As part of CCC’s ongoing support of visioning workshops, Josep Torrellas (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Mark Oskin (University of Washington) co-organized the second workshop in a series on Advancing Computer Architecture Research. This workshop — Laying a New Foundation for Information Technology: Computer Architecture for 2025 and Beyond — was held on the campus of the University of Washington on September 20-21, 2010. Computer Architecture Research as a Foundation for IT The degree to which information technology has impacted society cannot be understated, and computer architecture has played a foundational role in enabling that revolution. Computer architecture has been the engine for translating Moore’s Law technology improvements into […]

Thirty researchers met August 11-13 to discuss the future of interactive systems. This workshop was sponsored by the Computing Community Consortium, ACM/SIGCHI and Canada’s GRAND initiative. The interactive systems architecture is the foundation of what is feasible when people interact with computing technologies. An interactive architecture creates an ecosystem within which diverse user experiences can be developed. UNIX introduced the idea that software modules could be interactively “piped” together. X-Windows laid the foundation of distributed interaction. The Macintosh put graphical interaction in the hands of the masses and the Web distributed interaction around the world. The researchers gathered at this workshop in Jackson, WY, envision a world where information and […]

Dr. Ken Gabriel, the deputy director of DARPA, delivered a plenary address at CRA’s biannual Snowbird Conference on Monday morning — one day short of the one-year anniversary of the arrival of DARPA’s new leadership, including new DARPA director Dr. Regina Dugan. Gabriel spoke about DARPA’s incredible transformation over the past 12 months, including its renewed commitment to academic research. Specifically, Gabriel started by highlighting five key changes that have occurred at DARPA in the past year: – “Go/no-go” is gone. – Contracting has been simplified. The process is as clear, simple, and fast as the law allows. – More realistic conflict of interest rules have been applied to people […]

The Computing Community Consortium recently prepared a white paper titled, “Information Technology Research Challenges for Healthcare: From Discovery to Delivery,” as a follow-on to the Discovery and Innovation in Health IT Workshop that the CCC co-sponsored with various Federal agencies in October 2009. The paper describes basic research opportunities that can catalyze transformations in healthcare — an enterprise that costs U.S. taxpayers $2.3 trillion (yes, that’s trillion!) each year but, by all accounts, is poorly equipped to handle the evolving needs of patients and providers. A multitude of factors — poor diet habits, stressful lifestyles, aging populations, etc. — is causing chronic diseases like cancer and arthritis to soar, and […]

In the area of Computing Architectures there are some well known discontinuity-inducing trends staring us in the face. The entire computing community is planning for multi-core processors, a necessary order of magnitude(s) increase in the performance/power ratio, ‘failure is an option’ with the advent of millions of cores … and one of the holy grails, easier paralleling programming at scale. Adapting to these trends and necessities is tough and will require non-linear thinking, not just extrapolations of current trends. Statement like this are, of course, motherhood and apple pie. Computing architecture researchers have faced all of these challenges for years and there are numerous projects forging into the future to […]

The Free/Open Source Software workshop wrapped up today.  Discussion focused on a number of topics, including: – Translation into other domains of software – Software engineering practice – Collaboration issues in FOSS – Learning and education challenges/opportunities – Evolution of products, projects, practices and processes – Research infrastructures A report from the workshop will be developed in the coming weeks and posted on the CCC Web site. John L. King, CCC Council Liaison