Maersk Line, a global shipping company, has signed a $150 million-plus infrastructure services agreement that will support the shipper's global growth strategy. Under the five-year agreement, HP will help Maersk Line become an Instant-On Enterprise by using HP's Cloud-enabled data centres and HP Workplace Services to optimize its technology infrastructure. Read further...

BGI, a large genomic organisation, has introduced several bioinformatics analysis pipelines and software, including assembly and binning tools, genetic variation software, as well as two Cloud-based green solutions for genomic-based research. In addition,GigaScience, an upcoming research journal published by BGI, has launched its new, freely accessible, large-scale database: GigaDB. The launch of GigaDB is heralded by the release of numerous large datasets of different types and from a variety of organisms. GigaDB is unique because it is directly affiliated with a journal and all of its datasets are assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which allows these data to be directly cited in future publications. Read further...

EMC Corporation has further simplified the way enterprises and service providers implement and access public and private Cloud storage with new enhancements to the EMC Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform. With a simplified installation process and improved visibility and reporting tools, the enhanced Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform delivers expanded Cloud metering services and enhanced administrative reporting and controls. Packaged as a VMware vApp, the Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform enables service providers to deliver and monetize self-branded Storage-as-a-Service offerings even faster, while enterprises can more easily transform IT into an internal service organisation, enabling agility and cost savings throughout the business. EMC also announced that EMC GeoDrive now supports both Linux and Windows operating systems, enabling instant access to any Atmos Cloud without ever having to write a single line of code. Read further...

UniCredit Global Information Systems S.p.A. (UGIS), a global information and communication technology (ICT) company of the UniCredit Group, a major European financial institution, selected Platform Computing to create a global, virtualized high-performance shared computing infrastructure for its global Markets & Investment Banking and Risk Management applications to lower their costs and increase server utilization. Read further...

Adaptive Computing and SGI have signed an agreement for SGI to distribute the full line of Moab HPC Suite and Moab Cloud Suite. This business agreement was formalized in response to SGI's technical computing customers who require intelligent HPC workload management and Cloud management to improve and better manage data centre work flows. The patented Moab intelligence engine will support the SGI ICE family designed for today's data intensive problems. This platform from SGI raises the efficiency bar, easily scaling to meet virtually any processing requirements without compromising ease of use, manageability or price/performance. Read further...

Fujitsu has launched a new cutting-edge version of Fujitsu ServerView Resource Orchestrator - a powerful and proven Cloud management approach that makes it easy to build, extend, and consolidate private Cloud infrastructures. The new Fujitsu ServerView Resource Orchestrator V3 delivers enhanced Cloud management capability, providing enterprise-class multi-tenant system platform support allowing organisations to transform their static data centres into dynamic resource delivery centres. Incorporating new features proven in Fujitsu's own public Cloud data centres around the world, customers can easily introduce an optimized private Cloud infrastructure that will dramatically lower their total cost of ICT ownership. Read further...

At Momentum, the EMC Information Intelligence Group's EMEA user conference, EMC Corporation has made available EMC OnDemand for EMC Captiva, EMC Document Sciences and EMC Documentum. EMC OnDemand enables customers to save time and money, simplify their operations and transform their business by focusing on driving business value. Read further...

UniCredit Global Information Systems S.p.A. (UGIS), a global information and communication technology (ICT) company of the UniCredit Group, a major European financial institution, selected Platform Computing to create a global, virtualized high-performance shared computing infrastructure for its global Markets & Investment Banking and Risk Management applications to lower their costs and increase server utilization. Read further...

CERN kicked off the High Luminosity LHC study with a workshop bringing together scientists and engineers from some 14 European institutions, supported through the European Commission's seventh Framework programme (FP7), along with others from Japan and the USA. The goal is to prepare the ground for an LHC luminosity upgrade scheduled for around 2020. Luminosity gives a measure of the collision rate in a particle accelerator and therefore gives an indication of its performance. Read further...

Mersenne@home is a new project, based in Poland, that searches for 'Mersenne primes' - prime numbers of the form 2p-1. Mersenne@home is already over 3 TeraFLOPS on around 1000 hosts and no GPU. Read further...

Vijay Pande's chemistry and structural biology group at Stanford has become known for Folding@home, a distributed computing project that borrows computing time from home computers to simulate how proteins take shape. Now, other researchers will be able to take advantage of the computing technology that Vijay Pande's group has developed over the last decade. The new distributed framework for supercomputers, called Copernicus, was presented at SC11, an international supercomputing conference, in Seattle. Read further...

Norway's projectiondesign is using the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference as the launch pad for the latest addition to their unrivalled product range of WQXGA 2,560 x 1,600 resolution projectors. Read further...

Europe's HPC infrastructure PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, announced that 35 projects, selected from 54 proposals, will share 91 million processor core hours awarded by the most recent DECI (Distributed European Computing Initiative) call. The consortia of European computational scientists whose projects were selected for funding will be given access to one of the 19 European national HPC services through a national HPC resource exchange initiative, operated by members of the PRACE association. Read further...

The University of Oslo (UiO), Numascale and IBM have signed an agreement for a project where the Numascale technology will be tested on a large scale for advanced research computation. Funded by the Norwegian Research Council, UiO and PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), the programme will evaluate NumaConnect for future use in pan-European Research Infrastructure. As part of the pilot programme, IBM is providing the server infrastructure along with deep HPC competence across key functions and Gridcore, a joint partner of Numascale and IBM, will build the new advanced computing resource. Read further...

EMI 1 (Kebnekaise) Update 10 has been made available. Read further...

Fujitsu has introduced Hybrid Cloud Services for Microsoft Windows Azure, an extension of Fujitsu's global Cloud portfolio and its relationship with Microsoft. The offering enables government and enterprise customers to benefit from hybrid Cloud solutions and in doing so achieve operating cost reductions of typically 30% or more. Read further...

By 2017, quantum physics will help reduce the energy consumption of our computers and cellular phones by up to a factor of 100. For research and industry, the power consumption of transistors is a key issue. The next revolution will likely come from tunnel-FET, a technology that takes advantage of a phenomenon referred to as "quantum tunneling", At the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), but also in the laboratories of IBM Zurich and the CEA-Leti in France, research is well underway. As part of a special issue ofNaturedevoted to silicon, Adrian Ionescu, an EPFL researcher, has written an article on the topic. Read further...

Research results obtained using the "K computer" were awarded the ACM Gordon Bell Prize, Peak-Performance at SC11, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis taking place in Seattle, USA, on November 17. Read further...

Cray Inc. has introduced the latest addition to its line of high performance computing (HPC) products with the launch of the Cray Sonexion 1300 system - an integrated file system, software and storage product. The introduction of the Cray Sonexion 1300 system extends Cray's presence in the storage solutions business and gives the company the ability to offer its customers a complete and scalable Lustre file system. Read further...

Adaptive Computing, managers of supercomputing systems and experts in HPC workload management, have launched the new Moab HPC Suite - Enterprise Edition at Supercomputing '11. Enterprise Edition combines Moab's battle-tested HPC workload management products with implementation services and 24 x 7 support, creating a complete package to meet today's enterprise HPC needs. Using the patented Moab intelligence engine, the Enterprise Edition improves productivity and uptime while meeting the SLAs and business priorities for HPC systems and HPC Clouds. Commercial enterprises as well as enterprise-level public sector organisations will benefit from this single integrated solution. Read further...

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is now supporting scientific research at unprecedented bandwidth speeds - at least ten times faster than commercial Internet providers - with a new network that connects thousands of researchers using three of the world's top supercomputing centres in California, Illinois and Tennessee. The new network was officially unveiled on November 14, 2011 in Seattle, Washington, at the gala opening of SC11, the premier international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, where DOE researchers used the network for groundbreaking climate data transfers and astrophysics visualizations. Read further...

The list of supercomputers entered in the Graph500 competition now features 50 competitors, up from nine in its initial release a year ago, according to Sandia National Laboratories researcher Richard Murphy, chair of the Graph500 steering committee. New rankings were released in Seattle at SC2011, the international conference for high-performance computing. Read further...

For the second year in a row, the world's most energy efficient petaflop-class supercomputer is powered by NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. The Tsubame 2.0 system at the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Global Scientific Information Center (GSIC) ranks as the greenest petaflop-class supercomputer on the recently released Green500 list. Published twice annually, the Green500 list, rates the 500 most energy efficient supercomputers based on performance achieved relative to power consumed. Read further...

A $7.5 million award will help researchers harness the body's own defenses to counteract nerve agents and create new types of antidotes for exposure to pesticides and other poisons. The grant, from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), extends a previous grant and establishes a new Center of Excellence at Ohio State University, where chemists will collaborate with the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense (USAMRICD) at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Read further...

RIKEN, the University of Tsukuba, and Fujitsu Limited have received top-ranking in all four benchmarks for the performance results of the "K computer" at the 2011 HPC Challenge Awards. The awards were announced on November 15 at SC11, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis which took place in Seattle, USA. The first-place rankings in the HPC Challenge Awards were received in the following four benchmarks used for evaluating the all-around performance of a supercomputer: 1) Global HPL; 2) Global RandomAccess; 3) EP STREAM (Triad) per system; and 4) Global FFT. Read further...

Fujitsu, a global IT products and services company and Whamcloud, a venture-backed company formed from a worldwide network of high-performance computing (HPC) storage industry veterans, agreed to the principal terms of joint Lustre development. This collaboration will include scalability and file system work for Lustre, and merging Fujitsu's Lustre enhancements into the Lustre 2.x community release. Read further...

SGI has begun shipping to customers worldwide its SGI Rackable and SGI ICE server lines incorporating AMD Opteron 6200 series processors. These servers are in use across a broad range of applications, including astrophysics; earth sciences, including climatology and seismology; homeland security; and Cloud storage. Read further...

HP has launched "Odyssey", a project to redefine the future of mission-critical computing with a development roadmap that will unify UNIX and x86 server architectures to bring industry-leading availability, increased performance and uncompromising client choice to a single platform. Read further...

At SC11, the international conference on high performance computing, networking storage and analysis, EMC Corporation has expanded its HPC presence - showcasing new proof-of-concept technologies, and demonstrating new technologies developed in collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) for its Exascale programme - providing the HPC community with "no compromise" storage. Read further...