Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2019
From insideHPC
Using Inference Engines to Power AI Apps Audio, Video and more
With the demand for intelligent solutions like autonomous driving, digital assistants, recommender systems, enterprises of every type are demanding AI powered – applications for surveillance, retail, manufacturing, smart cities…
From insideHPC
Panel Discussion: Exascale and Beyond – Challenges in Productive and Sustainable Software
In this video from PASC 2019, Lois Curfman McInnes from Argonne and Rich Brueckner from insideHPC moderate a panel discussion on the challenges of software development for exascale supercomputers. "Software—the key crosscutting…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Diophantine Equations
Complexity of solving polynomial equations [ Jeff ] Jeff Lagarias is a mathematician or a professor at the University of Michigan. Today I wish to discuss Diophantine equations. Note, the “or” is a poor joke: For mathematicians…
From Schneier on Security
Risks of Password Managers
Stuart Schechter writes about the security risks of using a password manager. It's a good piece, and nicely discusses the trade-offs around password managers: which one to choose, which passwords to store in it, and so on. My…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Zero Knowledge Proofs
A good explanation of Zero Knowledge Proofs, starting with simple examples. Examples of usage at the link. At the tag below there is also a Python implementation example.
Zero-knowledge proof
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia…
From insideHPC
Nissan Moves HPC to the Cloud with Rescale
Today Rescale announced that Nissan selected Rescale and AWS to extend its on-premise high performance computing systems to the cloud. "It is exciting to see that our hybrid platform on AWS will help Nissan immediately reduce…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Towards Engaging Packaging
Recall being pitched a similar idea for product packaging, this seems to take it further. Now could deeper information be communicated this way?
Creating 3-D images, with regular ink
MIT startup Lumii helps manufacturers replicate…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smart Contracts Explained
An almost completely non-technical description of blockchains, and in particular smart contracts and their value and limitations. Using as an example the Ethereum Blockchain:
From The Eponymous Pickle
Waking up to New Risks
In some ways we saw this coming, risk was increasing, and that risk was coming from within in things we had specifically built. Our internet of things
Deep Insecurities: The Internet of Things Shifts Technology Risk
By Samuel…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Machines Like Me: Novelist Ian McEwan
More comments on the directions of AI
Machines Like Me
A Talk By Ian McEwan [4.16.19] in The Edge.
I would like to set aside the technological constraints in order to imagine how an embodied artificial consciousness might negotiate…
From insideHPC
Video: Leadership performance on the Intel® Xeon® Platinum 9200 series
In this video from ISC 2019, Brian Caslis from Intel describes how the Intel® Xeon® Platinum 9200 series of processors delivers new levels of HPC application performance. 2nd Gen Intel® Xeon® Platinum processors are the foundation…
From insideHPC
NEC signs up as Reseller for Altair PBS Professional
Today Altair announced a global VAR agreement with NEC Corporation to market and sell industry-leading HPC workload manager and job scheduler Altair PBS Professional. As a result of the agreement, NEC has worldwide rights to
…
From insideHPC
CUDA-X HPC: Libraries and Tools for your Next Scientific Breakthrough
Today NVIDIA announced CUDA-X HPC, a collection of libraries, tools, compilers and APIs that helps developers solve the world’s most challenging problems. "CUDA-X HPC includes highly tuned kernels essential for high-performance…
From insideHPC
Open Edge and HPC Initiative to Provide Arm-based Systems to Researchers
Today E4 Computer Engineering and the Open Edge and HPC Initiative today announced that Arm-based HPC resources will be provided to researchers and scientists from academia and industry through the codes@OEHI program. To submit…
From Schneier on Security
Maciej Cegłowski on Privacy in the Information Age
Maciej Cegłowski has a really good essay explaining how to think about privacy today: For the purposes of this essay, I'll call it "ambient privacy" -- the understanding that there is value in having our everyday interactions…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How fast is getline in C++?
A standard way to read a text file in C++ is to call the getline function. To iterate over all lines in file and sum up their length, you might do as follows: while(getline(is, line)) { x += line.size(); } How fast is this? On…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More on MIT Open Source AutoML ATMSeer
More on the topic, and some additional background information and links. Very powerful concept that that should continue to expand. Automation is the word, See also Google AutoML, at tag below.
MIT Researchers Open-Source …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Trust and Sponsoring Currencies and Contracts
In just a few hours there has been a considerable pushback on Facebook being trusted with cryptocurrencies:
Facebook’s cryptocurrency has a trust problem
Libra isn’t as decentralized as a normal cryptocurrency
By Russell Brandom…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC) Community Updates
Smart and Secure Cities and Communities Challenge (GCTC/SC3) Expo The Smart and Secure Cities and Communities Challenge (GCTC/SC3) Expo is July 10-12, 2019 in Washington, DC. GCTC/SC3 will bring together hundreds of municipal…
From insideHPC
Interview: New Intel Innovations for the Convergence of HPC & AI
In this video from ISC 2019 in Frankfurt, Raj Hazra from Intel shares highlights from his keynote. "Intel’s disclosures at ISC’19 demonstrate how its data-centric portfolio addresses the unique challenges of HPC systems by bringing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Overhauls Jet Management
An indication of less attention to direct online ordering?
Walmart in big overhaul of Jet.com In ChainStoreAge By CSA STAFF
Walmart is making some big changes at the online retail startup it bought for $3.3 billion in 2016.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Facebook Teams to Produce Cryptocurrency
Whats the ultimate of this? Payment/Procurement angle? Examining. Note the broad number of participants. And will also include the ability to integrate secure smart contracts.
Facebook launches cryptocurrency with Visa, MasterCard…
From insideHPC
Cray Boosts Deep Learning Performance for Geospatial AI
Today Cray announced enhanced capabilities to empower data scientists and engineers who are innovating in the field of Geospatial AI. “The new features include an augmented Deep Learning Plugin that provides best-in-class deep…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Automated Machine Learning
Bill Vorhies reports on Gartner and Forrester's look at automated machine learning. Ultimately a key advance for AI and its broad use. List and analysis of major players. Click through for outline of advances and Bill's
Automated…
From The Eponymous Pickle
GM Thinks new Brain for its Cars
Recently had a software update performed on my one year old MAzda, took too long and required too much testing to verify its correctness.
GM thinks up new electronic brain for its cars, allowing over-the-air updates By Stephen…
From insideHPC
Experience The Exascale Era with AMD at ISC 2019
AMD is stepping up with renewed momentum in the HPC market at the ISC 2019 conference this week. "AMD invites you to explore future architecture and ecosystem technologies that are Powering the Exascale Era, and to hear how AMD…
From insideHPC
NEC receives 50 Million Euro order from Germany’s DWD
Today NEC announced that it received an order for an NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA supercomputer with a value of 50 Million Euro from the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD), the German weather forecasting service. "The new HPC system will
…
From insideHPC
Video: Lenovo delivers HPC solutions “from Exascale to Everyscale”
Lenovo is far and away the leading computer system vendor on the latest TOP500 list, with of whopping 173 total systems. With 34.6 percent of TOP500 systems to date, Lenovo leads the list with both Rmax and Rpeak aggregate performance…
From insideHPC
HPC Market Five-Year Forecast bumps up to $44 Billion Worldwide
At ISC 2019 in Frankfurt, Hyperion Research announced it has increased its five-year HPC Market forecast to reach $44 billion in 2023 thanks to Exascale Systems, AI and increasing adoption of HPC in the Cloud. "In 2018, the HPC…
From Computational Complexity
Why does the Nevalina Prize (now Abacus) got to Algorithms/Complexity people
In my post about the Nevanlinna prize name change (see here) one of my readers raised a different question about the prize:
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