Ian Foster, former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member and Professor at the University of Chicago and Division Director at Argonne National Laboratory, was just named the 2022 Ken Kennedy award recipient. Presented by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society (IEEE-CS) the Ken Kennedy Award is an annual honor recognizing contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and community service or mentoring contributions. You can see past award winners here. Foster is recognized for his substantial contributions in accelerating scientific discovery in computational science by establishing innovative, newfangled applications of distributed computing both within supercomputers and over networks. His work […]

Last year the IEEE announced the creation of the IEEE Frances E Allen medal, recognizing the contributions of Frances “Fran” E. Allen as an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers. Allen spent her entire career at IBM, beginning in 1957 by teaching new employees the fundamentals of Fortran and continuing until her retirement in 2002. From 1980 to 1995, Allen led IBM’s work in the developing parallel computing area, and helped to develop software for the IBM Blue Gene project. Among her many awards, Allen was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1987, she became the first female IBM Fellow in 1989, and in 2006 became […]

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has released its 2020 list of newly elevated fellows. The IEEE Grade of Fellow is given to a IEEE member with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest by the Board of Directors. This year’s list features a number of impressive computer scientists, including Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Ian Foster (Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago), “for contributions to grid computing and data transport infrastructures.” Ian has been on the CCC Council since 2018 and is a member of the Systems and Architecture Task Force. Congratulations to all the recipients for their accomplishments, including CRA Board Members Mary Hall […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently released the Thermodynamic Computing workshop report, the output of the CCC’s January 2019 visioning workshop of the same name. The workshop was organized by Tom Conte (Georgia Tech), Erik DeBenedictis (former Sandia National Laboratories), Natesh Ganesh (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Todd Hylton (UC San Diego), Susanne Still (University of Hawaii), John Paul Strachan (Hewlett Packard Lab HPE), R. Stanley Williams (Texas A&M). It brought together physical theorists, electrical and computer engineers, electronic/ionic device researchers, and theoretical biologists to explore a novel idea: computing as an open thermodynamic system. The report begins by explaining the need for thermodynamic computers: with the end of Moore’s Law and Dennard […]

The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) recently hosted a visioning workshop on Thermodynamic Computing in Honolulu, Hawaii in order to establish a community of like-minded visionaries; craft a statement of research needs; and summarize the current state of understanding within this new area of computing. The premise behind thermodynamic computing is that striving for thermodynamic efficiency is not only highly desirable in hardware components, but may also be used as an embedded capability in the creation of algorithms. Can dissipated heat be used to trigger adaptation/restructuring of (parts of) the functioning hardware, thus allowing hardware to evolve increasingly efficient computing strategies? Recent theoretical developments in non-equilibrium thermodynamics suggest that it drives […]

Between December 2016 and August 2017, at least 24 employees of the U.S Embassy in Cuba heard high-pitched sounds and suffered injuries thought to be related to the noise. Many speculated that the high-pitched sounds were some high-frequency sonic weapon. When Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member, Kevin Fu from the University of Michigan, looked at the spectral plot of the clip he saw some unusual ripples. Fu worked with his collaborator, Wenyuan Xu, a professor at Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou, China, and her Ph.D. student Chen Yan, and through a series of simulations, saw that an effect known as intermodulation distortion could have produced the sound. Intermodulation distortion occurs when […]