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 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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Microsoft Extreme Computing Group (XCG)
The Extreme Computing Group (XCG) at Microsoft was formed to develop radical new approaches to ultrascale and high-performance computing hardware and software. The group’s research activities include work in computer security, cryptography, operating system design, parallel programming models, cloud software, data center architectures, specialty hardware accelerators and quantum computing.
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HPC: Making a Small Fortune
There is an old joke in the high-performance computing community that begins with a question, “How do you make a small fortune in high-performance computing?” There are several variations on the joke, but they all end with the same punch line, “Start with a large fortune and ship at least one generation of product. You…
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Nothing Left But the Smile …
Like the Cheshire Cat in Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, it seems increasingly clear that in the high-performance, low latency interconnection network space, we will be left with nothing but the smile. Simply put, the last remaining non-commodity component of HPC clusters – the high-performance interconnect – is in grave danger, due to the global economic…
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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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On Getting The “Right” Answer
The parallel application contains millions of lines of code, combining multiple models of physical, engineering, biological, social and/or economic processes, operating over temporal and spatial scales that span ten orders of magnitude. What is the probability that any execution of this code produces the “right” answer? Does a “right” answer even exist? If so, how…