Advertisement

Deferred Maintenance on the Future

Over-worked and sleep-deprived drivers are steering many of our vehicles of discovery on balding tires across potholed roads. Stripping away the metaphor, we are struggling to sustain appropriate investments in basic research infrastructure and facilities operations, and our dispirited researchers face ever-diminishing odds of research funding as they work to keep laboratories operational and students and post-doctoral research associates funded.

Big Data Analyzed By Big Compute, Big Compute Creates Big Data

The science and engineering communities have worked together through several 1,000x leaps in computing capability, each time managing to push the boundaries of the application of these technologies to the problems faced by our society. Last night I had a clear view that the transition from pan-petaFLOPS to exascale computing is interesting because it is both accelerating a move into the big data era, and being shaped by the arrival of big data from other disciplines well outside the traditional supercomputing community. If we are thoughtful as we proceed into this new era, we have a unique opportunity to create something much more effective, relevant, and useful than we ever have before.

Building a Computationally-Literate Workforce

Students must leave their formal training ready to take up the state of the practice in fields that routinely use computational tools, and ready to advance the state of the practice in fields that have been slower to adopt. While the academic community works through internal processes to adapt to the changing needs of their students, the computational knowledge gap is filled by employees and technical conferences.

For These Companies, It All Started With the Decision to Adopt

SC13 is featuring sixteen companies on the exhibit floor that have adopted HPC as part of their core business and, as a result, have transformed their ability to compete and succeed. From NASCAR to diapers, the HPC Impact Showcase is designed to provide inspiration and role models for organizations that think advanced computing is not relevant to what they do, or that it is out of their reach.

HPC Every Day, Everywhere

This Saturday the world's largest, and most influential, conference on high performance computing opens in Denver. Over the next week new advances in supercomputing research will be presented, new products will be announced, and important relationships will be kindled or renewed. And, yes, all of this really does matter to you: the impact of high performance computing is felt everywhere throughout our culture, in big ways and small, and impacts each of us every day.

Computing Does Not Support Its Infrastructure

All large, multinational companies that depend on their intellectual prowess are able to avoid most taxation. Two factors enable the trend: first intellectual property (IP) as product designs and software are hard to value in financial terms; second, the creators of software IP do not care about what businesses do with their products — they just as soon give them away — as long as they get paid. The infrastructure components that supported their education, the underlying research, and the communication facilities are to be supported by others. Transitioning to a fair balance requires more than patches to fix loopholes.

Shape the Future of Computing

ACM encourages its members to take a direct hand in shaping the future of the association. There are more ways than ever to get involved.

Get Involved

Communications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication.

By opening CACM to the world, we hope to increase engagement among the broader computer science community and encourage non-members to discover the rich resources ACM has to offer.

Learn More