Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2016
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Do results have a “teach-by-date?”
Teaching automata theory Noam Chomsky is famous for many many things. He has had a lot to say over his long career, and he wrote over 100 books on topics from linguistics to war and politics. Today I focus on work that he pioneered…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart to Buy Jet
The startup that notably follows an 'Amazon Prime' loyalty model. To push their online sales. Walmart buys Jet.com for $3.3 billion By Rebecca LinkeIf you have $3.3 billion lying around, why not buy a startup? ... That is exactly…
From Schneier on Security
Malware from Kazakhstan
EFF has the story of malware from the Kazakhstan government against "journalists and political activists critical of Kazakhstan's authoritarian government, along with their family members, lawyers, and associates."...
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
South Big Data Hub DataStart fellow reflects on lessons learned
The following is a blog post from Jonathan Ortiz, a Data Analytics and Big Data student at The University of Texas at Austin. Ortiz participated in data.world, an Austin data startup, through a DataStart fellowship managed by…
From Schneier on Security
GPS Spoofing
It's easy to spoof GPS signals, and hard to defend against....
From insideHPC
Nimbus Data Rolls Out ExaFlash Storage Platform
"The ExaFlash Platform is an historic achievement that will reshape the storage and data center industries," said Thomas Isakovich, CEO and Founder of Nimbus Data. "It offers unprecedented scale (from terabytes to exabytes), …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Still Looking for AI Language
Do we know how to build machines that understand language? Though some good attempts are out there, not yet. This Tech Review Article article does a good job of looking at the history of the challenge. Have spent some time…
From My Biased Coin
FOCS 16 Workshops/Tutorials Call for Proposals
I'm told that there's a call for proposals up for workshops/tutorials for FOCS 16. Here's a link to the call for those who are interested....Deadline is August 31, end of the month.
From insideHPC
New Mellanox Networking Solutions Accelerate NVMe Over Fabrics
"We’ve seen the rapid evolution of SSDs and have been contributing to the NVMe over Fabrics standard and community drivers,” said Michael Kagan, CTO at Mellanox Technologies. “Because faster storage requires faster networks, …
From insideHPC
Ethernet Alliance Technology Forum Looks to 2026
Today the Ethernet Alliance unveiled the agenda for its 2016 Technology Exploration Forum (TEF 2016). At the center of the day’s agenda is Ethernet’s quickening journey through its next decade of continuous technology evolution…
From insideHPC
Seagate Unveils 60 Terabyte SSD
Today Seagate announced two new flash innovations that extend the limits of storage computing performance in enterprise data centers to unprecedented levels. The new products include a 60 terabyte SAS solid-state-drive — the …
From insideHPC
Fujitsu Develops High-Speed Software for Deep Learning
"Fujitsu Laboratories has newly developed parallelization technology to efficiently share data between machines, and applied it to Caffe, an open source deep learning framework widely used around the world. Fujitsu Laboratories…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM and Innovation
Bob Herbold my former colleague writes about IBM. He has more than a little internal insight based on his experience in the computing industry. He makes some brief comments on innovation and leadership that make sense. Certainly…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How many reversible integer operations do you know?
Most operations on a computer are not reversible… meaning that once done, you can never go back. For example, if you divide integers by 2 to get a new integer, some information is lost (whether the original number was odd orContinue…
From insideHPC
High Performance 4K Video Storage, Editing and Rendering
Advancements in video technology have slowly pushed applications like video editing, video rendering and video storage editing into the High Performance Computing world. There are many different video editing programs that can…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cognitive Systems Institute Group
Wanted to remind people of the Cognitive Systems Institute Group, that I have been part of for several years. Spoken at and contributed to. I particularly like their goal: To Augment and Scale Expertise ... ". Their"…
From Schneier on Security
How the Iranian Government Hacks Dissidents
Citizen Lab has a new report on an Iranian government hacking program that targets dissidents. From a Washington Post op-ed by Ron Deibert: Al-Ameer is a net savvy activist, and so when she received a legitimate looking email…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Trip Report: Advanced Placement Summer Institute
My school will be offering AP CS Principles in the 2017/2018 school year so it was suggested that the current computer science teachers attend an AP Summer Institute to help us prepare. Sounds like a good idea so Tom (Indelicato…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Trends in China's Digital Embrace
Interesting stats about China's use of digital. in Strategy Business Trend Watch. " ... s+b Trend Watch: China’s Digital Embrace ... The time it takes for Chinese consumers to incorporate a new technology into their lives is…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmented Reality is Here
In Adworld. An overview of how it is being tested by marketers today. Now we know that the right kind of simple quest game can work. Now will other methods beyond gaming work too?" .. First, let's define the new medium…
From updated sporadically at best
A Starter Reading List About Asian America
Race in America isn't something I talk a lot about online, but it is something I think a lot about. Today I was giving my friend Seth a short reading list about being Asian American when I realized that 1) I have such a listWesley…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sports Analytics Taxonomy
Gary Cokins writes:My analytics colleagues, I am writing you to share a recently published article that I co-authored describing a “sports analytics taxonomy”. Everyone loves sports ! ...The article is a result of a volunteer…
From Phys.org Technology News
Complexity makes airline computer systems vulnerable
Twice in less than a month, a major airline was paralyzed by a computer outage that prevented passengers from checking in and flights from taking off.
From insideHPC
OSS Rolls Out Magma StorageBox 1000 PCIe Expansion Chassis
Today One Stop Systems introduced the Magma StorageBox 1000 PCIe expansion system. Targeted for HPC applications, the SBB1000 provides up to 25.6TB of NVMe SSD direct attached storage through eight 2.5" drives to any standard…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On IOT Smarthome Security
In the BBC, a non technical overview of the IoT in the smart home, and the security challenges it creates.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Donald Knuth Gets SIAM Award
Donald Knuth was an inspiration since my earliest use of computing. Reveled and still awaiting the latest volume of his Art of Computer Programming. For now here are many of his talks on Youtube. Looking for the SIAM talk…
From insideHPC
Nimbix Speeds Cloud-based Machine Learning
Today HPC cloud provider Nimbix announced a significant increase in their presence in the machine learning market space as more customers are using their JARVICE platform to help address the need for an easier, more cost efficient…
From insideHPC
Netlist HybriDIMM Memory Unifies DRAM-NAND
Today Netlist announced the first public demonstration of its HybriDIMM Storage Class Memory (SCM) product at the upcoming Flash Memory Summit. Using an industry standard DDR4 LRDIMM interface, HybriDIMM is the first SCM product…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Looks at Machine Learning and Data Locality
Is Machine Learning more of a Data Movement problem than a Processing problem? In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at use cases for Machine Learning where data locality is critical for performance. "Most of the Machine…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Whistling Past the Graveyard: What the End of Moore’s Law Means to All of Computing
The following is a guest blog post from Tom Conte of Georgia Tech. Is “Moore’s Law” ending? If so, what does this mean to all of us in the field of Computing? These questions were discussed at a July 2016 panel at Computing Research…