Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Category: Innovation
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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…
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NITRD Reauthorization: Enabling the Future
As a computing researcher, as chair of the Computing Research Association (CRA), and as a former member of the President’s IT Advisory Committee and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), I have spoken and written repeatedly about the state of computing research in the United States, the importance of long-term, strategic…
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Escaping from Flatland
As a community, we have grudgingly and guardedly recognized the need for multicore processors. However, we are still clinging tenaciously to our dual in-line memory module (DIMM), two-dimensional packaging and double data rate (DDR) memory designs. We need a visitor from the third dimension, preaching the gospel of chip stacking to the denizens of chip…
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Seeding The Clouds
I came to Microsoft to lead a new research initiative in cloud computing, one that complements our production data center infrastructure and our nascent Azure cloud software platform. You can read the press release and the web site for the official story. What follows is my personal perspective.
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A Few Thoughts on the Stimulus Package
Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, recently spoke to the U.S. House Democratic Caucus Retreat. Although you can read the complete speech, I would like to highlight a few excerpts that emphasize Microsoft’s strong support for innovation and the importance of continued investment in basic research.
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Publication Quarks
Over the past thirty years, I have accumulated the common artifact of an academic research career – bookshelves overflowing with research journals and conference proceedings. Each time I pull an old and yellowing volume from my shelves, it is simultaneously nostalgic and thought provoking to read a few randomly selected articles. Not only does this…