Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
December 2019
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Uses IOTs with Advanced Features
Impressive direction by Microsoft,with useful details.
Microsoft doubles down on Internet of Things with new features to simplify building connected devices By Nat Levy
Microsoft today announced a series of new Internet…
From insideHPC
IBM Powers AiMos Supercomputer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
The most powerful supercomputer to debut on the November 2019 Top500 ranking of supercomputers will be unveiled today at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Center for Computational Innovations (CCI). Part of a collaboration…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Notable Extensions to Google Assistant: Photos and Notes
Notable the ability to link to note taking capabilities, like Google Keep. Searching specifics in podcasts also very useful for business application support. Assistant has also become very good a working with display of photos…
From insideHPC
Video: TMGcore Showcases Immersive Cooling for HPC at SC19
In this video from SC19, Taylor Monnig from TMGcore describes OTTO, a completely automated, self-contained, two-phase liquid immersion-cooled data center platform that features a closed loop system, uses zero water and is a tenth…
From Schneier on Security
Andy Ellis on Risk Assessment
Andy Ellis, the CSO of Akamai, gave a great talk about the psychology of risk at the Business of Software conference this year. I've written about this before. One quote: "The problem is our brains are intuitively suited to the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft Will Read Text from Office Apps
Like to see this direction for mobile interaction, starting to use voice as part of a mobile and voice experience for much used 365 office apps.
Microsoft's redesigned Office mobile apps read text out loud
In Outlook, Play My Emails…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kroger Dark Kitchens
Been following Kroger for some time on their establishment of restaurants in stores, and partially prepared foods and 'food kits' and preparation methods.
Will Kroger’s dark kitchens cook up something good? in Retailwire by…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alexa Commands for Privacy/Transparency
Further look at privacy, by asking what has been heard.
Amazon makes Alexa more transparent with ‘Tell me what you heard’ feature By Allison Matyus in Digitaltrends
Amazon announced privacy and transparency improvements for its…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Great Innovative Idea: Datasets First! A Bottom-up Data Linking Paradigm
The following great innovative idea is from Konstantin Todorov from the University of Montpellier and a researcher at the LIRMM laboratory within the FADO group. Todorov was one of the Blue Sky Awards at ISWC 2019 for his paper…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Sampling Plan Ends
An idea I though was a good one. If it gathered the right data and understood how to use that data. Sounds like Amazon could have made this work.
Amazon decides it has sampled enough by Tom Ryan in Retailwire.
Amazon.com is
Under…
From insideHPC
Microway Showcases HPC & AI Solutions at SC19
In this video from SC19, Eliot Eshelman from Microway describes the company's innovative solutions for HPC & AI. As Deep Learning enters the mainstream, NVIDIA DGX solutions from Microway are uniquely positioned to provide the…
From insideHPC
2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors Demonstrate Amazing HPC Performance
In this guest article, our friends at Intel discuss how benchmarks show key workloads average 31% better on Intel Xeon Platinum 9282 than AMD EYPC “Rome” 7742. Intel analysis provides strong evidence that the 2nd Generation Intel…
From insideHPC
Sawtooth Supercomputer from HPE Comes to Idaho National Lab
A powerful new supercomputer arrived this week at Idaho National Laboratory’s Collaborative Computing Center. The machine has the power to run complex modeling and simulation applications, which are essential to developing next…
From insideHPC
Verne Global Offers Sustainable HPC in the Cloud
In this video from SC19, Tate Cantrell from Verne Global describes how the company delivers sustainable HPC in the Cloud. "Verne Global delivers true high performance computing solutions in an optimized environment, built upon…
From insideHPC
Fujitsu A64FX Arm Processors come to Cray CS Supercomputers
In this video from SC19, Takeshi Horie from Fujitsu and Steve Scott from Cray describe how the powerful Arm-based A64fx Arm Processor will power the next generation of Cray CS Supercomputers. “We are delivering the development…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bosch SoundSee Sensor Predicts Future
Another example of the linking of sensors to predictive decision making.
Bosch SoundSee combines deep learning with mobile microphone arrays to identify problems on the ISS before they happen in IEEE Spectrum By Evan Ackerman
We…
From Schneier on Security
Election Machine Insecurity Story
Interesting story of a flawed computer voting machine and a paper ballot available for recount. All ended well, but only because of that paper backup. Vote totals in a Northampton County judge's race showed one candidate, Abe…
From Writing
[NEW TALK] Automated Testing for Terraform, Docker, Packer, Kubernetes, and More
![[NEW TALK] Automated Testing for Terraform, Docker, Packer, Kubernetes, and More](/system/assets/0001/6457/070714_brikman.small_square.jpg?1476779490&1404742835)
I’m happy to share with you the video and slides from my QCon talk on how to test infrastructure code! This talk is a step-by-step, live-coding class on how to write automated tests for infrastructure code, including the code…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Instructions per cycle: AMD Zen 2 versus Intel
The performance of a processor is determined by several factors. For example, processors with a higher frequency tend to do more work per unit of time. Physics makes it difficult to produce processors that have higher frequency…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI to Hit the Wall?
Depends on your expectations. If you want 'General, Human AI (AGI)' you could expect some long delays, but there will be advances along the way. We waited since the 80s and made things very powerful along the way. The current…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Qualcomm Builds a Better Fingerprint Reader
Interesting out of Qualcomm. The size is noted, need to see it downsized.
Qualcomm builds a bigger, better in-screen fingerprint reader
Never miss your fingerprint scanner again with this giant new sensor. By Ron Amadeo
In…
From insideHPC
GigaIO and 2CRSi to Develop Integrated Rack Using FabreX PCIe Fabric
Today GigaIO announced a partnership with 2CRSi to develop advanced server solutions for today’s data intensive environments. 2CRSi, a leading producer of high-performance computing solutions, will integrate GigaIO’s FabreX technology…
From insideHPC
Inspur Showcases HPC & AI Solutions at SC19
In this video from SC19, Vangel Bojaxhi from Inspur describes the company's innovative solutions for HPC & AI. At the show, the company featured a broad array of HPC & AI servers based on x86 and OpenPOWER as well as a new liquid…
From insideHPC
Moving HPC to the Cloud with Easy8 and Bright Cluster Manager
In this video from SC19, Bill Wagner from Bright Computing announces the latest release of Bright Cluster Manager software for HPC, OpenStack, and Data Science. Now available for free for clusters up to eight nodes with the Easy8…
From insideHPC
D-Wave Expands Leap API into Amazon Braket
Today D-Wave Systems announced the expansion of the Leap API into Amazon Braket, a new, fully managed Amazon Web Services (AWS) solution that allows scientists, researchers, and developers to begin experimenting with computers…
From insideHPC
Introducing the oneAPI Software Stack for HPC & AI
With oneAPI, Intel delivers a unified and simplified programming model for application development across heterogenous processing architectures, including CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and NNPs. "HPC and AI workloads demand diverse architectures…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Coding for Fun and Advent of Code
My friend Mike Zamansky is a big proponent of the Advent of Code – 25 days of coding problems leading up the Christmas. Since I have been thinking I want to write more code for my personal enjoyment I started in on it myself.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Blockchain not Bitcoin
Likely approach for approaches that address problems like secure identification and control.
US Military’s DARPA Program Hops on the ‘Blockchain Not Bitcoin’ Bandwagon
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is seeking…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Further Value of Demo Data
At first I didn't understand the claim being made here, but after I understood it, remembered we had done sometime similar for a manufacturing application, but this takes it further yet. This still requires that the program…
From Schneier on Security
Becoming a Tech Policy Activist
Carolyn McCarthy gave an excellent TEDx talk about becoming a tech policy activist. It's a powerful call for public-interest technologists....