From the National Academies: The Future of Computing Performance: Game Over or Next Level?. A nice, thorough explanation of the current challenges in computing performance, ranging from transistor-level power vs. speed problems, up to how to program the circuits we’re likely to end up with. Also includes a bonus reprint of two classic papers, Gordon [...]

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An interesting post about how to evaluate a research idea. Basically, try to think about the bounds: what’s the maximum impact? Includes some good rules of thumb, like pay attention to physical constraints like the speed of light :) Embedded in Academia : Squeezing a CS Research Idea.

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Volatile and Decentralized: The death of Intel Labs and what it means for industrial research. Matt Welsh (ex Harvard Professor, now at Google) on the phasing out of Intel’s “Lablets”, which were a new kind of company-supported research center that was co-located with major universities. His blog post title notwithstanding, this doesn’t seem to be [...]

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I’ve always liked the programming-languages community website Lambda the Ultimate, and recently I went looking for something similar for the High-Performance Computing community. I didn’t find exactly that*, but I did find a few great resources for news about HPC and computing research policy: HPCWire is a well-known news source for HPC. It has daily [...]

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The UT-Austin TRIPS project will unveil their processor next Monday, and I take a look at what it looks like.

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If you spend a lot of time reading articles and research papers that you get in PDF form, then you might be interested in the latest app from the folks who brought you BibDesk. If you already use BibDesk, then you certainly want to take a look. Even though we keep our research papers stored [...]

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This is really cool: Fran Allen, a founder of the field of program optimization and compiler analysis, will be the first woman to receive the Turing Award. More info, including a description of her accomplishments, is at the ACM press release.

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For those few readers who are interested in High Performance Computing and might be going to this year’s Supercomputing conference in Tampa, my advisor Allan Snavely and Jeremy Kepner from Lincoln Labs are putting on a BOF with an intriguing subject: “Is 99% Utilization of a Supercomputer a Good Thing?” It’ll be on Thursday Nov. [...]

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Over at macresearch.org, they’ve posted a nice review of BibDesk. One quote: “If you use Latex search no more, this is a killer app.” Kudos to Adam and Christiaan. I see an increasing number of Macs at research meetings I go to, and I usually can’t help but peek on their dock to look for [...]

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Coverity, the company formed by the people behind the Stanford MC Checker, has started posting regular reports from their analysis tools on prominent open-source projects at scan.coverity.com. I found out about this through an email from the Coverity CTO on the GCC mailing list, and it seems to have been received with some moderate enthusiasm. [...]

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