Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Category: News and Events
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Cray and Fernbach Awards Redux
I am delighted that the 2009 Seymour Cray Award will be presented to Kenichi “Ken” Miura and that Roberto Car and Michele Parrinello are joint recipients of the 2009 Sidney Fernbach Award. I look forward to presenting the awards at SC09.
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I Could Smell the Smoke
Why didn’t we leave a high value target area, you might ask? The Washington Metro was closed, taxis were non-existent, there was a security cordon around the area, and it was too far to walk.
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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…
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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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Cray and Fernbach Awards
This year, I have the honor and privilege to chair the selection committee for the Seymour Cray and Sidney Fernbach awards, both of which will be presented at SC09 in Portland, Oregon. The deadline for submitting nominations is July 1, 2009. I encourage you to think about our colleagues who have made major contributions to…