In a guest blog "Effervescent Clouds: Nimble Computing Infrastructure" on the HPC in the Cloud project CloudLightning, Daniel Reed explains what Cloud computing is, or could be. "What's a cloud? It's an elastic, on-demand, often geo-distributed, frequently virtualized, flexible hardware, software and services infrastructure that powers the 21st century knowledge economy. And that is really important right now." Got it? Read further...

Google, in collaboration with the Aspuru-Guzik group at Harvard and researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, UC Santa Barbara, Tufts University and University College London, has performed the first completely scalable quantum simulation of a molecule. The experimental results are detailed in the paper "Scalable Quantum Simulation of Molecular Energies", which recently appeared in Physical Review X. On the Google blog is a longer explanation of the experiment. Read further...

Jetsstream is the science cloud in the US. Jetstream partners announced the September 1 date for the system to go into full operation at the XSEDE16 Conference in Miami, USA, this week. Indiana University’s Pervasive Technology Institute is the lead institution on the five-year, $11 million NSF (National Science Foundation) grant to create, implement and operate Jetstream. In Europe a similar initiative, called the European Open Science Cloud is underway. Read further...