acm-header
Sign In

Communications of the ACM

Blogs Archive


Archives

The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.

May 2021


From The Computing Community Consortium Blog

CRA-Industry Committee Announces Virtual Roundtable Series

CRA-Industry Committee Announces Virtual Roundtable Series

Created in the fall of 2020, the CRA-Industry standing committee will convene industry partners on computing research topics and connect them with CRA’s academic and government constituents. CRA-Industry recently announced a…


From insideHPC

SDSC Names Interim Director

SDSC Names Interim Director

San Diego — Frank Würthwein, the lead of Distributed High-Throughput Computing at the San Diego Supercomputing Center, has been named SDSC’s interim director effective July 1. SDSC, located at UC San Diego, said it is conducting…


From insideHPC

6,000 GPUs: NERSC Says Perlmutter Delivers 4 Exaflops, Claims Top Spot in AI Supercomputing

6,000 GPUs: NERSC Says Perlmutter Delivers 4 Exaflops, Claims Top Spot in AI Supercomputing

Claiming the no. 1 position in AI supercomputing, the U.S. National Energy research Scientific Computing Center today unveiled the Perlmutter HPC system, a beast of a machine powered by 6,159 Nvidia A100 GPUs and delivering 4…


From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson

Othello/Reversi for After the APCS Exam

Othello/Reversi for After the APCS Exam

My good friend and former teaching partner, Tom Indelicato posted about his end of year project for his AP CS A student recently. With his permission I share it with you.

I said goodbye to my seniors today (last day of classes…


From The Eponymous Pickle

Programmable Matter for Product Design

Programmable Matter for Product Design

With a zap of light, system switches objects’ colors and patterns

“Programmable matter” technique could enable product designers to churn out prototypes with ease.

Watch Video  https://news.mit.edu/2021/light-colors-patterns-surface…


From insideHPC

Phasecraft Launches Push for Noise and Error Reduction in Quantum Devices

Phasecraft Launches Push for Noise and Error Reduction in Quantum Devices

Bristol and London – 27 May 2021 – UK-based quantum software startup Phasecraft today begins a new project facilitated by Innovate UK to reduce noise and errors on near-term quantum hardware.   Phasecraft was awarded the project…


From The Eponymous Pickle

AI's competitive Advantage

AI's competitive Advantage

Interesting podcast, and ongoing pieces I am now connected to:

Exponential View with Azeem Azhar / Season 5, Episode 32

Subscribe:  Apple Podcasts  Google Podcasts   Spotify    RSS

AI’s Competitive Advantage

AI can offer a new type…


From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP

The Voting Paradox

Trust, but verify—Ronald Reagan are researchers in the area of voting security. Some have worked in this area for decades, others for years, and some are new to the area. But they all signed a letter about election security—right…


From Daniel Lemire's Blog

All Models are Wrong

All Models are Wrong

All models are wrong, but some are useful is a common saying in statistics. It does not merely apply to statistics, however. It is general observation. Box (1976) wrote an  influential article on the topic. He says that you make…


From The Eponymous Pickle

Amazon to Buy MGM

Amazon to Buy MGM

 As a long time follower of film and the studios ... this is a very big historical wow.  Its all about content.  True, prime does need a considerable boost.

Amazon to buy MGM for $8 billion in major boost to Prime Video library…


From The Eponymous Pickle

Getting to the Moon via the Cloud

Getting to the Moon via the Cloud

Very high performance supercomputing on the cloud is adding to the ability to research, design, simulate, test, manufacture, deliver.

Going to the Moon via the Cloud

The New York Times, Craig S. Smith, May 25, 2021

The wide availability…


From The Computing Community Consortium Blog

Active Learning of Transferable Priors, Kernels and Latent Representations for Robotics

Active Learning of Transferable Priors, Kernels and Latent Representations for Robotics

Rika Antonova began her CIFellowship in January 2021 after receiving her PhD from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in December 2020. Antonova is at Stanford University working with Jeannette Bohg, Assistant Professor…


From The Eponymous Pickle

AI: A Taxonomy of Machine Learning and Deep Learning Algorithms

AI: A Taxonomy of Machine Learning and Deep Learning Algorithms

Once again an excellent post by Ajit Jaokar:   Thanks Ajit!

Below is just the intro overview, the much longer post comes through when you click through to Linkedin.   Nicely done, incudes as part of the taxonomy a number of typical…


From Schneier on Security

The Misaligned Incentives for Cloud Security

The Misaligned Incentives for Cloud Security

Russia’s Sunburst cyberespionage campaign, discovered late last year, impacted more than 100 large companies and US federal agencies, including the Treasury, Energy, Justice, and Homeland Security departments. A crucial partcompromising…


From Schneier on Security

The Story of the 2011 RSA Hack

The Story of the 2011 RSA Hack

Really good long article about the Chinese hacking of RSA, Inc. They were able to get copies of the seed values to the SecurID authentication token, a harbinger of supply-chain attacks to come.


From Schneier on Security

Friday Squid Blogging: Fossil of Squid Eating and Being Eaten

Friday Squid Blogging: Fossil of Squid Eating and Being Eaten

We now have a fossil of a squid eating a crustacean while it is being eaten by a shark.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Read my blog posting guidelines…


From Schneier on Security

New Disk Wiping Malware Targets Israel

New Disk Wiping Malware Targets Israel

Apostle seems to be a new strain of malware that destroys data.

In a post published Tuesday, SentinelOne researchers said they assessed with high confidence that based on the code and the servers Apostle reported to, the malware…


From insideHPC

ColdQuanta Joins IBM Quantum Network

ColdQuanta Joins IBM Quantum Network

BOULDER, CO – May 26, 2021 – ColdQuanta, a Cold Atom Quantum Technology company, today announced it has joined the IBM Quantum Network. In addition to joining the Network, ColdQuanta will also integrate with Qiskit, an open source…


From The Eponymous Pickle

Security Implications for 5G in IOT

Security Implications for 5G in IOT

Was unaware of these implications.  Intro below:

Is 5G Opening Security Holes in the Internet of Things?  By David Geer, Commissioned by CACM Staff, May 25, 2021

Market research company Research and Markets, looking at the intersection…


From The Eponymous Pickle

MS Teams with Colaborative Apps

MS Teams with Colaborative Apps

 Makes good sense.   Especially apps that aid in bringing in multiple opinions, decision and task oriented views.  See some of the work we did in this space, well before the focus now being seen with apps like Teams and Zoom.…


From insideHPC

ScaleFlux Claims Flash Storage <1&#162;/Gigabyte/ Year with Micron QLC

ScaleFlux Claims Flash Storage <1&#162;/Gigabyte/ Year with Micron QLC

SAN JOSE – May 26, 2021 – ScaleFlux, Inc., maker of computational storage at scale, today announced it has expanded its Computational Storage Drive (CSD) portfolio to include quad-level cell (QLC) NAND Flash storage from Micron…


From The Eponymous Pickle

Nokia Launches first AI Use Case Library for CSPs

Nokia Launches first AI Use Case Library for CSPs

Always like representative use cases.  Especially if they have detailed and useful details.  Like the specifics of data being used and sources.

Nokia launches the first AI use case library on public cloud for CSPs     by TelecomLead…


From The Eponymous Pickle

Will AI ever be Smarter than a Baby?

Will AI ever be Smarter than a Baby?

Thoughtful piece, with many links ...

By Irving Wladawsky-Berger

A collection of observations, news and resources on the changing nature of innovation, technology, leadership, and other subjects.

Will AI Ever Be Smarter Than a Baby…


From insideHPC

Energy Efficiency Comparison: Air-Cooling vs Liquid Cooling

Energy Efficiency Comparison: Air-Cooling vs Liquid Cooling

In this sponsored article, David Craig, CEO of Iceotope, discusses how a paradigm shift, from air to liquid cooling has become the favoured solution - already the standard for high performance computing (HPC). The discussion …


From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing

Celebrating Technology Leaders – Women in Cybersecurity

Celebrating Technology Leaders – Women in Cybersecurity

Wednesday, June 9th at 3:00 PM ET/12:00 PM PT,  a panel discussion featuring Sara Hall (Deputy CISO and Head of Security Operations and Engineering, MassMutual), Sepideh Ghanavati, Ph.D. (Assistant Professor, Department of Computer…


From insideHPC

Arm-based Oracle Ampere with HPC-class Instances Now on Oracle Cloud

Arm-based Oracle Ampere with HPC-class Instances Now on Oracle Cloud

Oracle today said its first Arm-based compute offering, OCI Ampere A1 Compute, is available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) while also announcing tools and support for Arm-based application development. “We’re seeing interest…


From The Eponymous Pickle

Hacker Resistant Cloud Software

Hacker Resistant Cloud Software

From a former employer of mine.   Don't understand the details as yet.  See that it is to be presented shortly.   A proof?  See also the paper mentioned below for additional details. 

Columbia Team Builds Hacker-Resistant Cloud…


From insideHPC

Ramon.Space Raises $17.5M for Supercomputing in Space

Ramon.Space Raises $17.5M for Supercomputing in Space

PALO ALTO, Calif. and YOKNEAM, Israel, May 25, 2021 — Ramon.Space, developer of space computing solutions, has raised $17.5M in Series A funding. The round includes StageOne Ventures, Deep Insight, WorldQuant Ventures, UMC Capital…


From The Eponymous Pickle

LaMDA: Next Generation Chatbots

LaMDA: Next Generation Chatbots

Short intro to Google's LaMDA.   Looking for smarter conversations.  Hope to use this in  upcoming applications.

Google’s LaMDA: The Next Generation of Chatbots

First, we had GPT-3. Now we have LaMDA.,    By Alberto Romero

In mid…


From insideHPC

Kao Data Is NVIDIA DGX-Ready

Kao Data Is NVIDIA DGX-Ready

London, May 25, 2021 — Kao Data, developer and operator of carrier neutral data centres for high performance colocation, has today announced it has become NVIDIA DGX-Ready Data Center certified. The company said this step reinforces…