Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2015
From insideHPC
SuperVessel Cloud to Boost OpenPOWER Ecosystem
Today IBM announced SuperVessel, a first-of-its-kind initiative that enables business partners, application developers and university students to conduct innovation, development, and learning for the growing OpenPOWER ecosystem…
From Schneier on Security
Should Companies Do Most of Their Computing in the Cloud? (Part 3)
Cloud computing is the future of computing. Specialization and outsourcing make society more efficient and scalable, and computing isn't any different. But why aren't we there yet? Why don't we, in Simon Crosby's words, "get…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More Retail Robotics: Now in the Warehouse
What looks to be a more generalized robotic solution for warehouse tasks.A supermarket thinks it can create the most advanced robot known to manOnline-only supermarket Ocado is a household name in the UK, and some of you undoubtedly…
From insideHPC
Video: Computational Challenges in Macroeconomics
"Modern macroeconomic theory has provided many qualitative insights into the functioning of financial and labor markets in our complex modern economies. But determining the quantitative importance of frequently countervailing…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Maybe Robots Are Our Friends?
A few month ago we blogged about the on-going robotic debate, Are robots our friends? This seems to be the question of the year, if not the decade, as digital technology continues to advance. What does this mean for humanity…
From Schneier on Security
Should Companies Do Most of Their Computing in the Cloud? (Part 2)
Let me start by describing two approaches to the cloud. Most of the students I meet at Harvard University live their lives in the cloud. Their e-mail, documents, contacts, calendars, photos and everything else are stored on servers…
From insideHPC
Artemis Cluster Powers Research at University of Sydney
The University of Sydney in Australia has deployed a new Dell supercomputer. Known as "Artemis," the 1512-core system is powered by Intel Haswell processors, 10 Terabytes of DDR4 memory, Mellanox FDR InfiniBand, and 480 Terabytes…
From insideHPC
Idaho National Lab Deploys SGI ICE X Supercomputer
Today Idaho National Laboratory (INL) announced that the lab has deployed an SGI ICE X supercomputer to power nuclear reactor simulations. Supplied through SGI's partner ComnetCo, the 511 Teraflop SGI ICE X cluster comprises …
From insideHPC
PRACEdays15 Puts the Spotlight on Irish HPC
In this report from PRACEdays15 conference in Dublin last week, Robert Roe from Scientific Computing World looks at the role of HPC in the host country, Ireland.
The post PRACEdays15 Puts the Spotlight on Irish HPC appeared first…From The Eponymous Pickle
SAP Previews new Analytics Tools
Appears also be trying to deliver more automated data science tools for specific usage templates:SAP previews new analytics tools for IT, business usersSAP has made no secret of its desire to be front and center in the trendFor…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Designing Happiness
In FastCoDesign: Good thoughts on the topic. " ... Designing Happiness ... The Secret to Customer Loyalty? It's less about the moment of interaction and more about what comes before and after. .... To devise innovations…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Building Robotic Pants
In CACM:Scientists at the University of Bristol have developed robotic pants with built-in artificial muscles designed to aid the elderly or people with disabilities.The soft robotic clothing gives users added strength and balance…
From Schneier on Security
Should Companies Do Most of Their Computing in the Cloud? (Part 1)
Yes. No. Yes. Maybe. Yes. Okay, it's complicated. The economics of cloud computing are compelling. For companies, the lower operating costs, the lack of capital expenditure, the ability to quickly scale and the ability to outsource…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Improving Network Security with Big Data
Good examples:Having a secure network is vital in today’s digital landscape and with so many headlines about data breaches and identity theft, security is of the utmost importance. For some companies, this loss of information…
From insideHPC
Video: Towards Inevitable Convergence of HPC and Big Data
Satoshi Matsuoka from the Tokyo Institute of Technology discusses Big Data at the NCSA Blue Waters Symposium. "The trend towards convergence is not only strategic however but rather inevitable as the Moore’s law ends such that…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Can Delegate Work
AI Can now Delegate WorkBrought to my attention in an HBR ArticleAI Is Getting Good Enough to Delegate the Work It Can’t Do, by Katherine BarrMy thoughts: As we think about how we decide which tasks can be augmented and/or replaced…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Facts
In Fortune. It's the largest company in the world, and a number of other fun numbers of impressive scale. Ending with: " .... It hasn’t grown nearly as much as Amazon. In the last three years, Walmart’s sales grew by a total…
From The Eponymous Pickle
How Fast are Things Changing?
Potentially very fast, a simple view of the rate of change in computing power since 1940 to get to a computer processing roughly to the speed of a human brain ....
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Aging is a software bug
In my review of the movie Tomorrowland, I alluded to the fact that in the alternate world, people could stay young by drinking orange juice every morning. I conjectured that this was probably caused by nanotechnology. I do not…
From insideHPC
Power8 Sets World Records on STAC-A2 Benchmarks
Over at the Smarter Computing Blog, IBM's Sumit Gupta writes that newly published STAC-A2 benchmarks show that POWER8-based system server can deliver more than twice the performance of the best x86 server when running standard…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
WATCH Talk- Cybersecurity for the Internet of Everything (IoE)
The next WATCH Talk, called Cybersecurity for the Internet of Everything (IoE), is Thursday, June 18, 12:00-1:00 PM EST. The presenter is Bret Hartman, the Vice President & Security Chief Technical Officer at Cisco Systems, Inc…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
A Classroom Game to Teach Data Representation With Images
Our Gram's House team has been working on three classroom games designed to teach middle school girls about computer science principles. One game intends to teach data representation by showing how images can be representedMaterials…
From insideHPC
Cisco Joins CERN openlab
Today, Cisco announced it is joining CERN openlab, CERN's platform for science and industry partnerships.
The post Cisco Joins CERN openlab appeared first on insideHPC.
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of June 8
Monday, June 8, 2015 Congressional briefing: Carnegie Mellon University and IEEE-USA on “What Can Be Done Today to Dramatically Improve Cybersecurity” with Jeremy Epstein, John Haller, and Rob Seacord. 3 pm | 2168 Rayburn House…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tesco Tries in Aisle Rolling Robotics
In CWorld: Six foot tall robots, not really human-like android, more like large vacuum cleaners. Possibly scaring the Tesco shoppers? At least this could open shoppers to the expectation of having roving robotics in the aisles…
From insideHPC
Bright Cluster Manager Speeds Deployment of Apache Hadoop
Today Bright Computing announced a significant update to distribution-agnostic Bright Cluster Manager for Apache Hadoop at the Hadoop Summit North America 2015.
The post Bright Cluster Manager Speeds Deployment of Apache Hadoop…From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Washington News – Alerts and Updates
General Announcements * USACM signed a letter to President Obama from a variety of civil society organizations urging him to reject proposals that require U.S. companies to deliberately weaken the security of their products.…
From insideHPC
Petascale Research in Earthquake Science on Blue Waters
"SCEC’s multi-disciplinary research team is using NCSA Blue Waters to develop physics-based computational models of earthquake processes. During the past year, we integrated more realistic physics into our computational software…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More on the Apple Metaio Acquisition
In ReadWrite: Comparison to other efforts about augmented reality at Microsoft and Google. Metaio brings in a clear maturity in the space, with applications in retail and with automakers. Impressed with my conversations with…
From insideHPC
DDN User Group Comes to ISC 2015 July 14
The DDN User Group meeting will take place July 14 at ISC 2014 in Frankfurt.
The post DDN User Group Comes to ISC 2015 July 14 appeared first on insideHPC.