IBM has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Boston, Massachusetts-based Cloudant Inc., a privately held database-as-a-service (DBaaS) provider that enables developers to easily and quickly create next generation mobile and web apps. Cloudant will extend IBM's Big Data and Analytics, Cloud Computing and Mobile offerings by further helping clients take advantage of these key growth initiatives. Financial terms were not disclosed. Read further...

SUSE has made available SUSE Cloud 3, the next version of the original enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution for building Infrastructure-as-a-Service private Clouds. SUSE Cloud 3 provides customers with greater flexibility to cost-effectively deploy private Clouds with existing virtualized data centres by delivering full support for VMware vSphere through integration with VMware vCenter Server. Read further...

Oracle has signed an agreement to acquire BlueKai, the industry's leading Cloud-based Big Data platform that enables companies to personalize on-line, offline and mobile marketing campaigns with richer and more actionable information about targeted audiences. Read further...

To help organisations more easily and efficiently manage their swelling data volumes and adopt Cloud storage solutions quickly, IBM has launched a new pricing programme that offers high-performance storage systems without the heavy up-front costs. Read further...

VMware Inc., a global expert in virtualization and Cloud infrastructure, has made available VMware vCloud Hybrid Service in Europe from a data centre in Slough, UK. Complementing VMware's existing US data centres, the Slough data centre provides customers with a European location that addresses UK and EU compliance and data sovereignty demands. Read further...

VMware Inc., a global expert in virtualization and Cloud infrastructure, has completed its acquisition of AirWatch, a provider of enterprise mobile management and security solutions. Originally announced on January 22, 2014, VMware acquired AirWatch for approximately $1.181B in cash and approximately $364 million of installment payments and assumed unvested equity. Read further...

Adaptive Computing, a company that powers many of world's largest private/hybrid Cloud and technical computing environments with its Moab optimization and scheduling software, has launched Big Workflow, an industry term coined by Adaptive Computing that accelerates insights by more efficiently processing intense simulations and Big Data analysis. Read further...

IBM has introduced a unique new development environment and capabilities-as-a-service to help clients and developers speed the adoption of "hybrid" Clouds, which have the potential to usher in a new era of innovation across the enterprise. As part of its initiative, IBM has invested more than $1 billion for software Cloud development and is launching new capabilities running on SoftLayer. Read further...

Fujitsu has made available Fujitsu Cloud PaaS A5 for Windows Azure, an upgrade to its public Cloud based on Windows Azure, as part of a new alliance with Microsoft Corporation. The public Cloud based on Windows Azure that Fujitsu has provided from its data centres since August 2011 will be renamed as A5 for Windows Azure, with the service environment shifted to the data centres that Microsoft has established in Japan. Read further...

HTC, a global expert in mobile innovation and design, has unveiled HTC Power To Give, an initiative that aims to create the a supercomputer by harnessing the collective processing power of Android smartphones. Currently in beta, HTC Power To Give aims to galvanize smartphone owners to unlock their unused processing power in order to help answer some of society's biggest questions. Currently, the fight against cancer, AIDS and Alzheimer's; the drive to ensure every child has clean water to drink and even the search for extra-terrestrial life are all being tackled by volunteer computing platforms. Read further...

A new version of BOINCCalculator has been released. Read further...

The 8th PRACE Regular Call for Proposals yielded 124 eligible proposals of which 44 were accepted. The trend for larger allocations to each project continues, increasing the competition for Tier-0 resources. The 44 awarded projects are led by principal investigators from 11 different European countries. But in terms of nationality, PRACE is an even more inclusive Research Infrastructure, welcoming scientists and researchers from Norway, China, the United States and Russia as collaborators in several projects. Read further...

The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing continues to significantly contribute to European large-scale scientific and engineering research activities. The most recent Call for Proposals by PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, resulted in the allocation of 438+ mill core hours of computing time on the GCS supercomputing infrastructure to 20 projects from ten different European countries. Researchers awarded access to the supercomputing infrastructure of the three GCS member centres HLRS, LRZ, and JSC may use their allocated core hours for a period of 12 months, starting in March 2014. Read further...

IBM has launched the IBM Watson Mobile Developer Challenge, a first of its kind, global competition to encourage developers to create mobile consumer and business apps powered by Watson. IBM announced the challenge at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where the company demonstrated its mobile and Watson capabilities. Read further...

ISC'14 has created an exciting opportunity to help first-time exhibitors at ISC share the stories behind their product development as well as recent technical or commercial successes. The goal is to bring the successful candidates face to face with users, collaborators and the media in a new format the organisation is calling the "Exhibitors Innovation Forum". The International Supercomputing Conference '14 will be held June 22-26, 2014 in Leipzig, Germany. Read further...

HP has introduced OpenNFV, a comprehensive Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) programme designed to help the telecommunications industry accelerate innovation and launch new services faster, easier and with less expense through the virtualization of telecommunications core networks and network functions. Read further...

Intel Corporation has unveiled the Intel Industrial Solutions System Consolidation Series, providing an accelerated path for OEMs, machine builders and system integrators to implement state-of-the-art industrial embedded systems. This is the first pre-integrated, pre-validated embedded virtualization product that allows customers to merge and manage multiple discrete systems into a single machine. The new series enables industrial and automation design makers to reduce costs and deliver new products faster and more efficiently. Read further...

Rogue Wave Software has showcased the industry's first end-to-end toolset for deep software risk assessment and mitigation at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, California and at Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany. Through a combination of technology-leading tools in defect, performance and liability analysis, Rogue Wave's suite of products allows development teams to find and eliminate security, stability and compliance issues before they occur, reducing both risk and cost. Read further...

In recent years, OpenMP has shifted from being solely focused on shared-memory systems to also include accelerators, embedded systems, multicore and real-time systems. The OpenMP Architecture Review Board (ARB) has released a new Mission Statement to formalize this change. Read further...

Fujitsu has launched the Fujitsu Server PRIMEQUEST 2000 line-up, a brand new series of high-end servers that offer unprecedented x86 performance and memory expandability. The introduction of innovative mission-critical functionality guarantees business continuity, with availability levels equivalent to those of UNIX systems - but with the cost advantages of an x86-based architecture. Read further...

Researchers at IBM have set a new record for data transmission over a multimode optical fiber, a type of cable that is typically used to connect nearby computers within a single building or on a campus. The achievement demonstrated that the standard, existing technology for sending data over short distances should be able to meet the growing needs of servers, data centres and supercomputers through the end of this decade, the researchers said. Read further...

University of New Mexico (UNM) will soon have much more computing power under its belt. Enough to sequence the genomic data for thousands of people in New Mexico over the next several years. Thanks to a gift from the New Mexico Consortium, the repurposed 120-node, 960-core, AMD/InfiniBand-based system will be housed at the UNM Center for Advanced Research Computing (CARC) and be made available for parallel research computing use by faculty and student researchers at UNM, New Mexico Tech and New Mexico State University. The supercomputer is named Ulam, after renowned mathematician and Manhattan Project scientist Stanislaw Ulam. Read further...

Nova Southeastern University's (NSU) Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences has received a multimillion dollar IBM Supercomputer that will place NSU's research at the forefront of computational biology, data mining, graphic visualization and software engineering. Read further...

In the fourth quarter of 2013, worldwide server shipments grew 3.2 percent year over year, while revenue declined 6.6 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012, according to Gartner Inc. In all of 2013, worldwide server shipments grew 2.1 percent, and server revenue declined 4.5 percent. Read further...

Scientists running genomic analyses at George Washington University's Colonial One High Performance Computing Center will pilot ultra high-speed 40 Gigabit per second data transfers from the National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NLM) using both organisations' new 100 Gigabit per second links to the Internet2 Network. Read further...