Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Category: Current Affairs
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Small Planet, Large Planet
I still dream of the suborbital transport that is described so cavilierly in science fiction novels. A semi-ballistic suborbital flight could cross the Atlantic in less than an hour.
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America COMPETES Passage
My Microsoft colleague, Elizabeth Grossman, has posted a thoughtful essay on today’s passage of America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science (COMPETES) Reauthorization Act of 2010 by the U.S. Congress.
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2010 Cray and Fernbach Awards
This year, I again had had the honor and privilege to chair the selection committee for the IEEE Seymour Cray and Sidney Fernbach awards, both of which were presented at SC10 in New Orleans. These eponymously named awards recognize truly outstanding contributions to high-performance computing, in honor of two early leaders of our field.
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Social Leadership: Empty Seats at the Table
In the Information Age, computing researchers are well placed to be bilingual, translating computing technology trends and capabilities into the language understood by policy makers and other influentials, and, in turn, relating policy desires to other researchers. However, I am repeatedly struck by the relatively small number of computing researchers who are engaged in the…
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A Few Thoughts on Clouds, Science and SC10
On the Microsoft blog, I posted a few thoughts on SC10, the rise of clouds and the power of simplicity in high-performance computing. There is also a video of my smiling face expounding on this topic.
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The Zeros Matter: Bigger Is Different
Not that long ago, a megabyte was a lot of storage, whether primary or secondary. Not long ago supercomputers were defined by the number of megaflops they achieved. Times change. Bigger is not just bigger, bigger is different. Quantitative change begets qualitative change.