Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2018
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Getting 4 bytes or a full cache line: same speed or not?
Many software operations are believed to be “memory bound”, meaning that the processor spins empty while waiting for data to come from memory. To compensate, our processors rely on fast cache memory. If your problem fits in cache…
From insideHPC
Univa Announces Collaboration with Sylabs for HPC Containers
Today Univa announced a partnership with Sylabs to offer enhanced support and integration for Sylabs’ Singularity container platform in Univa Grid Engine and other Univa products. "Customers are rapidly embracing containers for…
From insideHPC
Dell EMC Gains Momentum on HPC & AI at ISC 2018
In this video from ISC 2018, Thierry Pelligrino from Dell EMC describes how the company is moving forward with HPC and AI solutions for customers in science, engineering, and the Enterprise. "HPC is great practice. AI is the
…
From insideHPC
Women in HPC Opens New Chapter in Texas
Faith Singer-Villalobos writes that Texas Women in HPC (TX-WHPC) has been recognized as one of the first Chapters in the new Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) Pilot Program. "The WHPC Chapter Pilot will enable us to
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Education via Voice Assistants with Shiken
If a skill can be built for Alexa, it can be readily built for other assistants. Voice and repetition is apparently key for this, aimed at qualifying tests. Her medical students. This makes sense. Also think about using…
From insideHPC
Evolving Scientific Computing at Argonne
Over at Argonne, John Spizzirri writes that the Lab has helped advance the boundaries of high-performance computing technologies through the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). "Realizing the promise of exascale computing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
NIH Partners with Google Cloud
Note that integration of Machine Learning is specifically mentioned. Once you have the right data readily accessible, many kinds of analytics can be tested and applied.
NIH Partners With Google Cloud to Speed Up Medical Breakthroughs…
From insideHPC
Lori Diachin Named Deputy Director of Exascale Computing Project
The Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) has named Lori Diachin as its new Deputy Director effective August 7, 2018. Lori replaces Stephen Lee who has retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Lori has
…
From insideHPC
Altair Orchestrates HPC Workloads with PBS Pro at ISC 2018
In this video from ISC 2018, Sam Mahalingam from Altair provides an update on the company's latest software innovations for managing HPC Workloads. "This year, with the announcement of the new PBS Works 2018, Altair is once again…
From The Eponymous Pickle
CSIG Talk: AI and Education
(Checking on the details of this, it may be August 2, check back, the recording and slides will be posted here: http://cognitive-science.info/community/weekly-update/). Note the assistant model being discussed here. )
CSIG (Cognitive…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at ACM Hypertext 2018
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently sponsored a Blue Sky Ideas Conference Track at the 29TH ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, July 9-12, 2018 in Baltimore, MD. The emphasis of this track was on visionary…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Honeywell Launches Alexa Thermostat
Some commercial applications of assistant capabilities are interesting to see. Some interesting details here.
Honeywell Launches Amazon Alexa Voice-ready Thermostat for Hotels
ATLANTA – Honeywell (NYSE: HON), a global leader in…
From Schneier on Security
Hacking a Robot Vacuum
The Diqee 360 robotic vacuum cleaner can be turned into a surveillance device. The attack requires physical access to the device, so in the scheme of things it's not a big deal. But why in the world is the vacuum equipped with…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Simulation plus Randomness Producing Learning
Where else can this be used? Note in particular the control of the randomness used.
OpenAI Demonstrates Complex Manipulation Transfer from Simulation to Real World by adding randomness to a relatively simple simulation, OpenAI's…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Futuretext: Data Science for the IOT
Looks to be of interest. Will be reviewing as it proceeds, From Futuretext:
" ... After a bit of delay, here is the methodology section of our book Data Science for Internet of Things co-authored by Ajit Jaokar, Jean Jacques…
From Putting People First
Datafication and data fiction: Narrating data and narrating with data
Datafication and data fiction: Narrating data and narrating with data Paul Dourish, Edgar Gómez Cruz Big Data & Society Journal Sage Publications, July 4, 2018 Creative Commons Attribution, Non Commercial 4.0 License https://doi…
From BLOG@CACM
First-Class Philosophical Failure
Interrogation of "first-class object" as an analog to human life goes nowhere.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Robot Hauling with Autonomous Trains
Had heard of autonomous shipping, but with oceangoing ships and not with trains. Here an interesting example.
World's Largest Robot Hauls Ore Through Western Australia By Evan Ackerman in IEEE Spectrum
The world's largest…
From BLOG@CACM
Moving Computing Education Past Argument from Authority: Stuart Reges and Women Who Code
Computing educators often make decisions based on arguments from authority. Time to move on.
From Schneier on Security
The Poor Cybersecurity of US Space Assets
Good policy paper (summary here) on the threats, current state, and potential policy solutions for the poor security of US space systems....
From insideHPC
DOE Awards 1.5 billion Hours of Computing Time at Argonne
The ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge has awarded 20 projects for a total of 1.5 billion core-hours at Argonne to pursue challenging, high-risk, high-payoff simulations. "The Advanced Scientific Computing Program (ASCR), which…
From insideHPC
Xtreme-D Showcases Innovative Solutions for Managing HPC Clouds at ISC 2018
In this video from ISC 2018 in Frankfurt, Naoki Shibata from Xtreme-D describes the company's the company’s innovative solutions for deploying and managing HPC clouds. "Customers can use our easy-to-deploy turnkey HPC cluster…
From insideHPC
How Dell EMC Powers HPC in the Cloud with R Systems
In this video from the Dell EMC HPC Community Meeting, Brian Kucic from R Systems describes how Dell EMC powers the company's HPC Cloud solutions. "R Systems NA, Inc. provides High Performance Computer Cluster resources and technical…
From BLOG@CACM
Blame-Free Quality Control
How liable should programmers be for the quality of their software?
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google and Accenture Create Business Group
More routes for the enterprise for digital transformation.
Google and Accenture create new cloud-focused business group
By Mike Wheatley in SiliconAngle
Before it wrapped up its Cloud Next conference today, Google LLC signed a deal…
From insideHPC
Radio Free HPC Reviews Lincoln Labs Paper on Spectre/Meltdown Performance Hits
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at a new whitepaper from Lincoln Labs focused on the performance hits Spectre/Meltdown mitigations. The news is not good. After that, Shahin point us to the story about how DARPA…
From The Noisy Channel
Analyze This!
Product development work should be data-driven — or, to be more precise, data-informed. We live in an age of science, which means that we should use data to resolve arguments, even if we don’t go as far as to make love with it…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Emergence of a Token Economy
Insightful piece in Irving Wladawsky-Berger's blog on Blockchain:
The Emergence of a Blockchain-Based Token Economy
Blockchain Revolution, published in May of 2016 by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott, was one of the first books that…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google AutoML and the Importance of Human Machine Communication
Call centers are the place where people to machine communications will increasingly be important. Better efficiency and results will be key. Having the systems learn to understand changes in their context is the next step…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon and Microsoft Partner
It seems on the cloud side, not the retail side. How does this influence the Amazon and Cortana proposed link?
Walmart and Microsoft team up to slow Amazon’s roll by George Anderson
Today, Walmart and Microsoft announced
The…