At the request of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Research Council (NRC) is undertaking a project entitled “Deterring Cyberattacks: Informing Strategies and Developing Options for U.S. Policy. ” The project is aimed at fostering a broad, multidisciplinary examination of strategies for deterring cyberattacks on the United States and the possible utility of these strategies for the U.S. government.  As part of this project, the responsible committee is issuing a call for papers that address questions relevant to this broad topic. To stimulate work in this area, the NRC is offering one or more monetary prizes for excellent contributed papers that address one or more of […]

A CACM “Viewpoints” column by Cameron Wilson (ACM) and Peter Harsha (CRA), inspired by the Transition Team white papers commissioned by the Computing Community Consortium. “While the history of computing-related contributions to shaping our world is a compelling topic, future opportunities in computing—where the field might go and what problems it might tackle—are perhaps even more compelling. Whether it’s creating the future of networking, revolutionizing transportation, delivering personalized education, enabling the smart grid, empowering the developing world, improving health care, or driving advances in all fields of science and engineering—all national priorities—computing has key contributions to make and key roles to play.” Read the full article here.

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 […]