Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2024
From insideHPC
Vultr and Run:ai Partner on NVIDIA GPU Orchestration
West Palm Beach, FL. – July 30, 2024 – Privately held cloud platform Vultr, the world’s largest, privately held cloud computing platform, today announced that Run:ai, a leader in AI optimization and orchestration, is the latest…
From insideHPC
SK hynix Introduces GDDR7 Graphics Memory
Seoul, July 30, 2024 – SK hynix Inc. announced the introduction of a GDDR7 graphics memory product. Graphics DDR(GDDR) is a standard specification of graphics DRAM defined by the Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC)…
From insideHPC
ExaWind: Wind Turbine CFD Simulation on Frontier Exascale
The Exascale Comuting Project’s ExaWind suite of computational fluid dynamics codes are designed to develop predictive simulations of wind farms that contain dozens of megawatt-class turbines spread across 30 square miles. Using…
From insideHPC
DOE Announces System for Searching DOE IP
RICHLAND, Wash., July 31, 2024 — The US Department of Energy has created a database designed to make ideas, technologies, methods and software developed by DOE available in one place. DOE said it worked with software engineers…
From Schneier on Security
Nearly 7% of Internet Traffic Is Malicious
Cloudflare reports on the state of applications security. It claims that 6.8% of Internet traffic is malicious. And that CVEs are exploited as quickly as 22 minutes after proof-of-concepts are published.
From insideHPC
Parallel Works Launches ACTIVATE for AI Model Training, HPC Simulation and Research
CHICAGO – July 31, 2024 – Parallel Works today announced the launch of ACTIVATE, an artificial intelligence and high performance computing control plane that simplifies configuration, access and management of compute resources…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Council Member Holly Yanco Joins DAPRA ISAT Group
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is pleased to announce another council member, Holly Yanco, has been appointed to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Science and Technology (ISAT) Study…
From insideHPC
Micron Announces Volume Production of 9th-Generation NAND Flash
BOISE, Idaho, July 30, 2024 — Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU), announced today that it is shipping ninth-generation (G9) TLC NAND in SSDs, making it the first in the industry to achieve this milestone. Micron G9 NAND features…
From Schneier on Security
Providing Security Updates to Automobile Software
Auto manufacturers are just starting to realize the problems of supporting the software in older models:
Today’s phones are able to receive updates six to eight years after their purchase date. Samsung and Google provide Android…From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Photogrammetry for fun, preservation and research – digitally stitching together 2D photographs to visualise the 3D world.
Photogrammetry, a way of creating a 3D representation from lots of overlapping 2D phototgraphs, has been around since the 1800s and is now being used by games designers, heritage curators and ecologists to digitise a variety…
From insideHPC
Quantistry and IQM Quantum to Explore Solutions for Chemical and Material Industry
Berlin and Munich, 29thJuly 2024 – Quantistry, a Berlin-based start-up offering a cloud-native chemical simulation platform, and IQM Quantum Computers announced today a memorandum of understanding to explore hybrid classical-quantum…
From insideHPC
Iceotope Announces Retirement of CEO David Craig
London, 29th July 2024 – Liquid cooling company Iceotope has announced the retirement of David Craig from the position of CEO effective from 30th September 2024. The company will be led jointly by Chief Commercial Officer, Nathan…
From insideHPC
D-Wave Announces Roadmap for Quantum Cloud Service for AI/ML
PALO ALTO, Calif. – July 29, 2024 – D-Wave Quantum Inc. today announced it is strengthening the connection between quantum optimization, artificial intelligence and machine learning by extending its product development roadmap…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Music & Computing: TouchKeys: getting more from your keyboard
TouchKeys - using computer science and electronics to let pianists shape the notes their keyboards make.
From The Noisy Channel
Search and the Art of Conversation
What is the job of a search application? A common answer is that it needs to return the best results for a query, sorted in relevance order. While this answer sounds reasonable, it glosses over an important nuance. A search application…
From Schneier on Security
New Research in Detecting AI-Generated Videos
The latest in what will be a continuing arms race between creating and detecting videos:
The new tool the research project is unleashing on deepfakes, called “MISLnet”, evolved from years of data derived from detecting fake …From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
ACM-W Global Chapter Summit 2024
The inaugural ACM-W Global Chapter Summit 2024 took place on May 22, 2024. This virtual event provided a forum for global ACM-W chapters to meet. Participants could attend this networking event unhindered by geographical location…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Evolution of iPhone storage capacity
People who should know better often underestimate how fast our storage capacity has grown. We have been able to get 1 TB of storage on iPhones for the last three generations. 2010 iPhone 4 32 GB 2012 iPhone 5 64 GB 2014 iPhone…
From Computational Complexity
In the future we will all have songs written about us, and it will be Lance's fault.
In response to my blog post about how its easier to FIND novelty songs (and other things) than it used to be (see here) Lance showed how easy it is to CREATE a novelty song using AI. He had an AI write lyrics and music for here…
From Putting People First
Two reports on the current state of user research
Maze and User Interviews, both USA-based entities providing user research platforms and user panels, published reports in the last months on the current state of user research.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Storage costs are plummeting
Storage costs are plummeting like a skydiver in freefall—between 10 and 100 times cheaper with each passing decade. Meanwhile, the programmer population is growing at a leisurely pace, like a tortoise in a marathon, increasing…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How big are your docker images?
Docker is a standard to deploy software on the cloud. Developers start with an existing image and add their own code before deploying their systems. How big are typical uncompressed images? python:alpine (latest, aarch64) 58Continue…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How much of your binary executable is just ASCII text?
We sometimes use binary executable which can span megabytes. I wondered: how much text is contained in these binary files? To find out, I wrote a Python script which adds up the size of all sequences of more than 16 ASCII characters…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Sunscreen from Squid Pigments
They’re better for the environment.
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Fulkerson Prize
The Fulkerson prize is given to: outstanding papers in the area of discrete mathematics and is sponsored jointly by the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS) and the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Up to three awards of…
From Schneier on Security
Compromising the Secure Boot Process
This isn’t good:
On Thursday, researchers from security firm Binarly revealed that Secure Boot is completely compromised on more than 200 device models sold by Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and Supermicro. The cause: a cryptographic…From insideHPC
UK Commits £106M to 5 Quantum Hubs
The UK government announced it will invest £106 million for five hubs to develop the use of quantum technology in medical scanners, secure communication networks and next-gen positioning systems. The hubs, which will work with…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Safer code in C++ with lifetime bounds
For better performance in software, we avoid unnecessary copies. To do so, we introduce references (or pointers). An example of this ideas in C++ is the std::string_view class. As the name suggests, a std::string_view instance…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Weekly Computing News: CDT Releases Report on Reducing Disability Bias
In this installment of CCCs Weekly Computing News, we’re sharing an important report by the Center for Democracy & Technology that addresses the need for better data that can inform equitable policies for individuals with disabilities…
From Schneier on Security
The CrowdStrike Outage and Market-Driven Brittleness
Friday’s massive internet outage, caused by a mid-sized tech company called CrowdStrike, disrupted major airlines, hospitals, and banks. Nearly 7,000 flights were canceled. It took down 911 systems and factories, courthouses,…