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 insideHPC
Dell and EMC Transaction to Close on September 7, 2016
Today Dell Inc. and EMC Corp. announced that they intend to close the transaction to combine Dell and EMC on Wednesday, September 7, 2016. The name of the newly combined company will be Dell Technologies.
The post Dell and EMC…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Visualizations in R
I was reminded of this, Machlis Musings ... By Sharon Machlis 5 data visualizations in 5 minutes: each in 5 lines or less of R ... Nicely done. Does not mean everything is this simple, but simple is always a good place…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The rate-of-living theory is wrong
The rate-of-living theory is popular on the Internet. The intuition is that all animals are born with some “budget” that they burn out over time according to their rate of energy expenditure. A proxy for how much energy you spend…
From insideHPC
Bridges Supercomputer Enters Production at PSC
"Bridges has enabled early scientific successes, for example in metagenomics, organic semiconductor electrochemistry, genome assembly in endangered species, and public health decision-making. Over 2,300 users currently have access…
From insideHPC
Co-Design Offloading
The move to network offloading is the first step in co-designed systems. A large amount of overhead is required to service the huge number of packets required for modern data rates. This amount of overhead can significantly reduce…
From insideHPC
Paul Messina Presents: A Path to Capable Exascale Computing
Paul Messina presented this talk at the 2016 Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. The U.S. Department of Energy has been charged with carrying out that role in an initiative called the Exascale Computing Project…
From insideHPC
Mellanox Ethernet Solutions Power Germany’s Most Advanced Cloud Datacenter
Today Mellanox announced that SysEleven in Germany used the company's 25/50/100GbE Open Ethernet solutions to build a new SSD-based, fully-automated cloud datacenter. "We chose the Mellanox suite of products because it allows…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Plotting Analytics Terminology
An interesting article in the SAS blog on the evolution of 'data mining', actually a term less used these days. They quote the image below about how a number of capabilities overlap, which was published by SAS in 1998.
The…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Recipes for Training and Understanding Delivery
In Adage:
Why Martha Stewart Doesn't Feel Sorry for Media Companies
Mogul Talks Facebook Live, Future of Magazines and the 'Advertiser Dilemma' ....
Fascinating piece on how Martha Stewart is experimenting with Facebook to produce…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Hadoop Effectiveness
A good overview of Hadoop and how it fits into data management and analytics. To what degree will open source approaches change our view of analytics?
From Schneier on Security
NSO Group
We're starting to see some information on the Israeli cyber-weapons arms manufacturer that sold the iPhone zero-day exploit to the United Arab Emirates so they could spy on human rights defenders....
From The Eponymous Pickle
EU Eldercare Effort
This was an area we looked at as we explored consumer robotics in the smarthome, See the tag for past examinations.
Netcarity is a European project researching and testing technologies which will help older people to improve…
From Phys.org Technology News
Turbulence forces emergency landing in Ireland; 12 injured
A United Airlines flight bound for London made an emergency landing at Shannon Airport in Ireland on Wednesday after severe turbulence that left 12 passengers needing hospital treatment, officials said.
From Phys.org Technology News
The quest to end lost airline luggage
Victor DaRosa stands under a scorching afternoon sun, loading bags onto a jet heading to Detroit.
From The Eponymous Pickle
IOT and High Value Goods
In Readwrite: Not extremely new. Had seen solutions by GE using essentially the idea in remote power plant applications. Active RFID applications. The idea has also been applied to container tracking. Pointer to an ROI analysis…
From The Noisy Channel
I may have been burned, but I’m not willing to let this experience make me that cynical.
I still basically trust people, and I’d like to keep it that way. But now I understand more than before why other people are less trusting.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Game that Speeds Language Learning
In the CACM: Always the kind of gamification that should be of most value, one that turns a difficult, lengthy and tedious effort into obsessive fun. But how often does this work well? Where do the game mechanics make
"…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Understanding Cognitive Applications: A Framework
" ... This a reminder about our Cognitive Systems Institute Group Speaker Series on Thursday, September 1, 2016 at 10:30 am ET US (9:30am CT, 7:30 am PT). Our presenter this week is Sue Feldman from Synthexis and Cognitive Computing…
From insideHPC
DOE Funds 13 HPC4Mfg Clean Energy Projects
The Department of Energy has funded $3.8 million fro 13 new industry projects as part of its HPC4Mfg program. "We're excited about this second round of projects because companies are bringing forward challenges that we can help…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Nimble Resource Allocation with Analytics
Good piece on resource allocation by McKinsey. I always point to this as a place to start to use analytics. It is all about resources. Using them better, to produce better results. This does not have to include the newer,…
From Computational Complexity
I have consulted four times. Really!
Those who know me know that I work on stuff that is not readily applied. Or perhaps not applied at all. Certainly my current state of knowledge does seem like it would be useful to a company. Many theorists, at one time in their…
From insideHPC
Indiana University to Launch Three New HPC Systems
Indiana University plans to unveil three new HPC resources at a launch event on Sept 1: Jetstream, Big Red II+, and Diet. "With these new systems, IU continues to provide our researchers the leading-edge computational tools needed…
From Schneier on Security
Using Wi-Fi Signals to Identify People by Body Shape
Another paper on using Wi-Fi for surveillance. This one is on identifying people by their body shape. "FreeSense:Indoor Human Identification with WiFi Signals": Abstract: Human identification plays an important role in human-computer…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Humans, Machines and the Future of Work Conference Call for Posters
The De Lange Conference X has released a call for posters for inclusion in their conference, Humans, Machines and the Future of Work. The conference, organized by Moshe Vardi and co-sponsored by The Computing Research Association…
From insideHPC
Exascale Computing – What are the Goals and the Baseline?
Thomas Schulthess presented this talk at the MVAPICH User Group. "Implementation of exascale computing will be different in that application performance is supposed to play a central role in determining the system performance…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Advanced Consumer Drones
IEEE Spectrum looks at Drones. In particular a drone that incorporates advanced autopilot capabilities.
From insideHPC
WINS Program Selects Seven Women to Help Build SCinet at SC16
Seven women who work in IT departments at research institutions around the country have been selected to help build and operate the high performance SCinet conference network at SC16. The announcement came from the Women in IT…
From insideHPC
Requesting Your Input on the HPC Customer Experience Survey
We'd like to invite our readers to participate in our new HPC Customer Experience Survey. It's an effort to better understand our readers and what is really happening out there in the world of High Performance Computing. "This…
From insideHPC
SGI Opens European Research Centre at ICHEC in Ireland
Today SGI announced a significant investment in extreme scale software research at the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC), a top European center. The investment highlights the commitment of SGI to the European software…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Developer as CEO
In CIOInsight. My reaction: True, most CEO's in consumer facing companies come out of marketing, which is a kind of strategic, high level interface between goods and sales. There are many exceptions, engineers can be CEOs…