Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2025
From insideHPC
CEA Claims Nuclear Fusion Energy Record for Plasma Duration
Feb. 18, 2025 — French research organization CEA reported that on 12 February, the CEA’s WEST tokamak maintained a nuclear fusion plasma for more than 22 minutes, a 25 percent improvement over the previous record. “This leap
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From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Dina St Johnston: Kickstarting a software industry
Back in its early days, after the war, women played a pivotal role in the computing industry, originally as skilled computer operators. Soon they started to be taken on as skilled computer programmers too. The myth that programming…
From Schneier on Security
Device Code Phishing
This isn’t new, but it’s increasingly popular:
The technique is known as device code phishing. It exploits “device code flow,” a form of authentication formalized in the industry-wide OAuth standard. Authentication through device…From insideHPC
Securiti Partners with Databricks Enterprise AI System Safety
SAN JOSE, February 19, 2025 – Securiti, a data security, privacy, governance and compliance company , today announced that it has partnered with Databricks, the data and AI company, to integrate Databricks Mosaic AI and Delta…
From Computational Complexity
Tomorrow and Yesterday
I recently completed Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, a book recommended by many including the City of Chicago. The novel covers the decades long journey of two game developers, Sadie and Sam, and howA…
From insideHPC
SambaNova Reports Fastest DeepSeek-R1 671B with High Efficiency
Palo Alto, CA – Generative AI company SambaNova announced last week that DeepSeek-R1 671B is running today on SambaNova Cloud at 198 tokens per second (t/s), “achieving speeds and efficiency that no other platform can match,”…
From insideHPC
CEA and Quobly Report Simultaneous, Microsecond Qubit-Readout Solution with 10x Power-Use Cut
SAN FRANCSCO – Feb. 18, 2025 – CEA-Leti, in its collaboration with Quobly, CEA-List and CEA-Irig, reported today it has developed a solution using FD-SOI CMOS technology that provides simultaneous, microsecond readouts of tens…
From insideHPC
Data Center Cooling: Carrier Invests in Direct-to-Chip Liquid Provider ZutaCore
PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla., Feb. 18, 2025 — Climate and energy company Carrier Global Corp. (NYSE: CARR) announced that its venture group, Carrier Ventures, is leading an investment and technology partnership with ZutaCore, a maker…
From insideHPC
Vultr Announces Availability of AMD MI325X GPUs in its Cloud Infrastructure
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla.– Cloud infrastructure company Vultr today announced the deployment of the AMD Instinct MI325X GPUs in its Chicago data center region, making it the first cloud provider to offer this AI solution, according…
From insideHPC
VAST Data Adds Blocks to Unified Storage Platform
VAST Data today announced the addition of block storage to its data platform, completing what the company said is its initial vision for the VAST DataStore as a universal storage platform that encompassesing files, objects and…
From Schneier on Security
Story About Medical Device Security
Ben Rothke relates a story about me working with a medical device firm back when I was with BT. I don’t remember the story at all, or who the company was. But it sounds about right.
From insideHPC
VyperCore Launches Compute Accelerator Evaluation Platform
Cambridge, United Kingdom – 17 February 2025 – VyperCore has launched VyperLab, a cloud-based evaluation platform that the company said allows Lead Partners to explore its hardware accelerator innovation designed to deliver energy…
From insideHPC
Modern Hydrogen and Mesa Solutions Partner on Clean Power for Data Centers
Houston — Modern Hydrogen, a hydrogen production and carbon management company, and Mesa Solutions, a provider of on-site power generation, announced a partnership to deliver clean power solution for data centers.
The post Modern…
From Schneier on Security
Atlas of Surveillance
The EFF has released its Atlas of Surveillance, which documents police surveillance technology across the US.
From Computational Complexity
Big Breakthrough in the exciting world of sum-free sets!
Let \([n]\) be the set \(\{1,\ldots,n\}\). (This is standard.)
Let X be a set of integers. \(X\) is sum-free if there is NO \(x,y,z\in X\) such that \(x+y=z\). (Note that \(x=y\) is allowed.)
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
The logic behind syntactic sugar
Computer Scientists talk about “Syntactic Sugar” when talking about programming languages. But in what way might a program be made sweet? It is all about how necessary a feature of a language is, and the idea and phrase was invented…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
AVX-512 gotcha: avoid compressing words to memory with AMD Zen 4 processors
The recent AMD processors (Zen 4) provide extensive support for the powerful AVX-512 instructions. AVX-512 (Advanced Vector Extensions 512) is an extension to the x86 instruction set architecture (ISA) introduced by Intel. These…
From insideHPC
Exascale: GE Aerospace Goes Airborne with Frontier and Aurora
Since 2022, GE Aerospace (NYSE: GE) has competed successfully for more than 3 million supercomputing hours under a U.S. Department of Energy peer-reviewed proposal process, incuding time on two of the three American exascale
…
From insideHPC
SNIA Announces Regional SDC Denver Event for April 30
Santa Clara, CA., February 13, 2025 –SNIA, the Storage Networking Industry Association, has announced its 2nd annual Regional SDC conference, Regional SDC Denver, on Wednesday, April 30. Registration for Regional SDC Denver is…
From insideHPC
Synopsys Expands Hardware-Assisted Verification Portfolio for Semiconductor Design
SUNNYVALE, Calif., Feb. 13, 2025 — Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq: SNPS) today announced the expansion of its hardware-assisted verification (HAV) portfolio with new HAPS prototyping and ZeBu emulation systems using AMD Versal Premium…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid the Care Dog
The Vanderbilt University Medical Center has a pediatric care dog named “Squid.”
From Schneier on Security
Upcoming Speaking Engagements
This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:
From Schneier on Security
AI and Civil Service Purges
Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s chaotic approach to reform is upending government operations. Critical functions have been halted, tens of thousands of federal staffers are being encouraged to resign, and congressional mandatesdisregarded…
From insideHPC
JSC Acquires D-Wave Quantum Computer
PALTO ALTO, Calif. and JÜLICH, Germany — D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS) and the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) at Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) announced today that FZJ has purchased a D-Wave quantum computer, becoming…
From insideHPC
Rice Univ. Prof. Lydia Kavraki Elected to National Academy of Engineering for Research in Biomedical Robotics
Rice University computer scientist Lydia Kavraki has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), one of the highest professional honors accorded to an engineer, for her work on “developing randomized motion-planning…
From insideHPC
Toward AGI: AI Innovation Will Be Driven by Applications, Not LLMs
DeepSeek’s LLM has caused a stir, but ... companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are aiming higher, their sights are set on artificial general intelligence, for which LLMs will be a component. No matter how fast, powerful, or efficient…
From CS4FN (Computer Science For Fun)
Turn Right in Tenejapa
Designing software that is inclusive for global markets is easy. All you have to do is get an AI to translate everything in the interface into multiple languages…or perhaps to do it properly it is harder than that! Not everyone…
From insideHPC
HPE Ships Its First NVIDIA Grace Blackwell System
HOUSTON – FEBRUARY 13, 2025 – Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE:HPE) announced today that it has shipped its first NVIDIA Blackwell family-based solution, the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72. This rack-scale system by HPE is designed to
…
From Schneier on Security
DOGE as a National Cyberattack
In the span of just weeks, the US government has experienced what may be the most consequential security breach in its history—not through a sophisticated cyberattack or an act of foreign espionage, but through official orders…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Responds to NSF Request for Comment on Proposed Intellectual Property Options
In December 2024, the National Science Foundation (NSF) released a Request for Comments (RFC) seeking public input to inform the adoption of new Intellectual Property (IP) provisions that the agency intends to use in future public…