Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Category: Innovation
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Luck Is a Fickle Friend
As an enterprising young faculty member, I asked Professor Slotnick if he had any words of wisdom to offer a young parallel computing researcher, based on his experience with ILLIAC IV. He simply said, “Choose your risks carefully.”
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Egg Baskets, Lambdas and Geo-resilience
The reason we strive to protect data centers is obvious, their failure often has catastrophic business implications. Without doubt, though, some workloads are less affected by failure than others. If your web search for basket weaving supplies times out, you are probably content to retry the query a few seconds later. If your attempt to…
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Impact, Not Indicators or Artifacts
N.B. I also write for the Communications of the ACM (CACM). The following essay recently appeared on the CACM blog. Publish and/or perish; proposals and reports; research, teaching and service: these are the “death and taxes” equivalents for life in major research universities. Success — or at least promotion and tenure – is normally measured…
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Bridging Cultures for Collaboration
One group was dressed in t-shirts, shorts and sandals and would have blended nicely with the nearby beachgoers. The second group was dressed in conservative business suits that would not have drawn a second glance in the corporate world. Imagine my surprise when I saw members of both groups entering the building where I was…
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That’s One Small Step for {a} Man …
On Sunday afternoon, July 20, 1969, I rode my AMF Roadmaster bicycle to the local Gulf gas station and asked for their cardboard model of the Apollo Lunar Module. I pedaled home in time to watch the Apollo 11 lunar landing later that afternoon, holding the cardboard model of the LEM in my hands. That…
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The Fallacy of Rankings
The latest, semi-annual Top 500 ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers will be revealed at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in June. Last year, two systems broke the petascale barrier using a GPU/game accelerator processor cluster (LANL’s Roadrunner) and a cluster of commodity microprocessors (ORNL’s Jaguar). As always, we can expect the latest announcement to…