Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Category: Technology
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The Ghosts of Holiday Shopping: Past, Present and Future
In many parts of the western world, the frenzy of holiday shopping has reached its crescendo. In the U.S., it began with Black Friday, the day immediately after U.S. Thanksgiving. Not only is holiday shopping a major component of retail profits, financial analysts also use such consumer spending as a barometer of possible economic recovery.…
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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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SC09 Reflections
The SC09 conference set an attendance record this year – roughly 10,000 attendees at the combined conference and tradeshow – despite the economic malaise of the technology industry and the global economy. One suspects the strong resilience of the conference may be due in part to substantial government investments in very high-performance computing (HPC).
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Consilience: Innovation Enabler
In this era of hyper-specialization, it is important to remember the combined power of generality and specialization, lest we render true the old joke that education teaches one more and more about less and less until finally one knows everything about nothing and is eligible for a Ph.D. After all, Ph.D. is an abbreviation for…
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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.
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Two, Five, Ten …
We tend to forget the real reason the Cray-1 was so successful. It was not the innovative vector architecture and memory system, nor was it the plethora of great software. Despite our love of self-similarity, orders of magnitude really matter. It’s worth remembering this as we contemplate future exascale computing system designs and digest the…