One of the hottest topics in the Cloud computing community is the suitability of such systems for performing the specialized high performance computing capability required by many scientific computing programmes. At the ISC Cloud'12 conference to be held September 24-25, 2012, in Mannheim, the keynote session will feature presentations on how a European Cloud project called the Helix Nebula Initiative is driving discovery in high energy physics, genomics and mitigating risks from natural disasters. Read further...

HP has introduced new virtualization software solutions that simplify, automate and secure the movement of virtual machines (VMs) and data in Cloud environments, providing clients with increased agility for addressing dynamic market opportunities. Read further...

Penguin Computing, a provider of on-demand High Performance Computing services in the Cloud, and Numira Biosciences, an expert in 3D imaging solutions for Pre-Clinical Life Sciences, have signed a formal partnership to bring graphics-intense data on-demand to Life Sciences customers. This unique platform will leverage a convergence of enabling technologies from Penguin Computing's HPC as a Service offering, POD - Numira Biosciences' AltaPortal product - and Nvidia's GPU technology to deliver advanced pre-clinical imaging services to researchers at pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies around the globe. Read further...

The OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Cloud computing project, has been much in the news. April's formation of the forthcoming OpenStack Foundation put in place a governance structure to help encourage open development and community building. Red Hat, along with AT&T, Canonical, HP, IBM, Nebula, Rackspace, and SUSE, are Platinum members of that foundation. The foundation announcement was quickly followed by a well-attended OpenStack Conference that clearly demonstrated the size and enthusiasm of the OpenStack developer community. Read further...

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), an IT services, consulting and business solutions firm, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire 100% equity of Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tata Sons, for a cash consideration of Rs 188 crore (US $34 million). Read further...

Experiments using heavy ions at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are advancing understanding of the primordial Universe. The ALICE, ATLAS and CMS collaborations have made new measurements of the kind of matter that probably existed in the first instants of the Universe. They have presented their latest results at the 2012 Quark Matter conference, held in Washington DC. The new findings are based mainly on the four-week LHC run with lead ions in 2011, during which the experiments collected 20 times more data than in 2010. Read further...

Aiming to use electron spins for storing, transporting and processing information, researchers from IBM and scientists at ETH Zurich, a major European university, have revealed the first-ever direct mapping of the formation of a persistent spin helix in a semiconductor. Read further...

Quantum computers promise to reach computation speeds far beyond that of today's computers. As they would use quantum effects, however, they would also be susceptible to external interferences. Information flow into and out of the system is a critical point. Researchers from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) with partners from Grenoble and Strasbourg have now read out the quantum state of an atom directly by using electrodes. In theNaturejournal, it is reported about the stable interface between classical and quantum world. Read further...

About 25,000 Danes currently live with congenital heart defects. Both heredity and environment play a role for these malformations, but exactly how various risk factors influence the development of the heart during pregnancy has been a mystery until now. With the aid of a supercomputer, an international, interdisciplinary research team has analysed millions of data points. This has allowed the scientists to show that a huge number of different risk factors - for example in the form of genetic defects - influence the molecular biology of heart development. Read further...

The HPC Advisory Council (HPCAC), an organisation for high-performance computing research, outreach and education, and the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), are planning the return and expansion of the widely successful HPCAC-ISC Student Cluster Competition in next year's ISC'13 programme of events. In a real-time challenge, 9 teams of undergraduate students will build a small cluster of their own design on the ISC'13 exhibit floor and race to demonstrate the greatest performance across a series of benchmarks and applications. Read further...

Single particles of light, also known as photons, have been produced and implemented into a quantum key distribution (QKD) link, paving the way for unbreakable communication networks. The results of the experiment, undertaken by a close collaboration of researchers based in Wuerzburg, Munich and Stuttgart, have been published, Thursday 2 August, in the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society'sNew Journal of Physics. Read further...

Cray Inc.'s next-generation supercomputer code-named "Cascade" will be available with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs based on the next-generation NVIDIA Kepler GPU computing architecture. Read further...

Fujitsu has received an order for a new supercomputer from the Institute for Solid State Physics (ISSP) at The University of Tokyo. The new system is scheduled to begin operations next spring. The new system, a Fujitsu PRIMEHPC FX10 supercomputer, will be comprised of four racks, with a total of 384 nodes for a theoretical computational performance of 90.8 teraflops. The system will primarily be used to support nationwide research conducted collaboratively by solid state science researchers, in addition to being employed in research and applications development for the 2nd field of the K computer's strategic programme, namely, "New Materials and Energy Creation". Researchers in this field aim to further the development of new materials and to produce key technologies that lead to the creation of new energy, while conducting R&D that will help bring about a sustainable society. The new system is expected to spur dramatic advances in the field of solid state sciences research and contribute to the development of high-performance devices, high-efficiency fuel cells, and new drugs. Read further...

Three educational institutions have selected HP Networking solutions, a core component of the HP Converged Infrastructure portfolio, to enable unified network environments, improve bandwidth connections and support the latest educational tools for students and faculty. Read further...

IBM has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Texas Memory Systems (TMS), a developer of high-performance flash memory solutions. TMS is a privately held company based in Houston, Texas. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Read further...

Victor Chandler, a large independent sports betting and on-line gambling organisation, has reaffirmed its commitment to SAS, an expert in business analytics, by migration across to SAS Grid Computing together with an upgrade to full SAS Marketing Automation from SAS Campaign Management. Read further...

Skyera Inc., founded by an executive and engineering team with unsurpassed backgrounds in the solid-state, storage and networking arenas, has unveiled the company's Skyhawk series of enterprise solid-state storage systems based entirely on low cost 19/20 nanometer Multi Level Cell (MLC) NAND Flash. The compact half-depth 1u form factor sports a staggering 44 terabytes of high performance, low latency native capacity for the most demanding Big Data, analytics and virtualization applications. And, at a system price of under $3 per gigabyte - before compression and deduplication - the company envisions a sea change in the solid-state playing field. Read further...

RENCI, the Renaissance Computing Institute at University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel Hill, will work with Utah State University and water scientists across the U.S. on a $4.5 million collaborative project funded by the National Science Foundation aimed at giving hydrologist the technology infrastructure they need to address critical issues related to water quality, quantity, accessibility, and management. Read further...

Acceleware Ltd., a developer of high performance computing applications, has released AxRTM 5.6, providing improved imaging of the most complex geology and increased price/performance ratio through highly-optimized computing performance. Read further...

Until recently scientists thought that quantum entanglement, when particles such as photons and electrons interact physically and then become separated, was required to run a quantum computer. But although entanglement, a phenomenon famously derided by Einstein as 'spooky action at a distance', can be facilitated in the laboratory in near ideal conditions, outside the laboratory the process is fragile and transient, and therefore not ideal. Read further...