Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2023
From Schneier on Security
New Revelations from the Snowden Documents
Jake Appelbaum’s PhD thesis contains several new revelations from the classified NSA documents provided to journalists by Edward Snowden. Nothing major, but a few more tidbits.
Kind of amazing that that all happened ten years…From insideHPC
Terra Quantum and Honda Research Institute Europe Develop Quantum ML Method for Disaster Routing
St. Gallen, Munich and Frankfurt, Germany, September 21, 2023 – Quantum computing company Terra Quantum and Honda Research Institute Europe (HRI-EU), a center for advanced research in intelligent systems, collaborated to develop…
From insideHPC
DOD Announces $238M CHIPS and Science Act Awards for Microelectronics Hubs
Washington, DC, Sept. 20, 2023 — The U.S. Department of Defense today announced the award of $238 million in CHIPS and Science Act funding for eight Microelectronics Commons regional innovation hubs. This is the largest award…
From Computational Complexity
We Must Be Doing Something Right
The Chicago Tribune ran an editorial Monday that started
What’s the best four-year college in Illinois? Not the University of Chicago, Northwestern University or the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
No, the best college…From insideHPC
VAST Data Names Marianne Budnik CMO
New York – September 20, 2023 – AI data platform company VAST Data has named Marianne Budnik chief marketing officer. She will lead all marketing functions including product marketing, field marketing, customer advocacy, communications…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
Introducing Stories From Our First Student Chapter Buddies!
ACM-W has started a new campaign. The aim of this campaign is to encourage all ACM-W chapters to partner with other ACM-W chapters to become a Buddy for collaborative works. As ACM-W Europe, we announced the new campaign of ACM…
From insideHPC
KAUST and Cerebras Named Gordon Bell Award Finalist
SUNNYVALE, Calif. and THUWAL, Saudi Arabia, Sept. 20, 2023 — Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and AI chip developer Cerebras Systems announced that its work on multi-dimensional seismic…
From insideHPC
Air Force Research Lab Adds 12PFLOPS Penguin HPC System
The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) has announced the installation of a supercomputer built by Penguin Systems, named the Raider. The system delivers about 12 petaFLOPS of compute power, ranking it in the vicinity of the…
From insideHPC
University of Maryland and IonQ Open Quantum Computing Research
COLLEGE PARK, MD – September 19, 2023 – The University of Maryland (UMD) today announced the opening of the National Quantum Laboratory (QLab), a quantum research center developed in partnership with quantum computing company…
From Schneier on Security
On the Cybersecurity Jobs Shortage
In April, Cybersecurity Ventures reported on extreme cybersecurity job shortage:
Global cybersecurity job vacancies grew by 350 percent, from one million openings in 2013 to 3.5 million in 2021, according to Cybersecurity Ventures…From insideHPC
Anyscale Teams With NVIDIA on LLM Performance
SAN FRANCISCO – Ray Summit – Sept. 18, 2023 – Anyscale, the AI infrastructure company built by the creators of the Ray open-source unified framework for scalable computing, today announced a collaboration with NVIDIA intended…
From insideHPC
TYAN Adopts New AMD EPYC 8004 Series Chips for Cloud and Edge Server Deployments
Newark, Calif. – September 18, 2023 – TYAN, a server platform design manufacturer and a subsidiary of MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation, announced availability of new single-socket server platforms supporting AMD EPYC 8004…
From insideHPC
Linux Foundation: Unified Acceleration Foundation Formed for Open Accelerated Compute and Cross-Platform Performance
BILBAO, SPAIN – September 19, 2023 – Today, the Linux Foundation announced the formation of the Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation, a cross-industry group focused on delivering an open standard accelerator programming model…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NIST to Standardize Encryption Algorithms That Can Resist Attack by Quantum Computers
Last year, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) set out to create four new algorithms capable of withstanding an attack by quantum computers. Last month, NIST released draft standards for three new algorithms…
From insideHPC
NSF Invests $72.5M in New Materials Design
Sept. 18, 2023 — A $72.5 million investment from the U.S. National Science Foundation will drive the development of advanced materials needed to address major societal challenges. The Designing Materials to Revolutionize and
…
From insideHPC
Sylabs Announces SingularityCE 4.0
Reno, NV – (September 19, 2023) – Sylabs, a provider of tools and services for performance-intensive container technology, today announced the release of SingularityCE 4.0, designed to be a bridge for traditional enterprise containers…
From insideHPC
Astera Labs Says Its CXL Memory Controller Boosts Server Memory Bandwidth by 50%
Astera Labs today said its Leo Memory Connectivity Platform is the industry’s first Compute Express Link (CXL) memory controller that increases server memory bandwidth by 50 percent while decreasing latency by 25 percent when…
From insideHPC
SambaNova: New AI Chip Runs 5 Trillion Parameter Models
Specialty AI chip maker SambaNova Systems today announced the SN40L processor, which the company said will power SambaNova’s full stack large language model (LLM) platform, the SambaNova Suite. Manufactured by TSMC, the SN40L…
From Schneier on Security
Detecting AI-Generated Text
There are no reliable ways to distinguish text written by a human from text written by an large language model. OpenAI writes:
Do AI detectors work?
In short, no. While some (including OpenAI) have released tools that purport…From Putting People First
Why do consumers purchase bottled water?
Fast Company published today an excerpt of the new book Unbottled by Daniel Jaffee in which he highlights the five factors why consumers purchase bottled water, or how have they been persuaded to do so - fashion, flavor, fitness…
From insideHPC
CIQ Bundles OpenRadioss and ParaView on Rocky Linux 9.1 for Computation of Shapes
LAS VEGAS, September 18, 2023 — CIQ announced today at Oracle CloudWorld that it has made a software stack for high-performance computation of shapes available on Oracle Cloud Marketplace. This application package — a bundle
…
From insideHPC
Livermore Lab Researchers Win 3 R&D 100 Awards
The award winners include a software suite that helps apply deep learning techniques to science and data challenges in cancer research; software that helps better understand the power, energy and performance of supercomputers…
From insideHPC
Building a Capable Computing Ecosystem for Exascale
With ECP, working together was a prerequisite for participation. “From the beginning, the teams had this so-called ‘shared fate,’” says Siegel. When incorporating new capabilities, applications teams had to consider relevant
…
From BLOG@CACM
ChatGPT (and Other Generative AI Applications) as a Disruptive Technology for Computer Science Education: Obsolescence or Reinvention
Generative AI may turn out to be disruptive technologies for computer science education, but generative AI can also be conceived of as an opportunity for computer science education.
From insideHPC
Vertiv Increases Manufacturing Capacity for Chilled Water Solutions
Piove di Sacco, Italy, September 18, 2023 –Vertiv (NYSE: VRT), a provider of digital infrastructure and continuity solutions, unveiled an upgraded testing room at its thermal management centre near Tognana, Italy. This investment…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Four and More Colors of Mathematics
A memorial to Wolfgang Haken (1928–2022) and more in the AMS Notices This month’s Notices of the American Mathematical Society for October 2023 has just been mailed to me. This issue is special in several ways: It is large and…
From insideHPC
$100M Series B for Generative AI Platform Writer
SAN FRANCISCO — Writer, a generative AI platform for enterprises, announced its Series B funding round of $100 million today. The round is being led by ICONIQ Growth with participation from WndrCo, Balderton Capital and Insight…
From Putting People First
Digital border governance: a human rights based approach
This collaborative study, conducted by the UN Human Rights Office and the University of Essex, analyses the human rights implications of specific border technologies. It provides recommendations for States and stakeholders on…
From Schneier on Security
Using Hacked LastPass Keys to Steal Cryptocurrency
Remember last November, when hackers broke into the network for LastPass—a password database—and stole password vaults with both encrypted and plaintext data for over 25 million users?
Well, they’re now using that data break …From Putting People First
[Report] How green is household behaviour?
How Green is Household Behaviour? presents an overview of results from the 2022 OECD Survey on Environmental Policies and Individual Behaviour Change. The survey investigates household attitudes and behaviour with respect to…