Read this if you want to understand how to shape our technological future and reinvigorate democracy along the way. -- Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO of Netflix __________ A forward-thinking manifesto from three Stanford professors which reveals how big tech's obsession with optimization and efficiency has sacrificed fundamental human values and outlines steps we can take to change course, renew our democracy, and save ourselves. __________ In no more than the blink of an eye, a naive optimism about technology's liberating potential has given way to a dystopian obsession with biased algorithms, surveillance capitalism, and job-displacing robots. Yet too few of us see any alternative to accepting the onward march of technology. We have simply accepted a technological future designed for us by technologists, the venture capitalists who fund them, and the politicians who give them free rein. It doesn't need to be this way. System Error exposes the root of our current predicament: how big tech's relentless focus on optimization is driving a future that reinforces discrimination, erodes privacy, displaces workers, and pollutes the information we get. Armed with an understanding of how technologists think and exercise their power, three Stanford professors - a philosopher working at the intersection of tech and ethics, a political scientist who served under Obama, and the director of the undergraduate Computer Science program at Stanford (also an early Google engineer) - reveal how we can hold that power to account. As the dominance of big tech becomes an explosive societal conundrum, they share their provocative insights and concrete solutions to help everyone understand what is happening, what is at stake, and what we can do to control technology instead of letting it control us.

This uniquely comprehensive book brings together the vast amount of technical, economic, and political information and the analyses of supercomputing that have hitherto been buried in the frequently inaccessible "gray literature." Seventy-nine distinguished participants in the second Frontiers of Supercomputing conference offer perceptive and often controversial views on the emerging computing environment in the United States. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

This uniquely comprehensive book brings together the vast amount of technical, economic, and political information and the analyses of supercomputing that have hitherto been buried in the frequently inaccessible "gray literature." Seventy-nine distinguished participants in the second Frontiers of Supercomputing conference offer perceptive and often controversial views on the emerging computing environment in the United States. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Also Available as an eBook

We're all familiar with computers and the concept of doing work via these silicon-chip-driven modern wonders. The technological advances have been stunning: a typical handheld computing device today has more computing power than a 1960s computer that took up an entire room. In today's world, computing size is inversely proportional to computer speed: The smaller the computer, the faster it works. With computing speed just about doubling every eighteen months, today's processing power is more than 100 million times that of a computer in 1970.

What does the future hold for computers and their ever-growing power? In Scientific American's UNDERSTANDING SUPERCOMPUTING, you'll discover what constitutes a "supercomputer," how supercomputers function, and how you can make your own computer into a super machine (it's a matter of networking). From a chess computer that can beat the world's greatest human player to machines that control satellite communications, find out what tomorrow holds in store for supercomputers in terms of hardware, software, and everyday applications.

High Performance Computing (HPC) is the area of supercomputers, the fastest and best systems of their time. Most supercomputers are used to solve scientific problems, be it weather forecasting, simulation of car crashes or wind tunnels, modeling of proteins in bio-chemical research, or for simulation of atom-bomb tests. The book deals with systems that are in practical use for such application areas. In the first part, the history of supercomputers is described, and it is shown which properties and trends will remain in the future. The second part describes all aspects of High Performance Computing, from chip technology over computer and cluster architecture, up to software, algorithms, and applications. The third part explores the practice of HPC planning: system selection, benchmarks, acceptance tests, and implementation of HPC environments. Finally, the book closes with an outlook on current trends and visions like Grid Computing.