ISGTW runs an interview with Aline Vidotto about her search for extraterrestrial life using HPC clusters and supercomputers. Aline Vidotto is scientific collaborator at the Observatoire de Genève in Switzerland. Her recent study harnesses supercomputers to find out how to tune our radio dials to listen in on other planets. Vidotto has been studying interstellar environments for a while now, focusing on the interplanetary atmosphere surrounding so-called hot-Jupiter exoplanets since 2009. Similar in size to our Jupiter, these exoplanets orbit their star up to 20 times as closely as Earth orbits the sun, and are considered ‘hot’ due to the extra irradiation they receive. For her most recent study, she divided the computational load between the Darwin cluster (part of the DiRAC network) at the University of Cambridge (UK) and the Piz Daint at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center. Read further...

At a meeting of the Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (ASCAC) of the Department of Energy (DoE) on July 27, the status of the US exascale initiative was reviewed. Steve Binkley Associate Director, DOE Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, concluded in his presentation that the next generation of advancements will require Extreme Scale Computing of 100-1,000X capabilities of today's computers with a similar physical size and power footprint. This poses significant challenges for power consumption, high parallelism, reliability. Extreme Scale Computing cannot be achieved by a "business-as-usual", evolutionary approach. Hence it is necessary to initiate partnerships with U.S. computer vendors to perform the required engineering, research and development for system architectures for capable exascale computing. Exascale systems will be based on marketable technology; it will be not a "one off" system. They must be productive systems, usable by scientists and engineers. Read further...

Horizion Magazine runs an article on the European Science Cloud. Europe’s researchers have access to super-fast networks, common data storage facilities, and shared HPC and supercomputing resources. The challenge now is to link them all together into a single science cloud. Until the European science cloud is up and running, jockeying between Europe’s e-infrastructures and duplication of services are costing unnecessary money. Damien Lecarpentier, project director of the big data organisation EUDAT told Horizon Magazine he is optimistic about achieving the European science cloud. "I think, once we have the right people around the table, it shouldn’t take too long," he said. "I would say you should be able to do it in a year or two." Read further...