At the EGI TF conference last week in Lyon, the booth of SysFera attracted a lot of attention. The company focuses on middleware and data management. Hotly debated topics in Lyon. In this article, SysFera's CTO, Benjamin Depardon, gives an overview of the state-of-the-art in data management. Read further...

Cloud computing is emerging as a major disruptive force for both IT vendors and users as companies globally strive to reduce cost of ownership for IT infrastructure. However the term "Cloud computing" means many things and different service layers (Infrastructure, Platform, Software) are deployed across organisations based on customer needs. There is plethora of service providers with expertise in different service layers of the Cloud. In addition to the different layers of services in Cloud computing there are different technological concepts like Grid computing, Virtual computing, etc. that need to be well understood by IT managers and end users alike before signing up with a service provider. Read further...

ZAO Hewlett-Packard AO has signed an agreement with ROLF Group, a Russian importer and retailer of cars, to migrate ROLF's information technology (IT) and applications infrastructure to an HP Cloud environment, enabling greater flexibility and aligning IT costs with business needs. Read further...

IBM is aligning its fast-growing business partner initiative for Smarter Commerce with a new channel offering to drive increased software-as-a-service (SaaS) sales, arming business partners with the ability to provide customers with quick access to IBM business solutions on the Cloud. Business partners are looking to expand their capabilities to more effectively fulfill client demands brought on by new on-line buying patterns driven by social networking and mobile computing trends. Read further...

Red Lambda Inc., a software company transforming security and operational intelligence for "Big Data" IT environments, has launched an Early Release Programme for MetaGrid - next generation security and operational intelligence software powered by the company's AppIron Grid Platform. MetaGrid is designed to address the Big Data dichotomy faced by providers of IT, network and Cloud infrastructures that generate up to petabytes per day of operational data. Read further...

The Desktop Grid middleware XtremWeb-HEP version 7.6.0 has been released by the team of the Laboratoire de l'Accelerateur Lineaire at CNRS in France. Read further...

The novascale gcos 7010 systems reaffirm the capability of Bull's gcos 7 product family to provide intensive, ultra-secure production with high levels of performance. The novascale gcos 7010 systems actively support the strategy that Bull has followed for a number of years. Aiming at bringing up to date application infrastructures, this strategy is extremely successful as shown recent by the constant growth of the gcos business. Read further...

Airbus has doubled its usable supercomputing power with containerized HP Performance Optimized Datacenters (PODs). In the final phase of a four-year high-performance computing (HPC) deployment, Airbus has taken delivery of two HP PODs, making this the world's largest industrial HPC system and one of the first confirmed commercial HPC container contracts. This deployment is the 29th biggest computer in the world according to the official TOP500 Supercomputer list published on June 20. Read further...

T-Platforms supported by M.V. Lomonosov MSU, has lauched the third stage of the competition of innovative projects for "effective use of GPU-accelerators to solve large problems". As the main objective of the contest, its organizers consider a demonstration of potential of graphics cards as an effective tool to speed up implementation of the most demanding computing projects. The contest prize fund is 10 million rubles. Read further...

On September 27, in the framework of "Siberian Open University", the general forum of the Educational and Scientific Institutions Association at the Tomsk State University (TSU), the unique supercomputer complex has been presented, demanded in various economy sectors of the Tomsk Region and Siberia. The event was attended by CEO of T-Platforms Vsevolod Opanasenko, representatives of the Tomsk Region Administration and large companies, and members of "Siberian Open University" Association. Read further...

T-Platforms Company's supercomputing solutions included in the new edition of the Russian Top50 ranking implement 47 percent of the total computing power of all represented systems, which brings the company into an undisputed leader position in the list. With its performance increased up to 1.3 Petaflop/s, Lomonosov Supercomputer also confirmed its leading position in the ranking by a wide margin from the closest rival. Read further...

The Bolshoi supercomputer simulation, the most accurate and detailed large cosmological simulation run to date, gives physicists and astronomers a powerful new tool for understanding such cosmic mysteries as galaxy formation, dark matter, and dark energy. The simulation traces the evolution of the large-scale structure of the universe, including the evolution and distribution of the dark matter halos in which galaxies coalesced and grew. Initial studies show good agreement between the simulation's predictions and astronomers' observations. Read further...

The National Agency of Meteorology and Environmental Monitoring (NAMEM) in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia has ordered a Cray XE6m supercomputer. NAMEM specializes in weather forecasting and climate projection integration in Mongolia, and will use its Cray XE6m system to perform regional weather and climate models for operational and research purposes. Read further...

An accidental discovery in a physicist's laboratory at the University of California, Riverside provides a unique route for tuning the electrical properties of graphene, nature's thinnest elastic material. This route holds great promise for replacing silicon with graphene in the microchip industry. The researchers found that stacking up three layers of graphene, like pancakes, significantly modifies the material's electrical properties. When they fabricated trilayer graphene in the lab and measured its conductance, they found, to their surprise, that depending on how the layers were stacked some of the trilayer graphene devices were conducting while others were insulating. Read further...

IBM has reached an agreement with the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization of Japan to develop for the group the "KEK Central Computer System", a server and storage solution that will be used to further advance man's understanding of the universe. Read further...

The newest Intel Science and Technology Center (ISTC) will focus on delivering technologies that offer a richer, more personalized experience to consumers of the future. By creating and funding an ecosystem of leading researchers in the field and providing a collaborative environment, Intel Corporation and its partners' goal is to accelerate the development of next-generation technologies capable of continuously learning and adapting to consumers' needs. Read further...

Individuals, federal agencies, and enterprises are producing data at massive scale and unprecedented velocity. The demand to consume, store, and analyze this information is driving innovations and opportunities for organisations that are looking to harness intelligence in the big-data economy. NetApp is working closely with leaders across all sectors to unlock new insights that will change the way organisations manage and use data. The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has selected the company to provide the storage foundation for its Sequoia supercomputer. Read further...

Oracle WebLogic Server 11g, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, together with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 running on Oracle Solaris, the no. 1 enterprise operating system and Oracle's new SPARC T4-4 servers achieved an overall world record result, in addition to setting the highest result ever achieved with a clustered database, with the industry-standard SPECjEnterprise2010 benchmark. Read further...

Canon Inc., Canon IT Solutions, Oracle and Oracle Japan plan to combine imaging technologies from Canon with Oracle software products including Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle WebCenter, Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME) and more. Read further...

Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management 2.0.1, running with Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2, processed 1 billion meter reads per hour. Read further...

Oracle has Hybrid Columnar Compression, pioneered in Oracle Exadata, now supported on Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage Appliances and Pillar Axiom Storage Systems. Oracle is bringing the storage efficiency of Hybrid Columnar Compression to customers using Oracle's NAS and SAN systems to manage the lifecycle of data using in-database archiving for OLTP databases and data warehouses, with 10x to 50x compression for most datasets. Read further...

The world's fastest general-purpose engineered system has been unveiled by Oracle Chief Executive Officer Larry Ellison and Executive Vice President John Fowler. Oracle's SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 is based on Oracle's new SPARC T4 servers, which deliver the biggest generational performance increase in the history of Oracle's SPARC processors, resulting in nine world record benchmarks. Read further...

Oracle has introduced its new SPARC T4 server line. Read further...

Demonstrating the superior performance, scalability and value of Oracle's new SPARC T4 server line, Oracle has achieved a range of record-setting and industry-first results on prominent business-critical enterprise workloads and industry-standard benchmarks. Read further...

Researchers from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, and San Diego State University (SDSU) will be assisting researchers from six other universities and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to develop detailed, large-scale computer simulations of earthquake faults under a new $4.6 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. Read further...

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin will deploy and support a world-class supercomputer with comprehensive computing and visualization capabilities for the national open science community. Made possible by a $27.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), this new deployment is part of the NSF "eXtreme Digital" (XD) programme, an integrating system for the majority of NSF's high end computational resources made widely available to U.S. researchers. Read further...