Christopher Johnson, Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah, talks in a video of the SC Conference about how HPC is transforming the treatment of epilepsy. Read further...

The Irish Times interviews Theo Lynn and Philip Healy of Cork-based company Rendicity about their new HPC in the Cloud service for rendering. They told to the Times: “Our service is more secure, lower cost, more convenient and doesn’t require the deep IT knowledge of existing HPC/HPC in the cloud solutions. It’s an on-demand, drag-and-drop solution and offers users access to a range of public cloud service providers. This provides near-infinite state-of-the-art computing power at real-time industry pricing using a utility billing model. This access will be attractive to SMEs but also to existing high-volume users who often hit capacity issues, especially when deadlines are looming.” Read further...

The HLRS supercomputing centre in Stuttgart celebrated the topping out ceremony for his new teaching and trainings centre. In addition to the usual topping out motto, Mrs. Sybille Müller, Head of the University Construction Authority and Prof. Michael Resch, Director of HLRS, gave the official speeches. By building up this centre, HLRS allowes the integration of science, development, production, and teaching for the further education of his users around the world. Read further...

In a speech at the joint German/French Digital Science in Paris, Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission said supercomputers are important, for instance for early prediction of heavy storms and hurricanes, which can save lives. He reconfirmed Europe's ambition to be a in the top 3 of High-Performance Computing regions in the world in 2020. Also the proposed European Science Cloud was mentioned as an important initiative. Read further...

The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) asked the newly appointed ELIXIR UK Compute Coordinator Dr. Timothy Stitt about the European infrastructure for biological information, supporting life science research and its translation to society, and how his supercomputing expertise and TGAC will help accelerate the big data initiative. ELIXIR's primary objective is to build a sustainable European infrastructure for biological information, supporting life science research and its application to medicine, agriculture, bioindustries and society. Tim Stitt will also be focused on marshalling expertise from the UK HPC community towards the ELIXIR project, as well as looking to incorporate computing infrastructures from across Europe. Read further...

Earlier this month, the EoCoE (Energy Oriented Center of Excellence) project was officially launched. EoCoE will use the prodigious potential offered by the ever-growing computing infrastructure to foster and accelerate the European transition to a reliable and low carbon energy supply. With a total budget of 5.5 M€, EoCoE will assist the energy transition via targeted support to four carbon-free energy pillars: Meteorology, Materials, Water and Fusion, each with a heavy reliance on numerical modelling. These four pillars will be anchored within a strong transversal multidisciplinary basis providing high-end expertise in Applied Mathematics and HPC. EoCoE, led by Maison de la Simulation (France), is structured around a Franco-German hub (Maison de la Simulation - Jülich Research Centre) coordinating a pan-European network, gathering a total of 8 countries and 23 teams. Its partners are strongly engaged in both the HPC and energy fields. Read further...