Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience


When any new technology appears, there is a great temptation to see it through the lens of the old, either in nomenclature or behavior. As with previous HPC technology transitions, clouds bring a set of technical and cultural challenges , but I believe we are moving down the path of successful adoption.

That picture of you at a family reunion, squinting into the sun, can rarely be delimited by a physical location. Instead, information flows freely and often globally. We need to rethink our notions of information privacy, moving beyond concepts rooted primarily in person and place, and considering logical privacy.

Dark silicon, the very phrase sounds ominious and it is, for I believe it will profoundly reshape how we think about computing in the next decade. We soon will have (and in many cases already do have) chips with more transistors than can be concurrently activated. The practical implication is that most of the chip…

Today, Microsoft and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the latest awardees for the joint Microsoft-NSF research partnership in cloud computing. All of the award recipients were selected via NSF’s rigorous peer review process, which emphasized the scientific merit of the proposed work. The Microsoft/NSF partnership is but one part of a broader international…

It is now incumbent upon us to rethink how we facilitate discovery and innovation in this brave new world of large data, for practitioners of both small and large science. Simply put, we must reconsider how we fund, construct, manage and operate scientific data repositories.

This week, I had the opportunity to speak at the Digital, Life, Design (DLD) conference in Munich. I posted a few thoughts on the future of experiences over on the Microsoft blog.