Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2023
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How many billions of transistors in your iPhone processor?
In about 10 years, Apple has multiplied by 19 the number of transistors in its mobile processors. It corresponds roughly to a steady rate of improvement of 34% per year on the number of transistors, or a doubling every 2.5 years…
From insideHPC
@HPCpodcast: Paul Messina and the Journey to Exascale
From the early days of supercomputing through the success of exascale supercomputing, few HPC luminaries have played as important and integral leadership role in HPC as Dr. Paul Messina. So as we observe Exascale Day today, we…
From insideHPC
Exascale Day 2023: The Exascale Computing Era Is Here.
With the delivery of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) first exascale system, Frontier, in 2022, and the upcoming deployment of Aurora and El Capitan systems by next year, researchers will have the most sophisticated computational…
From insideHPC
D-Wave Quantum: QPU Improves Cellphone Network Transmission
PALO ALTO, Calif., BURNABY, B.C. — October 18, 2023 — D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS) today launched a new open-source demonstration highlighting how its Advantage annealing quantum computing system can be used to tackle wireless…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
The More You Know The More You Expect
One thing that happens when you know who to write computer code is that you know how hard or easy some things are. If you’re even the least OCD some things that are minor, and even unnoticed to many, may bother you a little.
From Geeking with Greg
Book excerpt: Mark as spam, the long fight to keep emails and texts useful
(This is an excerpt from my book. Please let me know if you like it and want more.)
The first email on the internet was sent in 1971. Back then, the internet was a small place used only by a few geeky researchers affiliated…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Council Members Publish White Paper on Algorithmic Robustness
CCC Council Members David Jensen (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Brian LaMacchia (Farcaster Consulting Group, LLC), Ufuk Topcu (University of Texas Austin), and Pamela Wisniewski (Vanderbilt University), wrote a white…
From insideHPC
Argonne Deploys New Groq System to ALCF AI Testbed, Providing AI Accelerator Access to Researchers Globally
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA and LEMONT, IL, October 17, 2023 — Groq, an artificial intelligence (AI) solutions company, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Argonne National Laboratory announced today that Groq hardware is now available…
From insideHPC
Building a Capable Computing Ecosystem for Exascale and Beyond
The exascale computing era is here. With the delivery of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) first exascale system, Frontier, in 2022, and the upcoming deployment of Aurora and El Capitan systems by next year, researchers…
From insideHPC
Exascale Drives Industry Innovation for a Better Future
“Exascale is a massive accelerator for technology, productivity, engineering, and science.” Outside the high-performance computing (HPC) community, “exascale” may seem more like fodder for science fiction than a powerful tool…
From insideHPC
ALPINE/zfp Addresses Analysis, Visualization and Data Reduction Needs for Exascale Science Applications
With the advent of the exascale supercomputing era, computational scientists can run simulations at higher resolutions, add more detailed physical phenomena, increase the size of the physical problems, and couple multiple codes…
From insideHPC
Flare Gas Data Center Company Crusoe Picks HPE for Green GenAI
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced its HPE Cray supercomputers were selected by Crusoe, a builder of modular data centers, to power new cloud services designed to drive sustainable computing for generative…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Fairness and Sampling
A talk by Sruthi Gorantla while visiting Georgia Tech Sruthi Gorantla is a fourth-year PhD candidate in computer science at the Indian Institute of Science and Technology in Bangalore. Her research on computational fairness is…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Randomness in programming (with Go code)
Computer software is typically deterministic on paper: if you run twice the same program with the same inputs, you should get the same outputs. In practice, the complexity of modern computing makes it unlikely that you couldContinue…
From insideHPC
DOE Announces 2024 ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge, Pre-proposals Due Nov. 13
Oct. 16, 2023 — The ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) is an allocation program for projects of interest to the Department of Energy (DOE), with an emphasis on high-risk, high-payoff scientific campaigns enabled via high…
From insideHPC
Two Columbia Univ. Researchers Awarded John von Neumann Theory Prize
BALTIMORE, Oct. 16, 2023 – The 2023 John von Neumann Theory Prize, awarded by INFORMS, is bestowed to Christos H. Papadimitriou and Mihalis Yannakakis for their significant contributions to the field of operations research and…
From insideHPC
DOE Selects JLab to Be High Performance Data Facility Lead
Oct. 16, 2023 — Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the selection of the High Performance Data Facility (HPDF) hub, which will create a new scientific user facility specializing in advanced infrastructure for…
From insideHPC
Texas Tech HPC Center Chooses CIQ for HPC Infrastructure
RENO, Nev.—October 16, 2023—CIQ, the company building software infrastructure for enterprises running performance-intensive workloads atop the Rocky Linux enterprise Linux distribution, has published today a story that shows
…
From BLOG@CACM
The Israeli Social Protest from a Data Science Perspective: Part One
The challenge of data.
From Geeking with Greg
Cory Doctorow on enshittification
Another good piece by Cory on enshittification, with details about Facebook, some on how A/B testing optimizes for enshittification, and updated with how Musk's Twitter is impatiently racing to enshittify. An excerpt from Cory's…
From insideHPC
Phison Introduces Signal Conditioner IC Products, Expands PCIe 5.0 Ecosystem
SAN JOSE – October 16, 2023 – Phison Electronics (8299 TT), a NAND controllers and storage company, announced that the company has expanded its portfolio of PCIe 5.0 high-speed transmission solutions with PCIe 5.0, CXL 2.0 compatible…
From Schneier on Security
Coin Flips Are Biased
Experimental result:
Many people have flipped coins but few have stopped to ponder the statistical and physical intricacies of the process. In a preregistered study we collected 350,757 coin flips to test the counterintuitive…From insideHPC
Federated GPU Infrastructure for AI Workflows
[Sponsored Guest Article] With the explosion of use cases such as Generative AI and ML Ops driving tremendous demand for the most advanced GPUs and accelerated computing platforms, there’s never been a better time to explore…
From Computational Complexity
Paper is a tech-free way to preserve writing. Is there a tech-free way to preserve sound (e.g., music)
I blogged about ACM going mostly paper-free, and had some PROS and CONS about paper-free, in this blog here. One of my many astute readers named Abigail pointed out that paper does not go obsolete: we can still read books written…
From insideHPC
E4 Computer Engineering Partners with NVIDIA for Launch of Grace Hopper Superchips in Italy
Scandiano, RE (Italy), October 12, 2023 – E4 Computer Engineering announced a partnership with NVIDIA for the Italian launch of NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchip, the HBM3e processor for HPC and AI. The new Grace Hopper platform
…
From The Noisy Channel
Critical Thinking and Generative AI
Critical Reasoning and Generative AI
One of the formative experiences in my mathematics education was a time I struggled to compute an integral in a calculus class. After sweating over it and scribbling for several minutes, Ivolume…From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Possible Impossibilities and Impossible Possibilities
A livestreamed talk by Yejin Choi at TTIC on Monday 10/16, 11:30am CT MacArthur Foundation source Yejin Choi is a professor and a MacArthur Fellow at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: On Squid Intelligence
Article about squid intelligence.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
From insideHPC
NTT Reports Increase in Optical Transmission Capacity, Reduced Power Consumption
Tokyo – Oct. 12, 2023 – NTT Corporation (NTT) said it successfully demonstrated technology that expands transmission capacity while reducing energy use by 67 percent in optical communications platforms; specifically, the C band…
From Geeking with Greg
To stop disinformation, stop astroturf
(this is a version of an excerpt from my book, if you like it please let me know)
There's a lot of discussion of removing disinformation as censorship lately. I think this gets the problem wrong. The problem is using many accounts…