Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Category: Software
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On Licking the Cookies
Licking the cookies refers to claiming action or skill in an area but in a way that prevents anything from happening. It is intended to conjure an image of a cookie plate, where one licks the cookies then returns them to the plate, rendering them inedible by all.
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Information Privacy: Changing Norms and Expectations
That picture of you at a family reunion, squinting into the sun, can rarely be delimited by a physical location. Instead, information flows freely and often globally. We need to rethink our notions of information privacy, moving beyond concepts rooted primarily in person and place, and considering logical privacy.
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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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Intellectual Amplification via Computing
As the recent performance of IBM’s Watson system on the game show Jeopardy! Illustrated, the combination of large-scale data, rich algorithm suites and powerful computing is opening new vistas. Vannevar Bush’s 1940s vision of a Memex, a device capable of storing, indexing and retrieving data from a broad knowledge base, is now within our reach.
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HPC and the Excluded Middle
Betwixt and between ubiquitous consumer software and the ethereal realm of ultra-high-performance computing, lies the excluded middle, the world of day-to-day computational science problems. This “no man’s land” lacks both the ready availability of application software suitable for solving problems in a host of domains – advanced manufacturing, materials analysis, and biomedical assessment – and…