Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2019
From insideHPC
GCS Centres HLRS, JSC, and LRZ to Exhibit SC19
Meet the three GCS centres, the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), and Leibniz Supercomputing Centre Garching (LRZ) at SC19 in Denver, Colorado (USA). The international conference…
From The Eponymous Pickle
NELL and Machine Learning
In a re-examination of 'machine learning', the broader definition that includes but is not restricted to deep learning. I recalled our look the CMU effort called NELL, Never Ending Language Learner'. At the time it was insufficiently…
From The Eponymous Pickle
SAP Rolls Towards Cloud Data Intelligence
Our enterprise was and is an SAP user, we worked with them primarily on optimization analytics applications.
HANA in the Cloud by Christmas, SAP Says, Alex Woodie in DataNami
SAP formally revealed the planned general availability…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Benchmarking is hard: processors learn to predict branches
A lot of software is an intricate of branches (if–then clauses). For performance reasons, modern processors predict the results of these branches. In my previous post, I showed how the bulk of your running time could be due to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Asks for Home Access for Delivery
Another case, like the one with Amazon of allowing delivery personnel a means to enter the smart home for delivery. Amazon Key. No idea of how that is working, but have not heard it mentioned recently. We examined the use…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Mispredicted branches can multiply your running times
Modern processors are superscalar, meaning that they can execute many instructions at once. For example, some processors can retire four or six instructions per cycle. Furthermore, many of these processors can initiate instructions…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Daydream VR
Somewhat of a surprise given how Google is so emerging tech. But more of a confirmation of a very niche market? Not enough consumer uptake. We saw an early demo and it was impressive.
Google's Daydream VR experiment is…
From insideHPC
Mellanox Accelerates NVMe/TCP and RoCE Fabrics to 200Gb/s
Today Mellanox announced acceleration of NVMe/TCP at speeds up to 200Gb/s. The entire portfolio of shipping ConnectX adapters supports NVMe-oF over both TCP and RoCE, and the newly-introduced ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 products…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Call for Papers for the 7th Annual Hot Topics in the Science of Security (HoTSoS) Symposium
The 7th Annual Hot Topics in the Science of Security (HoTSoS) Symposium recently released a call for papers. This year’s HoTSoS Symposium will be held April 7-8, 2020 at the Burge Union on the University of Kansas campus in Lawrence…
From insideHPC
Registration Opens for CHPC National Conference in South Africa
Registration is now open for the CHPC National Conference. The event takes place Dec. 1-5 in Johannesburg, South Africa. "The National Integrated Cyber Infrastructure System (NICIS) promotes scientific and industrial development…
From Schneier on Security
Cracking the Passwords of Early Internet Pioneers
Lots of them weren't very good: BSD co-inventor Dennis Ritchie, for instance, used "dmac" (his middle name was MacAlistair); Stephen R. Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell command line interpreter, chose "bourne"; Eric Schmidt…
From insideHPC
Sandia Research Project turns Big Data into real-time, actionable intelligence
Researchers at Sandia National Labs are leading a project to deliver actionable information from streaming data to decision makers. While social media, cameras, sensors and more generate huge amounts of data that can overwhelm…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Facebook AI Releases Searchable Code Snippets
Seems a useful thing, what Facebook has put on the web to support AI efforts is impressive. See more at the Facebook.ai site. Also note the claimed validation against malware.
Facebook Releases AI Code Search Datasets By …
From insideHPC
Podcast: The Turing Machine is Sequential, so how about a Parallel Machine?
The @RadioFreeHPC team is joined by the folks at MemComputing, a San Diego startup that’s built a new parallel foundation for computing. It calls it the universal memcomputing machine, and a realization of self-organizing circuits…
From insideHPC
Accelerating Research and Enterprise Solutions by Bridging HPC and AI
Venkatesh Kannan from ICHEC gave this talk at the UK HPC Conference. "The presentation will highlight the need to address the symbiotic relationship between HPC and AI at different levels – technology development, education &…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ticketing with a Blockchain
Interesting example of a kind of smart contract embedded in the blockchain to enforce agreements regards how tickets can be used. So this means when a ticket is sold, if you can examine the context of the sale. The ticket…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Your Smart TV is (and has been) Watching You
Almost obvious, its one reason that smart TVs are relatively cheap. My TV seems to do an update every time I switch services. A massive download? After 1 AM every night it does a scheduled, major update. Meanwhile some fairly…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IoT and Fintech
FinTech probably not an area you would first think of IOT, but this non technical piece outlines some useful thoughts in the space.
How IoT Changes Banks and FinTech Companies By Vova Shevchyk in ReadWrite
Can financial services…
From insideHPC
GMS Launches Ruggedized TITAN AI-Equipped Rackmount Servers
Today General Micro Systems (GMS) launched TITAN, the industry’s first sealed, fanless, conduction-cooled rackmount servers with artificial intelligence (AI) and mil-circular (38999) connectors for superior ruggedness in the
…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Proposed Model for Machine Learning
Intriguing. Thinking this, its kind of like derived information transfer to some structured system. Like a brain or a machine? And then transferring that knowledge to a decision.
Machine Learning: A Formal Learning Model …
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Podcast Interview with “Father of the Internet” Vint Cerf
Vint Cerf, known as one of the “fathers of the internet” and a recipient of the 2004 ACM A.M. Turing Award, was a participating laureate at this year’s Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF). Cerf currently acts as a vice president…
From insideHPC
AMD to Power Cray’s ARCHER2 Supercomputer in the UK
Following a procurement exercise, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) are pleased to announce that Cray, an HPE company, has been awarded the contract to supply the hardware for the next national supercomputer, ARCHER2. Powered…
From insideHPC
Video: An Update on HPC at CSCS
Thomas Schulthess from CSCS gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. "CSCS has a strong track record in supporting the processing, analysis and storage of scientific data, and is investing heavily in new tools and computing systems…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CRA’s Career Mentoring Workshop Registration is Now Open!
The following is a message to the community from the Computing Research Association (CRA) Executive Director Andrew Bernat. Dear Colleague, I am pleased to announce that CRA’s Career Mentoring Workshop will take place February…
From The Noisy Channel
Search: Intent, Not Inventory
When I enter a physical store, my intent is “I want to buy X” or “I’m looking for something in order to do X.” It’s not “Show me the products that satisfy characteristics X, Y, and Z.” My intent is to find what I need, not to…
From insideHPC
Heterogeneous Computing: Long Live the CPU
In this guest article, our friends at Intel discuss how the company is investing in heterogeneous computing. Intel recently spoke about supporting heterogeneous computing with the catch phrase “One Size Does Not Fit All” in talking…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Game Theory and Autonomous Cars
How do we construct models about elements of autonomy and how they interact our own behavior?
Game Theory and AI Systems: Use Case For Autonomous Cars By Dr. Lance Eliot, CEO, Techbrium Inc. AI Trends Insider
When you get onto…
From Schneier on Security
Factoring 2048-bit Numbers Using 20 Million Qubits
This theoretical paper shows how to factor 2048-bit RSA moduli with a 20-million qubit quantum computer in eight hours. It's interesting work, but I don't want overstate the risk. We know from Shor's Algorithm that both factoring…
From The Eponymous Pickle
US Regulators Look at Data as an Asset
Several projects examined data as an asset, had been looking at how data's value would be treated in regulation. And likelihood of the nature of future regulation.
US says digital assets are covered by money laundering and disclosure…
From Computational Complexity
The Sheldon Conjecture (too late for Problems with a Point)
Chapter 5 of Problems with a Point (by Gasarch and Kruskal) is about how mathematical objects get their names. If it was an e-book that I could edit and add to (is this a good idea or not? later on that) then I would have added…