand Planning
Interesting conversation in Retailwire:How is omnichannel complicating demand planning?By Tom RyanDemand planning "has become an enigma" for supply chain professionals, according to the sixth annual "State of the Retail Supply…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Retirement a Flawed Concept
Interesting thoughts in the HBR: Retirement is a Flawed Concept. Will comment when I finally try it.
From The Eponymous Pickle
NeuroWine Claimed
A more direct sensory link than the usual examples. SA neuroscientists develop first NeuroWineBy Admire Moyo, ITWeb's senior news journalist.Johannesburg, 20 Apr 2016.....A South African team of neuromarketers and neuroscientists…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Sensors for an Internet of Things
An internet of things is also connected to its environment, which needs sensors to detect context. Context can drive analytics with data. Looking for new ways to connect and interact in the smart home. " ... Helium is releasing…
From XRDS
Rise of the Chatbots
Almost two decades ago I saw in the arcades the futuristic fighting game “Rise of the Robots”. As a youngster I was imagining what the future of computing and robotics could be. The game ended up not being that great, …Continue…
From insideHPC
Video: Intel Omni-Path Fabric Management and Tool Features
In this video from the 2016 OpenFabrics Workshop, James Wright from Intel presents: Intel Omni-Path Fabric Management and Tools Features. "The Intel Omni-Path Fabric includes a number of hardware and software features to make…
From insideHPC
X-Stack PI Meeting Showcases Exascale Code
Berkeley Lab recently hosted the fourth annual X-Stack PI event, where X-Stack researchers, facilities teams, application scientists, and developers from national labs, universities, and industry met to share the latest developments…
From Schneier on Security
Graffiti by Drone
Drones can graffiti walls that no person can reach. (Note that wired.com blocks ad blockers. My trick is to copy the page and then paste it into my text editor.)...
From insideHPC
Huazhong University of Science Wins ASC16 Student Cluster Challenge
In news from China this week, the Huazhong University of Science has won the ASC16 Student Cluster Challenge. The final round of the competition concluded Friday in Wuhan at the Central China University of Science.
The post Huazhong…From insideHPC
Performing Simulation-Based, Real-time Decision Making with Cloud HPC
Zach Smocha from Rescale presented this talk at the HPC User Forum. "Manor Racing is partnering with San Francisco based Rescale as a key technology provider for its 2016 FIA Formula 1 World Championship challenge. Manor Racing…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How will you die? Cancer, Alzheimer’s, Stroke?
Before the 1950s, many of us suffered from poliomyelitis and too many ended up crippled. Then we developed a vaccine and eradicated the disease. Before the second world war, many people, even the richest, could die of a simple…
From Phys.org Technology News
A look at the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in numbers
Telling the story of Chernobyl in numbers 30 years later involves dauntingly large figures and others that are even more vexing because they're still unknown. A look at numbers that hint at the scope of the world's worst nuclear…
From insideHPC
Mellanox Powers OpenStack Cloud at University of Cambridge
Today Mellanox announced that University of Cambridge has selected Mellanox End-to-End Ethernet interconnect solution including Spectrum SN2700 Ethernet switches, ConnectX-4 Lx NICs and LinkX cables for its OpenStack-based scientific…
From The Eponymous Pickle
An IKEA Virtual Reality App
Always liked the innovation that has come out of IKEA, Here a sims-like VR App. Have not tried yet, but will. How well does this work as VR, as engagement?
From The Eponymous Pickle
Basic Apache Spark Utilization
Good basic, mostly non technical introduction:Basic Spark Utilization for Analytics in Big Databy Atif Farid MohammadApache Spark is a Big Data Analytics Engine, which runs in both memory as well as on disk. It is 100 times faster…