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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In Vivo, In Vitro, In Silico
The wide dynamic range of temporal and spatial scales of systems biology models, from picosecond first principles molecular dynamics to the geological timescales of environmental shifts, is a full employment act for computational scientists. In many ways, we are attempting to come full circle, from in vivo observations to in vitro experiments to holistic, in…
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Modeling the World
Today, Microsoft publicly launched a new technical computing vision, Modeling the World. The web site contains vignettes about computing from a variety of technical computing leaders, both inside Microsoft and across the broader community.
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Jaron Lanier: Time’s Thinker
Time magazine annually publishes a list of its 100 Most Influential People in the World. This year, my Microsoft XCG colleague, Jaron Lanier, was named to this list in the thinker category.
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Don’t Be A WIMP!
It is time move beyond graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and embrace the brave new world of natural user interfaces (NUIs). As the name suggests, a NUI relies on and exploits the kinds of interactions humans use to interact with their peers, including speech, vision and gesture, as well as mood and social context.
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Technology Strategy and Policy
It seems axiomatic that technology strategy must include – drumroll please – both technology and strategy. It is all about the right ideas at the right times. We live in a world of exponential technology change, and understanding when quantitative technical change begets qualitative strategic and policy change is the essence of innovation.
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Serial Dismay, Parallel Excitement
Cloud services now operate on the largest computing systems we have ever built on this planet, with service reliability expectations far higher than what we demand from scientific applications. Thus, I also believe there are lessons from cloud computing that are potentially applicable to computational science applications.