Intel Corporation announced that Intel executives Diane Bryant, Murthy Renduchintala and Stacy Smith have been promoted to Group Presidents and Renduchintala has been appointed chief engineering officer. Bryant has been named Group President of the Data Center Group (DCG). She has been leading DCG since 2012 and is responsible for the group's P&L, strategy and product development. The organisation consists of the technology for server, storage and network infrastructure to serve the cloud service providers, communications service providers, enterprise and government organisations. She joined Intel in 1985. Read further...

Performance comparisons are always tricky to get exactly right, says Adrian Jackson in his EPCC blog "Apple vs oranges: performance comparisons". Some careful thought is needed when doing anything other than comparing two different versions of the same application on the same hardware with the same test case, he says. Even then, it's worth thinking about what performance you are really interested in. Usually it is actually time to solution rather than scaling or some other metric like that. He uses some detailed illustrations on the ARCHER supercomputer. Read further...

In a Cray blog post John Levesque describes the Cray Centres of Excellence and how they help in promoting HPC. The success of the first centre at ORNL, resulted in the creation of Centres in Edinburgh, Scotland, and in Seoul, South Korea. Those were joined by several centres in the USA: at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in Berkeley, California, and at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Centres of Excelence at research labs such as these provide Cray expertise to a wider range of the HPC community, says Levesque Read further...

Thomas Haner and Damian Steiger from ETH Zurich in Switzerland published a paper ".5 Petabyte Simulation of a 45-Qubit Quantum Circuit" on ArviX. They have simulated a 45-qubit quantum computer circuit on the Cori II supercomputer using 8.192 nodes and 0,5 petabytes of memory. 45 qubits is close to what would be needed for a real quantum computer to be as fast as today's large supercomputer. The simulation on the Cori II supercomputer runs of course much slower - it is a simualtion - but shows the potential. Read further...