Experts from telecom, datacom and computing are convening for the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition/National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC) - the premier optical communications event where experts from industry and academia share their results, experiences, and insights on the future of hot topic areas such as Cloud and data centre networking, software-defined networks, photonic integration and more. More than 12,000 attendees and an exhibit with 550 companies are expected. Read further...

Square Kilometer Array (SKA) South Africa, a business unit of the country's National Research Foundation is joining ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, and IBM in a four-year collaboration to research extremely fast, but low-power exascale computer systems aimed at developing advanced technologies for handling the massive amount of data that will be produced by the SKA, which is one of the most ambitious science projects ever undertaken. Read further...

At a Strategic Forum for Institutional Investors, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger outlined the company's strategy, revealing more details about its plans to deliver the software-defined data centre, expand its hybrid Cloud offerings and empower the multi-device era. Read further...

The Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), a global organisation where hundreds of enterprise IT organisations are working together to drive broad scale requirements for the enterprise ready Cloud, has released a new white paper focused on how one of its board members has adopted ODCA requirements as the foundation for its Cloud implementation and the release of two new usage models focused on Software Entitlement and Data Security. ODCA has now released over 20 Cloud requirements documents and publications and is demonstrating significant momentum in the adoption of its Cloud usage models. Read further...

Black Point Arts Internet Solutions GmbH would expand its Cloud infrastructure using IBM Flex Systems. Black Point Arts will also use IBM City Cloud, an initiative designed specifically to help Managed Service Providers (MSPs) quickly deliver new services and products for their midmarket clients. Read further...

SubsetSum@Home, based at the University of North Dakota Computer Science Department, is doing research in complexity theory - in particular, the properties of an NP-complete problem called Subset Sum.8 Read further...

Low and stable electricity prices are likely to make the U.S. a target for data centre investment at Europe's expense, according to a report published by 451 Research. Lower electricity prices are also expected to impact U.S. investment in energy-efficient technologies. The reason for this unexpected price stability in the U.S. is its booming shale gas industry. As a result, the energy bill for a medium-sized 2MW data centre in the U.S. with a 50% baseload energy consumption could be as much as $500,000 or GBP335,000 a year less than a comparable facility in the UK - and about $750,000 or GBP 500,000 less than one in Germany. Read further...

ClusterVision, Europe's dedicated specialist in high performance computing solutions, has successfully completed a new high performance computing (HPC) cluster system at the University of Paderborn. The 10,000 core, 200 Tflops system, which is part of a 4 million euro HPC systems and infrastructure investment by the University of Paderborn, and its partners Bielefeld University, Hamm-Lippstadt University of Applied Sciences East Westphalia, Lippe University of Applied Sciences, and Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences, is the most recent HPC cluster at Paderborn and is anticipated to claim a high ranking position in the next publication of the Top500 World supercomputer listings. Read further...

Recent figures by CBS (Statistics Netherlands) show that 4% of the energy produced in the Netherlands comes from renewable sources. Benjamin Sanderse, PhD at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), has developed advanced mathematical methods that are able to produce a reliable simulation of off-shore wind farms in the Netherlands. His research, carried out for ECN, the Energy reserach Centre of the Netherlands, can give a significant boost to energy production through wind power. Benjamin Sanderse defends his thesis on 19 March 2013 at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). Read further...

On February 28, 2013, registration opened for the fourth edition of the successful "Enlighten Your Research" contest (EYR4). Researchers from any discipline and with any level of technical expertise are invited to submit a proposal with challenging data questions. The research should revolve around data which is either too voluminous or too varied to deal with using existing solutions. Read further...

PRACE's proposal paper "How e-research infrastructures can catalyse European industrial Competitiveness" was selected as the winner of the Competitive industry category. The paper describes PRACE's continuous commitment to develop services for industry to benefit from PRACE research infrastructure. Read further...

The 1st Europe-China HPC Conference "Partnership for Supercomputing Applications in Science and Industry" is an open forum that will address a range of scientific and engineering challenges important for further development of high performance computing (HPC) in Europe and China. The conference will focus on the strategic nature of HPC as a crucial asset for the scientific comptetitivenss and innovation capacity. The conference will take place 8-10 April 2013 at the Grand Hotel Sofia in Sofia, Bulgaria. Read further...

The 2013 PRACE Scientific Conference will be held on Sunday, 16 June, in Leipzig, Germany from 9:00-18:00 at the Congress Center Leipzig, Hall 4. Top European scientists present results and advances in large scale simulations obtained with support of PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe. The European HPC Strategy implementation is presented by Konstantinos Glinos, head of the European Commision e-Infrastructure unit. PRACE services for Science and Industry are highlighted by Sergi Girona, Chair of the PRACE Board of Directors. Read further...

The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) is presenting the Spring School on "New and Emerging Technologies - Programming for Accelerators". The Spring School is organized by SNIC and hosted by High Performance Computing Center North (HPC2N) in Umea, Sweden. Expert presenters from PRACE Advanced Training Centers (PATCs) and vendors will combine lectures and hands-on sessions to provide an introduction to accelerator programming. The official language will be English. The school is offered free of charge to students and academics residing in PRACE member states. Lunches, coffee breaks and an evening dinner event are included. The number of full participants is limited to around 30 seats. Registrations should arrive no later than March 31, 2013. Read further...

The PRACE Summer School 2013 will be held June 17-21, 2013 in Ostrava, Czech Republic. This five-day event will offer tutorials on several distinguished software packages, frameworks and libraries widely used for solving large-scale engineering and scientific problems on high performance computing systems. The target audience consists of scientists and developers who wish to use high-level tools but at the same time require fine-grain control over the solution process. The presented open source packages were selected to cover the whole "life cycle" of such projects: preprocessing, solution and postprocessing. However, the focus is on the solution phase. Registration deadline is March 31, 2013. Read further...

The new N8 High Performance Computing (N8 HPC) centre, was showcased to over 100 representatives from industry and the N8 universities on 7 March at a special event in Manchester. The new facility provides access to a high performance computing facility for the Universities of Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and York, and will lower the barriers to industry use of high performance computing by offering businesses easy access to the facilities, alongside consultancy and e-infrastructure training. Read further...

Through the open Call for Tenders - DIGIT/R2/PO/2011/038 - Mainframe data servers III, Hewlett-Packard Belgium B.V.B.A/SPRL has been selected by the European Commission (EC) to supply HP Integrity servers and related offerings to support critical workloads, including database-intensive applications and other critical environments, across multiple EC countries. Read further...

Oracle used the research for theOracle Next Generation Datacentre Indexreport as an opportunity to test attitudes to and overall understanding of Big Data among nearly 1,000 organisations in Europe, the Middle East and Russia. The research shows that there is no consensus over what constitutes the critical characteristics of Big Data. Moreover, there is confusion over the extent of change required to implement Big Data, with some businesses believing that there will be a big upheaval and others confident that they will need only to supplement existing technology. Read further...

Fujitsu and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) have jointly developed and recently launched operations of the purpose-built Atacama Compact Array (ACA) Correlator supercomputer system, which will be employed as part of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) project, a Chile-based radio telescope featuring unprecedented sensitivity and resolution. A ceremony was held in Chile to commemorate the inauguration of ALMA on March 13, local time. Read further...

A new facility integrating Curtin University’s information and communication technology (ICT) services with the supercomputing capacity of iVEC to enhance research outcomes has been launched. iVEC@Curtin was launched to provide a single point of contact for Curtin researchers requiring advanced ICT assistance, by creating an integrated team of staff from iVEC and Curtin IT Services, based on the University's Bentley Campus. Read further...

Demonstrating the responsiveness and performance of DataDirect Network's (DDN) flagship Big Data storage platform, the SFA12K-40, DDN has achieved new record results for financial analytics response times and corresponding throughput as reported by the Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC). Read further...

Two years after Jeopardy!, IBM is putting Watson to work in ways that will forever change how business and health care leaders solve problems. And while company researchers are hard at work developing new commercial applications for the cognitive computing innovation, IBM is also turning to brilliant young minds in academia for big ideas on where Watson should work next. Read further...

New tech­nolo­gies that exploit quan­tum behav­iour for com­put­ing and other appli­ca­tions are closer than ever to being real­ized due to recent advances, accord­ing to a review arti­cle pub­lished in the jour­nal Sci­ence. Read further...

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has announced that Prof. Shafi Goldwasser of the Weizmann Institute's Computer Science and Applied Mathematics Department, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, will receive the ACM A.M. Turing Award. Read further...

Illinois Department of Human Services (DHS) is using IBM software to manage Big Data and digitize thousands of documents, enabling caseworkers to spend more time focusing on the needs of citizens. DHS is one of the largest state agencies in Illinois, with an annual budget of $5.4 billion and more than 12,000 employees. It provides integrated services through 100 Family and Community Resource Centers (FCRC) for state residents on welfare, those transitioning to work, and others looking for more self-sufficiency. Read further...