The EU-funded DEGISCO project aimed at setting up Desktop Grids for International Scientific Collaboration, has released the first version of a Desktop Grids for eScience Road Map on January 31, 2011. The document, produced for the International Desktop Grid Federation (IDGF) is comprised of two parts. The first part constitutes a bird view of all the relevant topics to be considered when setting up a Desktop Grid infrastructure. This management part is addressed to political stakeholders and the general public. The second part offers a detailed and step-by-step description in five chapters of all the challenges and issues to be solved including relevant links to background information and practical examples. This technical part is aimed at Desktop Grid operators, scientific users, the academic user community, legal experts, and volunteer computing organisations. Read further...

eChallenges e-2011 Conference & Exhibition takes place in Florence, Italy, 26-28 October. This is the twenty-first in a series of Annual Conferences supported by the European Commission, which regularly attracts over 600 delegates from commercial, government and research organisations around the world to share knowledge and experience, lessons learnt, good practice and innovation. The deadline for extended abstracts and workshop submissions is 28 February, 2011. Read further...

The PRACE Executive Seminar on Industrial Usage of HPC Services will take place March 28-29 at Stockholm Waterfront Conference Centre, Stockholm, Sweden. The 3rd PRACE Industry Seminar is especially designed for CIOs, CTOs and R&D managers, responsible for designing, deploying and operating computing and data management infrastructures, or depending there upon for the success of their enterprises. The seminar will provide decision-makers and leaders with a focus on the significant resources and expertise PRACE offers for high impact research and development as well as an occasion for enterprises to influence PRACE plans and the future of HPC in Europe. Read further...

The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, PRACE, has opened a new website. With the new website, the PRACE Research Infrastructure is delivering information about the service it operates for both academic and industrial communities across Europe, in the field of HPC (High Performance Computing), how to access the services, results of the use of the infrastructure and services and user support activities and community engagements. Read further...

A supercomputer capable of doing a billion calculations each second has been installed at the University of Portsmouth, enabling cosmologists to test our understanding of the origin of galaxies and of gravity itself. The supercomputer, called 'SCIAMA', has a 1008 Intel core cluster, which represents the equivalent strength of approximately 1000 desktop systems, and is designed to receive, process and present large amounts of astronomical data very quickly. Read further...

Bull has refreshed its EMC product portfolio following EMC's January 18th, 2011 announcements. EMC has introduced the new VNXe and VNX unified storage systems, and major updates to the VMAX and Data Domain storage families. Read further...

CRANN, the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices, at Trinity College Dublin has signed a newly created research collaboration with the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST, Saudi Arabia) which has the potential of solving some of the technological issues on the path towards massive solar energy production. The project, sponsored by KAUST, is worth 1 million euro and will involve two senior researchers and three PhD students both at KAUST and TCD, and it will avail of the computational power of the KAUST supercomputer Sasheen. Read further...

A new way of splitting layered materials to give atom thin "nanosheets" has been discovered. This has led to a range of novel two-dimensional nanomaterials with chemical and electronic properties that have the potential to enable new electronic and energy storage technologies. The collaborative international research led by the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nanostructures and Nanodevices (CRANN), Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, and the University of Oxford has been published inScience. Read further...

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, has selected Oracle WebLogic Server to manage technical applications, as well as the numerous HR and administrative Java-based web applications used by CERN employees. In December 2010, the first Oracle WebLogic Server application was deployed to schedule LHC (Large Hadron Collider) interventions. Read further...

C12G Labs, the company behind the OpenNebula open-source toolkit, has just launched a new partner programme aimed at developing solid alliances with business partners that understand Cloud technology and its applications. C12G Labs provides their partners with a customizable, flexible Cloud management technology and the professional services to create innovative Cloud offerings and accelerate their delivery. The objectives of the partner programme are to align developments and technologies to meet customer's needs and to support the design and development of joint Cloud solutions, products or services. Read further...

Inspired by the popular confidence trick known as "shell game", researchers at UC Santa Barbara have demonstrated the ability to hide and shuffle "quantum-mechanical peas" - microwave single photons - under and between three microwave resonators, or "quantized shells". In a paper published in the January 30 issue of the journalNature Physics, UCSB researchers show the first demonstration of the coherent control of a multi-resonator architecture. This topic has been a holy grail among physicists studying photons at the quantum-mechanical level for more than a decade. Read further...

The first stars to form in the universe were not as lonely as previously thought. These are the findings of an international collaboration between researchers at the Center of Astronomy at Heidelberg University, the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, and at the University of Texas at Austin. These results are being published inSciencemagazine. Read further...

Oracle has launched new Business Transaction Management capabilities in Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g, further enabling IT to monitor transactions across computing tiers and applications. The new capabilities allow IT to track the exact flow of business transactions across underlying IT systems, helping them quickly identify issues and fix them before they become critical or impact end-user experiences. Read further...

Score Media Inc. has selected HP 3PAR Utility Storage, a key element of a Converged Infrastructure strategy, to manage its corporate data and media content, including high-definition (HD) video. Score Media Inc. is the owner of "theScore" sports television network in Canada, theScore.com and theScore Satellite Radio, as well as the No. 1 sports app for BlackBerry, ScoreMobile, which is also available on the Android, iPhone and Windows Phone 7 platforms. As the media company's digital network and on-line presence have grown, its data storage requirements also have increased. Score Media chose the HP 3PAR F-Class Storage System to replace existing network attached storage (NAS) devices that were inefficient and costly to scale. Read further...

AT&T and Acuo Technologies, a provider of comprehensive software solutions to the medical imaging industry for archiving, collaboration and migration services, have signed a strategic alliance to develop vendor-neutral, Cloud-based medical imaging storage solutions for health care providers and suppliers. Acuo is the latest technology ally to join the AT&T ForHealth portfolio of mHealth, Cloud-based, and telehealth products and solutions. Read further...

WealthEngine, a provider of wealth identification and information-based fundraising solutions, has selected Oracle Exadata Database Machine to power the next-generation of its FindWealth research service. Read further...

Siteopsys.com, a resultant of almost two years of Research, Development and Testing at RedAlkemi, is developed not only to make SEO analysis process easy, but also to make it efficient, delivering intuitive results that help make the SEO professionals job easy and productive. Siteopsys.com offers over 20 proficient automated tools categorized into 7 categories, and uses Cloud and Grid computing technology for processing queries. Read further...

The Dallas Cowboys have deployed HP Converged Infrastructure technology in the state-of-the-art data centre that powers Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas. The world-famous Cowboys Stadium hosts the Dallas Cowboys Football Club as well as high-profile concerts, conferences and sporting events, including the annual AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic, the Super Bowl XLV on February. 6 and the 2014 NCAA Men's Basketball Final Four. Read further...

Oracle has launched the StorageTek T10000C tape drive, which provides the highest performance, lowest total cost of ownership at one-third to one-fifth the floor space of any tiered storage, archive or back-up solution. Read further...

Vice-Chancellor Professor Stuart McCutcheon said that the University of Auckland is delighted to host the National e-Science Infrastructure (NeSI), to be built over the next 4 years with nearly $50 million co-invested by the Government and partner research organisations. Read further...

Computer engineers at North Carolina State University have developed hardware that allows programmes to operate more efficiently by significantly boosting the speed at which the "cores" on a computer chip communicate with each other. Read further...

Dr. Stefan Strauf, Assistant Professor of Physics and Engineering Physics at Stevens Institute of Technology, has been honoured by the National Science Foundation (NSF) with the prestigious CAREER Award. One of the most competitive programmes offered by the NSF, the CAREER Award supports early career development of faculty in the sciences who are most likely to become leading researchers and teachers. The awards provide a financial stipend to support research activity over the course of five years. Read further...

Researchers are leveraging Ohio Supercomputer Center resources to develop computer-assisted diagnosis tools that will provide pathologists grading Follicular Lymphoma samples with quicker, more consistently accurate diagnoses. Read further...

The partnership will see Eagle Genomics take on responsibility for providing commercial support for Taverna. Users of Taverna will benefit from an increased range and quality of support options, whilst Taverna's developers will be able to focus on developing innovative new features for the Taverna product line. Read further...

The scientists have now carried out the first full run of experiments that smash protons together at almost the speed of light. When these sub-atomic particles collide at the heart of the CMS detector, the resultant energies and densities are similar to those that were present in the first instants of the Universe, immediately after the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago. The unique conditions created by these collisions can lead to the production of new particles that would have existed in those early instants and have since disappeared. Read further...

Fitness First, the largest global health club and gym operator with over a million members in 500 clubs worldwide, has implemented Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g, Oracle Essbase and Oracle partner product Environmental Measurement and Management Application (EMMA) to measure and reduce the company's carbon footprint and lower operational costs in 95 Fitness First gyms in Australia. Read further...

University of Maryland researchers have made a breakthrough in the use of visible light for making tiny integrated circuits. Though their advance is probably at least a decade from commercial use, they say it could one day make it possible for companies like Intel to continue their decades long tread of making ever smaller, faster, and cheaper computer chips. Read further...

"This is no cartoon. It's a real molecule, with all the interactions taking place correctly", stated Anatoly Kolomeisky as he showed an animation of atoms twisting and turning about a central hub like a carnival ride gone mad. Anatoly Kolomeisky, a Rice University associate professor of chemistry, was offering a peek into a molecular midway where atoms dip, dive and soar according to a set of rules he is determined to decode. Read further...

The latest experiment with photonic entanglement, conducted by Polish physicists working in the consortium National Laboratory for Quantum Technologies, may be of vital importance to make quantum cryptography a more widespread technology. It has been demonstrated that secret communication based on quantum phenomena, which guarantees unconditional security against eavesdropping, can be also realized using sources of quantum entanglement considered until now to be too corrupt. Read further...

The University of Washington (UW) has launched a new programme, co-funded by Intel Corp., that aims to make it dramatically easier and cheaper to manufacture silicon chips that combine light and electronics, enabling the next generation of computer chips. This programme will provide access to high-end semiconductor manufacturing, enabling any researcher in the world to build integrated electronic-photonic circuits in silicon. Read further...

Bright Computing today announced that Bright Cluster Manager is now available through Dell, as an option for High Performance Computing Clusters (HPCC). Read further...

Recently a large number of bio-inspired computational methods have been used - also called methods of Natural Computing - to solve computationally hard problems in many domains. These methods have proven to be successful for different types of problems with unknown and uncertain data where the traditional approaches are not so effective. It is estimated that the biological life that evolved during millions of years will be a fruitful source of inspiration for the development of new computational methods offer in the years to come and they will represent an important research direction in the Artificial Intelligence mainstream. A call for papers for a journal special issue in theJournal of Information Technology Research(JITR) is issued on this topic. Read further...

Oracle has introduced the Oracle Cloud File System. The Oracle Cloud File System offers organisations a solution that extends Cloud characteristics to their storage by enabling more effective storage pooling through a network accessible elastic storage Cloud. The Oracle Cloud File System is available today and is priced at $5,000 per processor. It is available free of charge for storing Oracle software binaries, metadata, and diagnostic files - terms, conditions and restrictions apply. Read further...

CLOUDS Lab and the Cloudbus Project have issued the 2010 Annual Report detailing the R&D activities, outcomes, and community services. Read further...

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory will use IBM's next-generation Blue Gene supercomputer to enable significant advances in areas such as designing ultra-efficient electric car batteries, understanding global climate change and exploring the evolution of our universe. The 10-petaflop IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer, named "Mira", will be operational in 2012 and made available to scientists from industry, academia and government research facilities around the world. Read further...

A BMI Corp. SmartTruck technology that could save 1.5 billion gallons of diesel fuel and $5 billion in fuel costs per year has hit the road in record time in part because of simulations performed on the nation's most powerful supercomputer at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. While South Carolina-based BMI Corp. has just won an industry award fromHeavy Duty Truckingmagazine, the real winners could be trucking companies and the environment. With installation of BMI's SmartTruck UnderTray System to improve the aerodynamics of 18-wheeler (Class 8) long-haul trucks, the typical big rig can achieve fuel savings of between 7 and 12 percent, easily meeting the new California Air Resources Board mandate that calls for a minimum mileage improvement of 5 percent. Read further...

Completed performance testing with Oracle Financial Services Analytical Applications on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 delivered outstanding results for regulatory capital computations. The performance tests were designed to model the Bank for International Settlements' (BIS) Advanced Internal Ratings-Based (AIRB) approach, which also serves as the foundation for regulatory capital calculations at many tier-one financial institutions. Read further...

Completed performance testing with Oracle Financial Services Profitability Management running on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine has delivered outstanding results for calculating profitability measures at extreme speed. Oracle Financial Services Profitability Management running on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine computed profitability for 172 allocation rules across 250 million accounts and more than 1 billion transactions in only 4 hours and 45 minutes. Read further...

Cloud computing is a tempting development for IT managers: with Cloud computing, companies and organisations no longer have to acquire servers and software solutions themselves and instead rent the capacities they need for data, computing power and applications from professional providers. You only pay for what you use. In Germany, primarily companies are turning to Cloud computing, transferring their data, applications and networks to server farms at Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft or other IT service providers. In the space of just a few years, Cloud computing has emerged as a market worth billions, with a high level of importance for business-location policy in the German economy. Read further...

Completed testing with Oracle Reveleus Liquidity Risk Management on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 revealed extreme performance for liquidity computations, enabling financial institutions to now estimate liquidity gaps under baseline and stressed conditions and devise appropriate contingency funding strategies in minutes. Oracle Reveleus Liquidity Risk Management running on Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 calculated business-as-usual liquidity gaps for 370 million cash flows across 65 million accounts in just 69 minutes. After applying modified behaviour assumptions to simulate adverse market conditions, stressed liquidity gaps were calculated in only 10 minutes. Read further...

Von Welch, an internationally recognized cybersecurity expert, has been named Indiana University's Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research's deputy director. Read further...

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is one of eight universities collaborating with IBM to advance the Question Answering (QA) technology behind the IBM "Watson" computing system. IBM and CMU have collaborated on the Open Advancement of Question-Answering Initiative (OAQA), which encouraged the creation of a computer architecture and methodologies that could be used by researchers to support the Watson system. Watson will compete against "Jeopardy!" champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a historic "man vs. machine" match that will air on Jeopardy! February 14-16. Read further...

Google and CNRS have entered into a partnership, the first of its kind in France, aiming to support research in computer science. Initiated jointly by CNRS and Google, it involves teams specialized in the same field: optimization. This area of research may have applications in transport, networks, production management, resources, etc. Under the agreement, Google will dedicate nearly 325,000 euro to the teams in 2011, while CNRS will provide an engineer and two PhD research grants. This partnership reflects both organisations' will to develop long-term scientific co-operation. Read further...

OpenNebula 2.0.1 is available in the openSUSE repositories. This news follows a recent announcement of its availability in Debian and in Ubuntu. Read further...

Fujitsu and Oracle are strengthening a multi-decade partnership with the extension of their SPARC development relationship, an expansive, new product distribution agreement and a commitment to further joint engineering, marketing and sales promotion efforts. Read further...

Engineers and scientists collaborating at Harvard University and the MITRE Corporation have developed and demonstrated the world's first programmable nanoprocessor. The groundbreaking prototype computer system, described in a paper appearing in the journalNature, represents a significant step forward in the complexity of computer circuits that can be assembled from synthesized nanometer-scale components. Read further...

The e-ScienceTalk Briefing on supercomputing has been released. The Briefings are jargon-free summaries of key reports and issues on European e-infrastructure. Each briefing contains a number of case studies and quotes from experts in the field. Read further...

The Customs Directorate of Senegal's Ministry of Finance has turned to IBM and CFAO Technologies, an IBM Business Partner in West Africa, to help modernize Senegal's import and export processes. The new system, based on two IBM z10 mainframe computers, will give customs officers and their partners on-line access to real-time information across all of the country's 30 border checkpoints. Read further...

Govsphere Inc., a dynamic management and technology consulting firm based in the Syracuse Technology Garden, will partner with Syracuse University (SU) and join WiGIT - The Wireless Grid Innovation Testbed. Read further...

ING Insurance Benelux deployed a Cloud-based solution that uses a hosted platform from Bitbrains IT Services, Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008 R2, and the HPC Excel Acceleration Toolkit (HEAT) solution from Grid Dynamics to significantly speed up financial simulations on insurance risk, saving hours of analysts' time and increasing the accuracy of important financial information. Read further...

Eight universities are collaborating with IBM Researchers to advance the Question Answering (QA) technology behind the "Watson" computing system, which will compete against humans on the quiz show, Jeopardy!, airing February 14-16. Read further...

In the quest to discover more about our Universe and the birth of stars and galaxies, a new UK telescope connected for the first time to others across Europe has delivered its first 'radio pictures'. The images of the 3C196 quasar - a black hole in a distant galaxy - were taken in January 2011 by the International LOFAR Telescope (ILT). LOFAR (Low Frequency Array), which is co-ordinated by ASTRON in The Netherlands, is a network of radio telescopes designed to study the sky at the lowest radio frequencies accessible from the surface of the Earth with unprecedented resolution. Read further...

The Vienna University of Technology, the University of Vienna and the University for Soil Management have awarded an order for the fastest supercomputer ever built in Austria to the Chemnitz-based company MEGWARE Computer Vertrieb und Service GmbH. The computer is called "Vienna Scientific Cluster 2" (VSC-2) and will be delivered in May 2011. With this computer, Vienna's scientific workers will be provided with a powerful and energy-efficient system. Read further...

Internode, an Australian Internet Service Provider, has deployed the Oracle Coherence In-Memory Data Grid, to cache customer connection data to dramatically expedite customer service calls. Read further...

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego has announced the latest round of computer allocations under the Triton Research Opportunities (TRO) programme associated with the centre's Triton Resource, a data-intensive computing system primarily designed to support UC San Diego and UC researchers. Read further...

Bankinter, a Spanish provider of banking and brokerage services, is leveraging Desktop Grid computing solutions from TIBCO and Amazon Web Services to help mitigate risk and accelerate the complex modelling and simulations of loan portfolios that enable the bank to predict how loans will perform. Read further...

Platform Computing, an independent Cloud management software provider, will be hosting a webinar, entitled "The Journey to the Private Cloud - Ensure Your Success", on Wednesday, February 16. Dr. Songnian Zhou, CEO of Platform Computing, will be joined by William Fellows, principal analyst of The 451 Group, to discuss strategies and best practices to ensure the success of enterprise private Cloud projects. While many are calling 2011 the year of the private Cloud, the journey to adoption is still uncharted territory for most companies developing or re-examining their Cloud strategies. Read further...

A single SGI Rackable C2005-TY6 server achieved a world record for performance-per-watt on the SPECpower_ssj2008 benchmark, an industry-standard measurement of energy efficiency of volume server class and multi-node class computers. C2005-TY6 server easily outperformed comparable systems from Dell, IBM and HP. Read further...

SGI has issued financial results for its second quarter of fiscal 2011. Read further...

T-Platforms Group, a provider of systems, solutions and services for high-performance computing, supported by M.V. Lomonosov MSU, has launched the competition project for "Effective use of GPU-accelerators to solve large problems". Its aim is to popularize the use of graphics processors as a promising tool to accelerate calculations in solving problems that require large computing power. Read further...

Bull's novascale bullion server, running under VMware, has just been ranked as the fastest in the world according to the international SPECvirt_sc2010 benchmark. Supporting 168 virtual machines (VMs) on a single server, bullion has proved itself to be more than twice as powerful as its nearest competitor, and even more efficient, with fewer disks and less memory. Read further...

The Board of Directors of Bull approved the Group's consolidated accounts for 2010 on 17 February 2011. Auditing procedures have been carried out on the financial statements, and the certification report will be issued following the Board meeting convening the next Annual General Meeting. Read further...

Bull has successfully implemented "Bull Fast Track" - its new, scalable solution combining all the services needed for effective decision support - for the terrestrial transport networks and advanced it engineering research laboratory (Genie des Reseaux de Transport Terrestre et Informatique Avancee or GRETTIA) at the French Institute of Science and Technology for transport, development and networks, IFSTTAR (l'Institut Francais des Sciences et Technologies des Transports, de l'Amenagement et des Reseaux). Read further...

The North Rhine-Westphalia Technical University (RWTH or Rheinisch-Westfalische Technische Hochschule) in Aachen - one of the nine German 'Universities of Excellence' with about 33 000 students - has chosen a bullx supercomputer. The new system, featuring over 28,000 processing cores, will deliver some 300 Teraflops of power and three Petabytes of disk storage, and will give the University a significant advantage when it comes to running computer simulations that reflect reality as closely as possible. In addition, the University's Center for Computing and Communication and Bull have signed a collaboration agreement aimed at optimizing applications that may be useful to industry in heterogeneous cluster environments and in the area of 'Green IT'. Read further...

Whamcloud, a venture-backed company formed from worldwide high-performance computing (HPC) storage industry veterans, has signed a strategic partnership with the European Information Technology company Bull to accelerate the development of open source Lustre storage technology and to ensure that Lustre users have access to the highest level of support and service. Read further...

Located just outside Geneva, straddling the border between Switzerland and France, CERN is the world's leading particle physics research institute. CERN explores what matter is made of and what holds it together by accelerating protons to a fraction under the speed of light and then smashing them together. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has just started and is expected to generate some 15 million gigabytes of data per year. Read further...

Research with small particles has led to a big-time award for a Kansas State University researcher. Vikas Berry, assistant professor of chemical engineering, has received a National Science Foundation CAREER award for his work involving graphene, which could lead to improved electronics and opto-electronics. Read further...

Illinois researchers have documented the first observations of some unusual physics when two prominent electric materials are connected: superconductors and graphene. Led by University of Illinois physics professor Nadya Mason, the group published its findings in the journalNature Physics. Read further...

Axcient Inc. has selected HP Converged Infrastructure to power its data protection platform for small and midsize business (SMB) customers. As a rapidly growing provider of back-up, business continuity and disaster recovery services, Axcient required a resilient infrastructure with the uptime capabilities customers need for complete data protection. Axcient delivers its data protection software as a service through managed service providers and value-added resellers. Read further...

HP has launched a comprehensive service that simplifies the process of designing and building data centres by offering design, construction and project management from a single vendor. The new HP Critical Facilities Implementation service (CFI) can lower clients' cost of ownership by providing a single integrator that delivers all the elements of a data centre design-build project from start to finish. An extension of the HP Converged Infrastructure strategy, HP CFI is an architectural blueprint for the data centre of the future that allows clients to align and share pools of interoperable resources. Read further...

HP has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Vertica, a privately held, real-time analytics platform company based in Billerica, Massachusetts. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition of Vertica will enhance HP capabilities for information optimization, adding sophisticated, real-time business analytics for large and complex sets of data in physical, virtual and Cloud environments. Vertica's platform helps customers analyze massive amounts of data simply, quickly and reliably, resulting in "just-in-time" business intelligence. Read further...

HP and VMware intend to collaborate on developing and marketing next-generation Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) solutions designed and optimized for VMware vSphere-based virtual and Cloud environments. Extending HP's Converged Infrastructure strategy, the collaboration is designed to build on the success of the existing HP TippingPoint IPS solution for VMware vSphere deployments, taking current integrations to new levels. Read further...

The HPC Advisory Council, a worldwide organisation for high-performance computing research, development, outreach and education, has grown global membership to over 200 member organisations. Members include best-in-class original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), strategic technology suppliers, independent software vendors (ISVs), worldwide universities and higher education, national laboratories and selected end-users across the entire range of high-performance computing (HPC) market segments. Formed in May of 2008, the HPC Advisory Council's mission is to bridge the gap between high-performance computing use and its potential, as well as to bring the beneficial capabilities of HPC to new users for better research, education, innovation and product manufacturing. Read further...

The HPC Advisory Council and the Swiss Supercomputing Centre will host the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Workshop 2011 in the Lugano Convention Centre, Lugano, Switzerland, from March 21-23, 2011. The workshop will focus on High-Performance Computing (HPC) education, hands-on and classroom training and overviews of new important HPC developments and trends. Read further...

IBM has unveiled new skills development, marketing, technical and sales programs to help IBM business partners capture the growing market opportunities in Cloud computing and business analytics. With the volume of data in the world growing exponentially every year, the ability to quickly extract key insights from that data is critical. Today, nearly 95 percent of IBM analytics engagements with mid-sized organisations are driven by a network of analytics-focused IBM business partners that has grown to nearly 1,000 companies. Read further...

Music Mastermind, a mid-sized independent entertainment and technology company, will deploy SoundBetter, the audio processing suite behind its create-and-share music platform, on IBM's Smart Business Cloud service. Music Mastermind's SoundBetter is a groundbreaking technology that eliminates the traditional effort required to master music, breaking down barriers to creativity and allowing anyone to instantly become a recording artist. Faced with the need to expand globally while balancing development and distribution costs, the three-year-old start-up chose IBM's Smart Business Cloud services to increase scalability, reduce power requirements, and eliminate the need for an on-site network environment. Read further...

IBM has introduced workload-optimized systems to help companies manage a range of more demanding workloads that are placing new stresses on already over-taxed data centres. The offerings, which span IBM's systems portfolio, represent IBM's continued investment in systems integrated and optimized across chips, hardware and software, for a range of work at a time when companies face unprecedented amounts of data and are under pressure to become more efficient in managing and drawing timely insights from the information. Read further...

IBM and Nuance Communications Inc. have signed a research agreement to explore, develop and commercialize the Watson computing system's advanced analytics capabilities in the health care industry. The research and technology initiative will combine IBM's Deep Question Answering (QA), Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning capabilities with Nuance's speech recognition and Clinical Language Understanding (CLU) solutions for the diagnosis and treatment of patients that provide hospitals, physicians and payers access to critical and timely information. The two companies expect the first commercial offerings from the collaboration to be available in 18-24 months. Read further...

Watson wasn't the only computer system that has won when it competed successfully against two human champions on the Jeopardy! game show. The other computing system is called World Community Grid, a virtual supercomputer that helps scientists solve humanitarian challenges by tapping the unused computing power of personal computers around the world. Scientists who use World Community Grid are not only set to receive $500,000 in prize money - but are already earning unprecedented support worldwide: The day after the tournament's conclusion, World Community Grid saw a 700% spike in the number of people who normally volunteer their computers' spare power for the effort. Read further...

An important milestone toward the realization of a large-scale quantum computer, and further demonstration of a new level of the quantum control of light, were accomplished by a team of scientists at UC Santa Barbara and in China and Japan. The study, published in the February 7 issue of the journalPhysical Review Letters, involved scientists from Zhejiang University, China, and NEC Corporation, Japan. The experimental effort was pursued in the research groups of UCSB physics professors Andrew Cleland and John Martinis. Read further...

Oracle has made available Oracle Database Firewall. Oracle Database Firewall establishes a defensive perimeter around databases, monitoring and enforcing normal application behaviour in real-time, helping to prevent SQL injection attacks and unauthorized attempts to access sensitive information. Read further...

Bolstering its enterprise-class x86 blade and rackmount servers for highly virtualized and private cloud deployments, Oracle has launched enhanced Sun Fire x86 clustered systems. Oracle's Sun Fire x86 clustered systems posted five new world records, demonstrating enterprise leadership and superior performance for Java applications. Read further...

Oracle has introduced Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) Release 3.1, a comprehensive update with the first releases of AIA pre-built integrations based on and certified for industry-leading Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. Oracle AIA Release 3.1 includes nine cross-industry Process Integration Packs (PIP), eight vertical PIPs, and two direct integrations certified for Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. Read further...

Oracle has launched two new carrier-grade, NEBS Level 3 - certified servers - Oracle's Netra SPARC T3-1 rackmount server and Oracle's Netra SPARC T3-1BA ATCA blade server. Read further...

University of Florida (UF) researchers say their supercomputer, named Novo-G, is the world's fastest reconfigurable supercomputer and is able to perform some important science applications faster than the Chinese supercomputer touted as the world's most powerful. In November, the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, for the first time ever, named the Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Computer Center in Tainjin, China as No. 1. Read further...

Peter Fox and James Hendler of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are calling for scientists to take a few tips from the users of the World Wide Web when presenting their data to the public and other scientists in the February 11 issue ofSciencemagazine. Peter Fox and James Hendler, both professors within the Tetherless World Research Constellation at Rensselaer, outline a new vision for the visualization of scientific data in a perspective piece titled "Changing the Equation on Scientific Data Visualization". Read further...

The US National Science Foundation's TeraGrid, the European Union Seventh Framework Programme's Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), and the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) will organize the second joint EU-US summer school on High Performance Computing (HPC) Challenges in Computational Science, August 7-12, 2011 at Embassy Suites Lake Tahoe Hotel and Resort, Lake Tahoe, California. Read further...

Elsevier, a global publisher of scientific, technical, and medical information products and services, has launchedSustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems. The journal aims to publish the myriad of research findings related to energy-aware and thermal-aware management of computing resources. Equally important is a spectrum of related research issues such as applications of computing that can have ecological and societal impacts. Read further...

The Third International Workshop on Science Gateways for Life Sciences will be held June 8-10, 2011 at the University of Westminster, London, United Kingdom. IWSG-Life'11 will bring together scientists from the field of life sciences, bioinformatics and computer science. The aim is to exchange experience, formulate ideas and introduce up-to-date technological advances in molecular and systems biology in the context of Science Gateways. The deadline for paper submission is April 1, 2011. Read further...

The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Manno, Switzerland has awarded a contract to Cray to acquire a next-generation Cray XMT supercomputer. The announcement, which is being made in conjunction with a CSCS-hosted workshop focused on large-scale data analysis, marks Cray's first order for the company's next-generation Cray XMT system. Read further...

Cray Inc. has announced 2010 financial results for the full-year and fourth quarter. For 2010, Cray reported record revenue of $319.4 million and net income of $15.1 million, or $0.43 per share. For 2009, revenue was $284.0 million and net loss was ($0.6 million), or ($0.02) per share. Read further...

Dell has completed its acquisition of Compellent Technologies Inc., a rapidly-growing provider of highly-virtualized storage solutions with automated data management features, including tiering and thin provisioning, for enterprise and Cloud-computing environments. Compellent shareholders approved the acquisition at a special shareholder meeting. Read further...

Vidyo Inc. has introduced the next stage in the evolution of the VidyoConferencing architecture that delivers affordable scalability for telecom carriers and organisations to deploy personal telepresence as a Cloud service to tens of thousands of users. VidyoRouter Cloud Edition offers an easily deployed, low maintenance infrastructure comprised of a network of VidyoRouter appliances to further enhance the Vidyo conference experience, optimize WAN bandwidth utilization, and expedite ROI. For the first time, IT managers can address the challenges of rapidly growing user demand for video conferencing on mobile devices, desktops and room systems while delivering a 5–10x cost reduction in Wide Area Network bandwidth and multipoint infrastructure. Read further...

Paycor Inc., one of the largest independently owned payroll processing service providers in the United States, has upgraded its data centre to an HP Converged Infrastructure to increase its business agility and ability to deliver superior client services while the company continues to grow. During its most demanding days, Paycor - which supports more than 19,000 corporate clients - executes 1.7 million transactions while processing nearly 130,000 paychecks. Read further...

The Government National Business Funding Agency (Fondo Nacional de Financiamiento de la Actividad Empresarial del Estado / FONAFE) and IBM has signed a five-year information technology (IT) services agreement to develop and manage a private Cloud-computing technology infrastructure that will centralize IT operations for 10 government-owned companies that provide power utility, postal, port shipping, transportation, housing and other critical services to Peruvian citizens. Read further...

According to a new report from Gartner, IBM regained the number one position as the leading server vendor in the fourth quarter of 2010, capturing 35.5 percent revenue market share. Read further...

Further development of modern information technology requires computer capacities of increased efficiency at reasonable costs. In the past, integration density of the relevant electronic components was increased constantly. In continuation of this strategy, future components will have to reach the size of individual molecules. Researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) Center for Functional Nanostructures (CFN) and Institut de Physique et Chimie des Matériaux de Strasbourg (IPCMS) have now come closer to reaching this target. Read further...

A theoretical technique developed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory is bringing supercomputer simulations and experimental results closer together by identifying common "fingerprints". ORNL's Jeremy Smith collaborated on devising a method - dynamical fingerprints - that reconciles the different signals between experiments and computer simulations to strengthen analyses of molecules in motion. The research will be published in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read further...

Platform Computing, an expert in cluster, Grid and Cloud management software, has introduced a migration programme for Grid Engine users. With the recent change in licensing and distribution for Grid Engine, its users are at a critical juncture with respect to the selection of workload management software. Platform Computing is offering a stable, proven and feature-rich alternative that can meet the needs of the most demanding customers. With the launch of the migration programme, customers will find workload management more affordable than ever and get the help needed to make a migration easy. Read further...

Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have for the first time coaxed two atoms in separate locations to take turns jiggling back and forth while swapping the smallest measurable units of energy. By directly linking the motions of two physically separated atoms, the technique has the potential to simplify information processing in future quantum computers and simulations. Read further...

The Austrian research group led by physicist Rainer Blatt suggests a fundamentally novel architecture for quantum computation. They have experimentally demonstrated quantum antennae, which enable the exchange of quantum information between two separate memory cells located on a computer chip. This offers new opportunities to build practical quantum computers. The researchers have published their work in the scientific journalNature. Read further...

Experimental physicists have put a lot of effort in isolating sensitive measurements from the disruptive influences of the environment. In an international first, Austrian quantum physicists have realized a toolbox of elementary building blocks for an open-system quantum simulator, where a controlled coupling to an environment is used in a beneficial way. This offers novel prospects for studying the behaviour of highly complex quantum systems. The researchers have published their work in the scientific journalNature. Read further...

Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Centers' (RMSC) Executive Director Earl J. Dodd has accepted an invitation from the U.S. Council on Competitiveness to serve on its High Performance Computing (HPC) Advisory Committee. This committee spearheads the Council's initiatives to promote HPC technology as a means of stimulating innovation and productivity in the United States. Read further...

The Astronomy Department of the University of São Paulo has selected SGI Altix ICE 8400 for its high performance computing (HPC) system to enable advanced scientific astronomical research in Brazil. As theoreticians at the University of São Paulo are creating new and more advanced physical models to study the universe, they require immense processing power from larger, faster and more massively parallel computer clusters. The Astronomy Department selected Altix ICE 8400 with AMD processors to uniquely meet its intensive computing needs, enabling them to solve problems that were previously not possible. Read further...

Super Micro Computer Inc., an expert in server technology innovation and green computing, will develop its new business park for System Integration, Logistics and Operation located in Taoyuan, Taiwan to further expand its operational capabilities in Asia and better service customers in the APAC region. Driven by strong demand from the company's APAC customer base, Supermicro just doubled its logistics capacity last quarter based on the company's current Taiwan branch location. The new development will support much higher capacity for the company's future growth. Read further...

Univa, a data centre optimization company, has made available UniSight, a reporting product that increases the productivity and efficiency of people and processes through visibility into cluster resource utilization. Read further...

Researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and other organisations within the University of California, San Diego, have developed a novel way to encode and display vector data that clearly shows magnitude and direction. This new visualization technique may help seismologists to accurately analyze ground movements for an earthquake, measure magnetic turbulence in deep space, or allow medical researchers to study areas such as blood flow and nutrient absorption. Read further...

After only fifteen months, researchers using the Triton Resource, a medium-scale high performance computing system at the University of California San Diego's San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), are giving the system high marks for accelerating research across a wide variety of disciplines. Designed primarily to support UC San Diego and UC researchers, Triton Resource currently has a roster of more than 600 users across campus and the UC system. Research projects range from cancer research and molecular dynamics, to global climate forecasting, earthquake simulations, and nano-engineering activities. Read further...

The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) has signed a collaboration agreement with the Procter & Gamble Company, enabling the two to work together on modelling and simulation projects aimed at accelerating innovation collaboration between industry and academia. The collaboration is the first at the Ohio State University enacted under P&G's master alliance agreement with Ohio colleges and universities. Read further...

Spectrum Health has chosen VMware ThinApp to provide fast and efficient access to point-of-care applications, electronic medical records (EMR) and patient data from their Cloud computing environment. Read further...

Major Japan-based telecommunications operator, SOFTBANK TELECOM Corp., has joined the VMware vCloud Datacenter Services Programme, which delivers globally consistent enterprise-class hybrid Cloud computing infrastructure services. Read further...

NVIDIA has launched the latest version of the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit for developing parallel applications using NVIDIA GPUs. Read further...

Ciena Corporation, a network specialist, and RENATER, the French national telecommunications network for technology education and research, have successfully completed a next-generation 100 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) network trial connecting the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva and the IN2P3 Computing Centre in Lyon, a distance of 220 km. Based on Ciena's ActivFlex 6500 Packet-Optical Platform, the 100G solution supplements the capabilities of RENATER's existing fibre-optic network and considerably expands its capacity - helping to meet researchers' ever-increasing demand for bandwidth while protecting past investments. Read further...

G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottling Inc., a PepsiCo Inc. franchise bottler, has selected HP Networking solutions to improve business agility while lowering costs. To achieve this, G&J turned to HP for standards-based technology that reduces the complexity of their network environment and provides a more scalable architecture for increased flexibility. HP Networking solutions are part of HP's Converged Infrastructure portfolio, which integrates data centre technologies into pools of interoperable resources. Read further...

Emerson Network Power, a business of Emerson and a global expert in enabling Business-Critical Continuity, has launched its latest 10G AdvancedTCA (ATCA) switch blade, the ATCA-F125. The ATCA-F125 enables network equipment manufacturers to combine many functions on a single blade so that available slots can be filled with revenue-generating application blades. Read further...

The Grid computing facility at the Hubert Curien Multi-disciplinary Institute of the University of Strasburg in France is a major user of the university's ultra high performance network. It works closely with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, generating enormous peaks in data traffic and demanding a very high level of reliability. NextiraOne has won a contract with the University of Strasburg in France to provide the equipment needed for the complete upgrade of the university's metropolitan area network infrastructure (MAN). This will help to simplify the network and reduce costs. Read further...

CERN, one of the world's largest and most respected centres for scientific research, has selected HP networking solutions to further improve its network infrastructure performance, reliability and security needed to support its ground-breaking discoveries. CERN's research community includes more than 10,000 scientists and engineers who need to share large amounts of data quickly and securely with other researchers at CERN and around the world. Faced with the explosion of information and data analysis, CERN turned to HP to improve its network infrastructure. Read further...

HP has added enhancements to the HP TippingPoint Reputation Digital Vaccine (RepDV) service that protects enterprises from the latest security risks by providing greater visibility into malicious activity on corporate networks. HP also announced the new TippingPoint Digital Vaccine Toolkit (DVToolkit), which enables clients to create unique Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) filters to protect custom applications. Read further...

In an effort to help clients pro-actively identify and prevent potential threats to their organisation, IBM at the RSA Conference introduced the industry's fastest and most comprehensive network security appliance. Designed to help enterprises meet the challenges of an increasingly sophisticated and rapidly changing threat landscape, the IBM Network Intrusion Protection System (IPS) GX7800 helps organisations protect their data and infrastructure from unauthorized access and attacks, without compromising on the performance and availability of business-critical applications. Read further...

Oracle has made available Oracle Communications Network Intelligence 3.4. Data traffic across NGNs is growing rapidly and is increasingly dynamic with the proliferation of mobile broadband services. This creates greater challenges for network operators working to ensure a problem-free service experience for existing customers and sufficient network capacity for new or upgrading customers. Read further...

Intel Corporation has made available Thunderbolt technology, a new high-speed PC connection technology that brings together high-speed data transfer and high-definition (HD) display on to a single cable. Running at 10Gbps, Thunderbolt technology can transfer a full-length HD movie in less than 30 seconds. This Intel-developed technology is coming to market through a technical collaboration with Apple, and is available first on Apple's new line of MacBook Pro laptop computers. Read further...

Huawei Symantec Technologies Co. Ltd., a provider of network security and storage appliance solutions, has signed a strategic partnership with Force10 Networks, a global networking expert that provides performance solutions designed to deliver new economics by virtualizing and automating Ethernet networks. Together, Huawei Symantec and Force10 Networks will aim to deliver solutions that will increase reliability and decrease costs for customers. The partnership will combine Huawei Symantec's expertise in storage hardware and software with Force10 Networks' best-in-class Ethernet switches to create high performance solutions aimed at strategic vertical markets. Read further...

Belvedere Trading LLC, a proprietary trading firm specializing in equity index and commodity derivatives, has selected and deployed high-performance Force10 S-Series top-of-rack (ToR) switches as part of a successful network design aimed at providing ultra-low latency, which better supports the highly transactional nature of their business. Read further...

The next e-IRG open workshop will be held in Budapest, Hungary, on 4-5 April 2011. The e-IRG workshop, organized in the frame of the Hungarian EU Presidency, will address the topics ERA and e-Infrastructures, e-Infrastructure trends, e-Infrastructure relations and partnerships, and e-Infrastructures and FP8. All topics will be presented and discussed in plenary sessions. In addition, the Cohesion and Regional aspects and the e-IRG Recommendations will be discussed in two panel sessions. Read further...

A new strategy browser game - the "Power of research" - has officially been launched. Supported by the European Commission, "Power of Research" has been developed to inspire young Europeans to pursue scientific careers and disseminate interesting up-to-date scientific information. Players assume the role of scientists working in a virtual research environment that replicates the situations that scientists have to deal with in the real world. The game, which can be played for free, is expected to create a large community of more than 100,000 players who will be able to communicate in real time via a state of the art interface. "Power of Research" has already received the support of several international scientists, including 5 Nobel Prize winners, and attracted the interest of well-known European research institutes. Read further...