Computers have been doubling in performance every two years for the last forty years but we are reaching the physical limits of what we can achieve with current semiconductor technology. An EU initiative for High Performance Computing (HPC) is looking to shake up the way in which computer processors are designed and made. The good news is that computers with higher performance will also lead to less power consumption; a win for computing and a win for the environment. Read further...

HP has expanded its portfolio of highly available, efficient and proven solutions for enterprises' most demanding applications and workloads. The enhancements to the HP-UX operating environment and HP CloudSystem Matrix with HP-UX, as well as new HP Integrity NonStop entry-class servers enable organisations to increase business performance, boost efficiency and reduce costs. Read further...

The University of Texas at San Antonio will host the inaugural Open BigCloud Symposium and Open Compute Project Workshop May 7-8 in the HEB University Center Ballroom (HUC 1.104) on the UTSA Main Campus. The symposium will bring together the nation's brightest minds in academia, industry and research to discuss the future of Cloud computing and Big Data. One highlight will be the official grand opening of the UTSA Open Compute Certification and Solutions Laboratory, the first laboratory of its kind in North America. Read further...

IBM is launching a series of initiatives to make it easier and more profitable for Business Partners of SoftLayer, an IBM company, to develop, market and sell Cloud services to their customers. Read further...

Parabon Computation has launched the Compute Against Alzheimer’s Disease (CAAD) research initiative, which will accelerate investigations into the causes and risks of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) through the application of large-scale computational capacity donated by concerned citizens and organisations. AD is a leading cause of death and dementia among the elderly, affecting nearly 40 million people worldwide. In addition to its devastating effect on patients and its emotional toll on their families, the societal costs of AD are estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, yet there are no effective treatment options available today. Read further...

SETI.Germany invites all BOINC teams to the 5th BOINC Pentathlon, a competition inspired by the Pentathlon in ancient Greece. Teams will compete between May 5 and May 19 at five different BOINC projects to determine the overall winner. Read further...

A BOINC server VM image, based on Debian 7 and the latest BOINC code, is available, thanks to Christian Beer and the University of Halle. Read further...

Tower International, a global automotive manufacturer, has selected Altair's Compute Manager to simplify and streamline access to distributed resources. Compute Manager is a Web-based application for accessing computing resources from any location. With Compute Manager's easy to use interface, users can set up jobs on remote HPC systems, access geographically distributed applications and data, manage and monitor workloads, and visualize results remotely from virtually any Internet-enabled device. Read further...

Forschungszentrum Jülich has joined the OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community based on the POWER microprocessor architecture. Platinum members of the foundation like IBM, NVIDIA, Mellanox and Samsung Electronics are leading providers of key High-Performance Computing (HPC) technologies. By joining the OpenPOWER Foundation, Forschungszentrum Jülich intends to foster the development of future high-end solutions by providing architectural and application expertise to the foundation. Read further...

The Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC) has recently appointed CSC's Project Director Antti Pursula to co-ordinate the Tryggve project, an ambitious project designed to develop simpler and safer e-infrastructure services for researchers to improve our quality of life. Read further...

Intel has selected CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd. as one of its Intel Parallel Computing Centers. CSC will collaborate with Intel to develop parallel algorithms and optimize several open source high-performance computing (HPC) applications for Intel's latest parallel processor architectures. The work will be conducted by CSC in collaboration with Finnish Centre of Excellence in Atmospheric Science research unit and Bull's Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming (IPCC). Read further...

Geophysicists use the SeisSol earthquake simulation software to investigate rupture processes and seismic waves beneath the Earth's surface. Their goal is to simulate earthquakes as accurately as possible to be better prepared for future events and to better understand the fundamental underlying mechanisms. However, the calculations involved in this kind of simulation are so complex that they push even supercomputers to their limits. Read further...

ICTP and the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) are now accepting applications for the inaugural year of the Master in High Performance Computing (MHPC) programme, which will start in September 2014 in Trieste. Read further...

ICRI, the International Conference on Research Infrastructures, held its second edition from 2 to 4 April 2014 at the Megaron Athens International Conference Centre. On 3 April, during the 4th parallel session on e-Infrastructures, Part 1: Sustainability & Business Models, Catherine Rivière, Chair of the PRACE Council, outlined the future of PRACE and HPC in Europe. Read further...

A total of 55 international researchers, scientists and students participated in the PRACE Spring School at the Castle of Hagenberg, Austria. The aim was to bring together users and developers of research and industry and to learn about efficient software development for high performance computing (HPC) research infrastructures. Read further...

Delegates at the TEDx Sydney conference on 26 April were set to be wowed by a breakthrough film by Kate Kazokas and Lucy Adelaide - thanks in no small part to projection technology and technical support services supplied by the TDC - Technical Direction Company. Read further...

The OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community dedicated to accelerating data centre innovation, has taken its first steps to deliver transformative system designs based on IBM's new POWER8 processor. Read further...

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder) will join the Intel Parallel Computing Centers programme. Participants in the programme will develop methods to increase the performance of applications that use advanced microprocessor technologies and will help train the next generation of scientists and engineers who will apply these new technologies to challenges of societal importance. Read further...

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded AltaSim Technologies nearly $150,000 to further develop the technologies that drive additive manufacturing - adding momentum to an public-private initiative based in Ohio to boost industrial use of modelling and simulation. Read further...

Somewhere in the cosmos an ordinary galaxy spins, seemingly at slumber. Then all of a sudden, a flash of light explodes from the galaxy's centre. A star orbiting too close to the event horizon of the galaxy's central supermassive black hole is torn apart by the force of gravity, heating up its gas and sending out a beacon to the far reaches of the universe. Read further...

Chelsio Communications, Inc.'s T4 based 10GbE adapters have been selected by NEC Corporation for NEC's HPC Systems for network and storage connectivity in SX-ACE, the latest SX-series Vector Supercomputer, targeted at large data processing applications. Equipped with the Chelsio T420-CR Storage Adapter, the NEC SX-ACE enables customers to achieve unprecedented levels of performance and efficiency for scientific computing applications such as weather forecasting, climate studies, fluid dynamics and material science simulations. Read further...

Imagine having access to your own personal shopping assistant anytime, anywhere. Thanks to a partnership between IBM and Fluid Inc., the ultimate shopping advisor, powered by Watson, is poised to transform the consumer shopping experience. Read further...

HP has unveiled an enterprise-class storage disk array that provides customers with lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for traditional storage workloads in mission-critical environments. Large enterprises rely on mission-critical applications to drive their businesses, which means that applications and data must remain available at all times, without exception. To ensure business continuity, enterprises require storage solutions that are designed to maintain high levels of data availability and continuous disaster recovery protection. To drive greater enterprise efficiency, storage systems that serve these mission-critical environments must also drive greater storage consolidation, deliver extremely high performance levels and offer the lowest possible TCO without compromising data availability or data protection. Read further...

Advances in the technology frontier have resulted in major disruptions and transformations in the massive data processing infrastructures. For the past three decades, classical database management systems, data warehousing and data analysis technologies have been well recognized as effective tools for data management and analysis. More recently, data from different sources and in different format are being collected at unprecedented scale. This gives rise to the so-called 3V characteristics of the Big Data: volume, velocity and variety. Classical approaches of data warehousing and data analysis are no longer viable to deal with both the scale of data and the sophisticated analysis. This challenge has been labeled as the 'Big Data' problem. In principle, while earlier DBMSs focused on modelling operational characteristics of enterprises, Big Data systems are now expected to model vast amounts of heterogeneous and complex data. Read further...

IBM has debuted new Power Systems servers that allow data centres to manage staggering data requirements with unprecedented speed, all built on an open server platform. In a move that sharply contrasts other chip and server manufacturers' proprietary business models, IBM through the OpenPOWER Foundation, released detailed technical specifications for its POWER8 processor, inviting collaborators and competitors alike to innovate on the processor and server platform, providing a catalyst for new innovation. Read further...