Communications of the ACM

Home/Opinion/Articles/Learning For the New Digital Age/Abstract

The profession of IT

Learning For the New Digital Age

By Peter J. Denning
Communications of the ACM, September 2014, Vol. 57 No. 9, Pages 29-31
10.1145/2644230
Comments

View as: Print Mobile App ACM Digital Library In the Digital Edition Share: Send by email Share on reddit Share on StumbleUpon Share on Hacker News Share on Tweeter Share on Facebook

An Internet graph rendered using Border Gateway Protocol data points circa 2010.

Credit: Barrett Lyon / The Opte Project

The first of the two accompanying images shows the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer at Argonne Labs. It houses 250,000 processors in 72 cabinets connected by an optical network. It can perform approximately 10¹⁵ operations per second—a million times faster than the chip in your smartphone. The image on the next page is a beautiful graph of connections between Internet sites. The Internet is a supercomputer grown from a billion machines and several billion people.

The IBM supercomputer is a wholly electronic machine. It uses a robust design first conceived in the 1940s. Its structure is fixed. It is very good at processing large datasets with deterministic algorithms. It has no intelligence.

No entries found

Log in to Read the Full Article

Sign In

Sign in using your ACM Web Account username and password to access premium content if you are an ACM member, Communications subscriber or Digital Library subscriber.

Need Access?

Please select one of the options below for access to premium content and features.

Create a Web Account

If you are already an ACM member, Communications subscriber, or Digital Library subscriber, please set up a web account to access premium content on this site.

Join the ACM

Become a member to take full advantage of ACM's outstanding computing information resources, networking opportunities, and other benefits.

Subscribe to Communications of the ACM Magazine

Get full access to 50+ years of CACM content and receive the print version of the magazine monthly.

Purchase the Article

Non-members can purchase this article or a copy of the magazine in which it appears.