Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Category: Extreme Computing
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Surrounded By Opportunities
Our run of good luck is over. We need new, integrated design methodologies and rich collaborations that consider end-to-end design and capability. In many ways, this is a return to the past.
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Why We Compute
Why do we, as researchers and practitioners, have this deep and abiding love of computing? Why do we compute? I suspect it is a deeper, more primal yearning, one that underlies all of science and engineering and that unites us in a common cause. It is the insatiable desire to know and understand. From terascale…
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Nothing Lasts Forever
No exponential continues forever, at least outside the mathematics textbooks. All technology-based advances are ultimately limited by something, usually some physical or economic limit. Innovation then shifts to other metrics, against which advances can be measured and valued. Computing is no exception.
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Battling Evil: Dark Silicon
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…
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Microsoft/NSF Cloud Research Partnership
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…
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Goldilocks, Porridge and Science: Getting It Right
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.