Communications of the ACM
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From BLOG@CACM
Star Trek@50: Inspiring Discovery and Innovation
Star Trek has inspired generations to pursue science and technology careers, not a few of whom have transformed part of it into technological and commercial fact...
From BLOG@CACM
Exascale Computing and Big Data: Time To Reunite
It is past time to reunite the big data, cloud, and high-performance computing communities. Each can each learn much from the other.
From BLOG@CACM
Leaping the Exascale Chasm
The global race is on to build ever-faster supercomputers, fueled by a combination of scientific and engineering needs to simulate phenomena with greater resolution...
From BLOG@CACM
Exascale Software: Just a Few Orders of Magnitude
Extraordinary parallelism, unprecedented data locality and adaptive resilience: these are daunting architecture, system software and application challenges for...
From BLOG@CACM
HPC, Big Data and the Peloponnesian War
We need a concord and strategic research investment plan that recognizes the shared importance of HPC and big data. Both warrant investments in basic research,...
From BLOG@CACM
Research {Preposition} Infrastructure
Computing research and advanced computing infrastructure–each is dependent on the other in a myriad of subtle and complex ways, yet each is profoundly different...
From BLOG@CACM
SC11: The Cray, Fernbach, and Kennedy Awards
The Cray, Fernbach, and Kennedy awards and the work of the recipients reflect the evolving interplay of technology, software, applications and algorithms in advancing...
From BLOG@CACM
Analog Computing: Time For a Comeback?
Use of the word "computer" conjures certain images. One of them, so deeply ingrained that we rarely question it, is that computing is digital. The alternative,...
From BLOG@CACM
2010 Seymour Cray and Sidney Fernbach Awards
This year, I again had the honor and privilege to chair the selection committee for the IEEE Seymour Cray and Sidney Fernbach awards, both of which were presented...
From BLOG@CACM
HPC and the Excluded Middle
Betwixt and between ubiquitous consumer software and the ethereal realm of ultra-high-performance computing, lies the excluded middle, the world of day-to-day computational...
From BLOG@CACM
Technology Transfer: A Contact Sport
The success or failure of technology transfer depends on many factors. No single mechanism is guaranteed to succeed, though there are many mechanisms that are likely...
From BLOG@CACM
Simple HPC Wins
You want to be the first person to design a successful, transistorized computer system, not the last person to design vacuum tube computer. Any designer's challenge...
From BLOG@CACM
In Vivo, In Vitro, In Silico
These “grand challenges” of systems biology encompass almost every aspect of modern computing, from numerical and symbolic methods through data management and analytics...
From BLOG@CACM
Consumerization of IT and Research
When a corporate, government, or university IT department of the 1970s debated an upgrade to its IBM S/370 mainframes, it is doubtful that the IT director was in...
From BLOG@CACM
Paucity to Plethora: Jevons Paradox
I suspect much of computing is still socially conditioned by its roots in computational paucity to recognize fully the true opportunity afforded by computational...
From BLOG@CACM
SC09 Reflections: The Need For Speed
SC09 (aka the “Supercomputing Conference”) was held during the week of November 16. The conference set an attendance record this year – roughly 10,000 attendees...
From BLOG@CACM
Cray and Fernbach Award Winners
This year, I have the honor and privilege to chair the selection committee for the Seymour Cray and Sidney Fernbach awards, which recognize outstanding contributions...
From BLOG@CACM
The Fallacy of Rankings
The list of the world's fastest computers will soon be announced. As always, we can expect the latest announcement to garner interest among the technological community...
From BLOG@CACM
HPC: Making a Small Fortune
There is an old joke in the high-performance computing community that begins with a question, “How do you make a small fortune in high-performance computing?” There...
From BLOG@CACM
High-Performance Computing: Where
By definition, the raison d’être for high-performance computing is high performance, but floating point operations per second (FLOPS) need not be the only measure...12