Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2018
From insideHPC
Linda Gesenhues and Markus Höhnerbach to receive George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships
Today ACM announced that Linda Gesenhues of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Markus Höhnerbach of RWTH Aachen University are the recipients of the 2018 ACM-IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships. "The ACM…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alibaba Looks at Shopping Experience with VR
Have been asked to take a closer look at this. The extent to which it engages consumers,and the type of products being sold will be essential. Video at the link.
Alibaba Is Using AR To Change The Shopping Experience by Bobby…
From insideHPC
Video: Massive Galaxies and Black Holes at the Cosmic Dawn
Tiziana DiMatteo from Carnegie Melon University gave this talk at the 2018 Blue Waters Symposium. "The first billion years is a pivotal time for cosmic structure formation. The galaxies and black holes that form then shape and…
From insideHPC
Why the Choice of DRAM in the Data Center is so Critical
By working with a manufacturer of DRAM products that deliver a diversity of components, data center operators can be assured that they will not have a patchwork of suppliers to work with. This guest post from Kingston Technology…
From The Eponymous Pickle
L'Oreal and Augmented Reality
We worked on beauty applications that used aspects of augmented reality to market. Had not heard of Facebook Camera Products. Note L'Oreal's acquisition of Modiface.
L’Oreal Teams with Facebook on AR Initiative By CGT
L’Or…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Question Database for Assistants
Useful to have a benchmark dataset of context and questions.
New Data Could Help Siri, Alexa Know When They're Being Unhelpful
in Quartz By Dave Gershgorn
A new dataset from Stanford University is designed to train artificial…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Use Cases
Useful, based on a study of 400 use examples. Still speculative, since it depends on the complexity of these use cases. In what was needed to solve the problem and the nature and stability of the data involved, and the support…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The dangers of AVX-512 throttling: a 3% impact
Intel’s latest processors come with powerful new instructions from the AVX-512 family. These instructions operate over 512-bit registers. They use more power than regular (64-bit) instructions. Thus, on some Intel processors,…
From insideHPC
Call for Participation: OSC Statewide User Group Conference in October
The Ohio Supercomputer Center Statewide Users Group (SUG) has issued its Call for Participation. Featuring a talk on OSC's pending Pitzer cluster, the event takes place Oct. 4 in Columbus, Ohio. The purposes of the SUG conference…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More on Kroger and Alibaba
More and expert comments on this. Also notice the assistant augmented Tmall platform, testing for US application? Large CPG's now getting private label competition from abroad in new markets?
Kroger teams with Alibaba to sell…
From insideHPC
OFA Expands Mission to Boost Development of Advanced Network and Fabric Technologies
Today the OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) unveiled an expanded mission to accelerate the development and adoption of advanced fabric technologies. This is a significant expansion of its original mission from 2004, which was to facilitate…
From insideHPC
Podcast: Bringing Complex Data To Life with Intel Select Solutions
In this Chip Chat podcast, Jim Jeffers from Intel describes his team's three important open source libraries for data center rendering that deliver rasterization and ray tracing with high performance on Intel Xeon processors.…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Fast strongly universal 64-bit hashing everywhere!
In software, hashing is the process of taking a value and mapping it to a random-looking value. Suppose you are given 64-bit integers (a long in Java). You might want to “hash” these integers to other 64-bit values. There are…
From insideHPC
Extreme Computing for Extreme Adaptive Optics: The Key to Finding Life Outside our Solar System
Hatem Ltaief from KAUST gave this talk at PASC18. "The real-time correction of telescopic images in the search for exoplanets is highly sensitive to atmospheric aberrations. The pseudo-inverse algorithm is an efficient mathematical…
From insideHPC
Intel to Host IXPUG eXtreme Performance User Group Sept. 25-28 in Oregon
Intel will host the Intel eXtreme Performance User Group (IXPUG) event Sept. 25-28 in Hillsboro, Oregon. "This IXPUG conference is focused on all aspects of employing and adopting many-core processing technologies and techniques…
From The Eponymous Pickle
DefCon Reports on Whats Hackable
Wired reports on the Defcon hacker conference. As usual fairly scary, and I am not that paranoid.
A weekend of security updates from the DefCon conference has confirmed what the most paranoid of us already knew: Pretty much anything…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cortana and Alexa are Talking
Always been intrigued by this, and how it would work. How will the work be handed off? Just by a choice of their users? I like to think of this as a conversation between two agents, that could cooperate to provide value.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Follow a Tuna on the Blockchain
An exampled of the simplest use of blockchains. Follow a Tuna on the Blockchain. from Wired.
From Schneier on Security
Hacking Police Bodycams
Suprising no one, the security of police bodycams is terrible. Mitchell even realized that because he can remotely access device storage on models like the Fire Cam OnCall, an attacker could potentially plant malware on some…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Seeking Cognitive Infrastructures for Process ML
Have been reviewing work we did with machine learning as far back as 1998. We initially installed and used inductive techniques to learn and adapt rules from data. This was useful, but not for big data applications. At the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kroger Teams with Alibaba in First Int'l Venture
Big news. Getting Kroger's premium private label into China. Will there bean exchange of technology as well? See Alibaba's Tmall effort.
Kroger teams with Amazon rival Alibaba to sell groceries in China
By Alexander Coolidge…
From insideHPC
HPE Eagle Supercomputer to Triple Performance and Enhance Energy Efficiency at NREL
Today HPE announced it is building a new supercomputer for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) that is more energy efficient and 3.5 times more powerful than its existing system. The new development is part of a long…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI Hasn't Happened Yet
A thoughtful piece. We have experienced much of this. It has not happened, but we have achied some new hints as to directions.
Artificial Intelligence — The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet By Michael Jordan in Medium
Michael…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NIH’s New STRIDES Initiative
The following is from Sonynka Ngosso from the Office of Strategic Coordination at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announcing their new STRIDES (Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Potential of Drone Swarms
We examined, and here Wired debunks their current capabilities. Teleoperation is not an autonomous swarm. But if cars can be autonomous, how soon can swarms?
Drone Swarms as you Know them are Just An Illusion - For now. By…
From The Eponymous Pickle
50 Plus Examples of Business Blockchains
Interesting to see the breadth, here the descriptions are not consistent, but instructive. 'Taking over' is an overstatement. 'Showing they can be useful' would be more accurate. I see only one example clearly to use a 'smart…
From insideHPC
Video: NVIDIA Announces Turing GPUs and CUDA Toolkit 10
Today at SIGGRPAH, NVIDIA announced its newest GPUs based on the new Turing architecture. "
This fundamentally changes how computer graphics will be done, it’s a step change in realism,” Huang told an audience of more than 1,200…
From insideHPC
Lenovo Takes the TOP500 with Liquid Cooling at ISC 2018
In this video from ISC 2018, Rick Koopman from Lenovo describes the company's latest HPC innovations including their new Neptune liquid cooling technology. Lenovo is the world’s largest TOP500 supercomputing provider measured…
From insideHPC
One Stop Systems rolls out Magma ExpressBox eGPU with Thunderbolt 3
Today One Stop Systems introduced the Magma ExpressBox 3T-V3-eGPU, a new external graphics card solution with Thunderbolt 3. The ExpressBox 3T-V3-eGPU can transform both computers and laptops with Thunderbolt 3 connections into…
From Computational Complexity
While I Was Away
After the Oxford Workshop I enjoyed a two-week family vacation in Spain, where there was no rain in the plain, just very hot up to 106℉. The old Spanish cities knew how to optimize for shade and breeze, more than I can say for…