Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2016
From insideHPC
HSA 1.1 Specification Adds Multi-Vendor Architecture Support
The Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation has released the HSA 1.1 specification, significantly enhancing the ability to integrate open and proprietary IP blocks in heterogeneous designs. The new specification is…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Virtual Reality Department Store
Hardly first. What this is depends in part on the definition of VR. I have seen and even helped build virtual stores in virtual worlds and in laboratory settings. But yes, we are close to the needed hardware and software to…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Giant Mechanical Squid
It's beautiful, from the Maker Faire Bay Area 2016....
From Phys.org Technology News
A lesson in backups
Michael Friedman learned the hard way how important it is to back up computers.
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Helping Students Debug Code
It is final project time for my programming students. They are working on projects to show me what they have learned. They are very clever these kids. So clever that sometimes they can’t figure out what the did wrong. That’s …
From Schneier on Security
Security and Human Behavior (SHB 2016)
Earlier this week, I was at the ninth Workshop on Security and Human Behavior, hosted at Harvard University. SHB is a small invitational gathering of people studying various aspects of the human side of security. The fifty or…
From insideHPC
HPE and Mellanox: Advanced Technology Solutions for HPC
In this special guest feature, Scot Schultz from Mellanox and Terry Myers from HPE write that the two companies are collaborating to push the boundaries of high performance computing. "So while every company must weigh the cost…
From insideHPC
Supercomputing Supernova Explosions on Mira
Researchers from Michigan State University are using the Mira supercomputer to perform large-scale 3-D simulations of the final moments of a supernova’s life cycle. While the 3-D simulation approach is still in its infancy, early…
From insideHPC
Video: Will AI & Robotics Make Humans Obsolete?
"IBM has developed new scale-up and scale-out systems — with 16 million neurons — that will be presented in Dr Modha's pioneering research talk. Watson wins at Jeopardy and enters industrial applications while AlphaGo defeats…
From insideHPC
Dell Unveils Triton Liquid Cooling Technology
"Because water can transport heat 25 times more efficiently than air, ‘Triton’ can run high performing components faster and more efficiently than traditional air-cooled systems. Its ability to sub-cool the processor and operate…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
To be smart, work on problems you care about
Never do anything that bores you. My experience in science is that someone is always telling to do something that leaves you flat. Bad idea. I’m not good enough to do something I dislike. In fact, I find it hard enough to doContinue…
From insideHPC
New TPCx-BB Benchmark Compares Big Data Analytics Systems
Today the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) today announced the immediate availability of the TPCx-BB benchmark. The benchmark is designed to measure the performance of Hadoop based systems including MapReduce,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mixed Reality in Windows Holographic Announced
Microsoft announces to 'insiders' the availability of Windows Holographic to partners. Hardware and software costs are still high for the individual. Calling it 'Mixed Reality', though I have always thought that augmented reality…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Competing with Amazon on Delivery
Wal-Mart is starting to experiment with using Uber and Lyft services for delivery. Driectly competing with the delivery expertise of Amazon. In Mashable.
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI, Cognition and Creativity
"AI, Cognition, and Creativity", talk by - by Prof Dr Kai-Uwe Kühnberger, University of Osnabrück,Germany ... More on his research here. Slides. Recording of his presentation. presented as part of our Cognitive Systems…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Walmart Develops a Drone
Like this application, we examined a number for warehouse applications. Simple, cheap, readily manipulable sensors that move to check inventory. We did not considered flyable ones at the time. See also previous posts aboutIn…
From Schneier on Security
Stuxnet-Like Malware Discovered
There's a new piece of malware called Irongate, which is obviously inspired by Stuxnet. We don't know who is responsible for it. Slashdot thread....
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
ACM U.S. Public Policy Council Comments on the Internet of Things
The ACM U.S. Public Policy Council submitted comments to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) on the potential benefits and challenges of the Internet of Things and what role the U.S. Government…
From Geeking with Greg
Quick links
A tightly curated list of what I enjoyed in the news recently: Bezos: "Every single important thing we’ve done has taken a lot of risk, risk-taking, perseverance, guts, and some have worked out. Most of them have not." ([1])…
From Putting People First
Design fiction as a strategy for engaging with dystopian futures
The limits of our imagination: design fiction as a strategy for engaging with dystopian futures By Joshua Tanenbaum, Marcel Pufal and Karen Tanenbaum (UC Irvine Published in: LIMITS ’16 Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Computing…
From Schneier on Security
Lockpicking Competitions in the 1950s
Interesting history....
From The Eponymous Pickle
Watson Delivers Cognitive Artificial Intelligence Ads
A new automation play in the works with a number of participants. Note also the natural language and voice interaction components. New channels of automated consumer interaction. Bots are not mentioned, but this providesWeather…
From insideHPC
Stampede 2 Supercomputer at TACC to Sport 18 Petaflops
Over at the Dell HPC Community, Jim Ganthier writes that TACC is planning to deploy its 18 Petflop Stampede 2 supercomputer based on Dell servers running Intel Knights Landing processors. "Stampede 2 will do more than just meet…
From insideHPC
Singularity 2.0 Software
Today LBNL released version 2.0 of its innovative Singularity container software. Mobility of Compute is the encapsulation of an environment in such a manner to make it portable between systems. This operating system environment…
From insideHPC
Interview: Ken Claffey on Seagate HPC Innovation On Deck at ISC 2016
"One of the benefits of our ClusterStor modular architecture is its flexibility - we can deliver a very comparable performance with either Lustre or Spectrum Scale on the same extensible architecture. There are two key reasons…
From insideHPC
Platform Rebrands as IBM Spectrum Computing with Focus on HPDA
Today expanded its portfolio of software-defined infrastructure solutions with cognitive features to help clients improve the management of computing resources to achieve faster, results from data-driven applications and analytics…
From insideHPC
Data Layout for High Performance
For maximum performance, data needs to flow into and out of the vectorization units. There are a few things to remember regarding laying out the data to gain high performance. These include, data layout, alignment, prefetching…
From Computational Complexity
CCC 2016
Earlier this week I attended the 31st Computational Complexity Conference in Tokyo. I've been to thirty of these meetings, missing only the 2012 conference in Porto. Eric Allender has attended them all. The conference had aproceedings…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Marketing Automation Animation
Marketing automation defined in a 60 second animation. Well done, but simplistic and fairly obvious. Still a good starting point for thinking about automation. Made me thing of how to represent other 'tasks' as straightforward…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alteryx and Tableau Guide
Used Tableau for years in the enterprise, mostly known for data visualization. here a 'definitive guide' for using it with Alteryx, which is known for data preparation, blending and analytics. Was suggested I examine it.…