Primeur Magazinehad the opportunity to interview Tamas Kiss from the University of Westminster in London, UK. Tamas Kiss is the coordinator of the CloudSME project that is bringing Cloud HPC technology to SMEs. CloudSME creates a Cloud-based simulation platform for the European engineering and manufacturing SMEs. The platform allows to use simulation solutions in a much more effective way. CloudSME helps the enterprises to access technologies that they are not able to access at the moment. Read further...

Primeur Magazinehad the opportunity to interview Arjen van Rijn, Institute Manager NIKHEF in Amsterdam and Member of the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group, e-IRG, on the topic of a better service for scientific users in Europe by means of the e-Infrastructures Commons. Read further...

Equinix Inc., a global interconnection and data centre company, together with IBM has signed an agreement to provide enterprises direct access to the full portfolio of Cloud services from SoftLayer, an IBM company, via the Equinix Cloud Exchange in nine markets worldwide spanning the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific. Equinix also announced Cloud Exchange enhancements, including API functionality that makes it easier for service providers to use a single interface to the Cloud Exchange, resulting in scalable, private and secure connections to their Cloud services with near real-time provisioning. Read further...

HP has unveiled HP Haven OnDemand, an important milestone in its Big Data strategy that gives organisations of all sizes Cloud-based access to key components of HP’s world class analytics platform. HP Haven OnDemand, which runs on the HP Helion Cloud, enables customers to analyze all forms of data, including business data, machine data, and unstructured, human information. Developers can also leverage this innovative web service, as well as engage with a robust and growing community to create next-generation applications and services. Read further...

Oracle Corporation has announced that fiscal 2015 Q2 Total Revenues were up 3% to $9.6 billion. Software and Cloud Revenues was up 5% to $7.3 billion. Cloud software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) revenue was up 45% to $516 million. Hardware Systems revenues were up 1% to $1.3 billion. GAAP operating income was up 4% to $3.5 billion, and the GAAP operating margin was 37%. Non-GAAP operating income was up 3% to $4.4 billion, and the non-GAAP operating margin was 46%. GAAP net income was down 2% to $2.5 billion while non-GAAP net income was down 1% to $3.1 billion. GAAP earnings per share were $0.56, unchanged from last year, while non-GAAP earnings per share were up 1% at $0.69. GAAP operating cash flow on a trailing twelve-month basis was $15.3 billion. Read further...

IBM is planning a continued expansion of its global Cloud computing network to 40 Cloud centres with 12 new locations serving a growing roster of enterprise clients looking to move to hybrid Cloud computing. Read further...

An international team of astronomers, based at Durham University and Leiden University in the Netherlands, has developed a simulation of the universe in which realistic galaxies are created - their mass, size and age are similar to those of observed galaxies. Read further...

Net Futures 2015 taking place between 25-26 March is one of the main events for the future internet community. This year it will also be looking at one of the Digital Single Market objectives, on how to "Strengthen Digital Innovation & Research". Read further...

When you opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate the New Year, you probably didn't think the complicated physical process that launched the cork into the sky. Scientists, however, believe that understanding these principles can lead to more efficient energy production; but it requires a supercomputer. The bubbles that give the sparkling wine its texture and sometimes cause the liquid spray from the bottle are carbon dioxide, which is still in solution when under pressure, but reveals itself by returning to its gas phase after the cork pops. Read further...

In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue computer beat chess wizard Garry Kasparov. This year, a computer system developed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) equaled or bested scientists at the complex task of extracting data from scientific publications and placing it in a database that catalogues the results of tens of thousands of individual studies. Read further...

Prospects of developing computing and communication technologies based on quantum properties of light and matter may have taken a major step forward thanks to research by City College of New York physicists led by Dr. Vinod Menon. In a pioneering study, Professor Menon and his team were able to discover half-light, half-matter particles in atomically thin semiconductors (thickness ~ a millionth of a single sheet of paper) consisting of two-dimensional (2D) layer of molybdenum and sulfur atoms arranged similar to graphene. They sandwiched this 2D material in a light trapping structure to realize these composite quantum particles. Read further...

In the race to design the world's first universal quantum computer, a special kind of diamond defect called a nitrogen vacancy (NV) centre is playing a big role. NV centres consist of a nitrogen atom and a vacant site that together replace two adjacent carbon atoms in diamond crystal. The defects can record or store quantum information and transmit it in the form of light, but the weak signal is hard to identify, extract and transmit unless it is intensified. Read further...

NVIDIA has unveiled Tegra X1, its next-generation mobile super chip with over one teraflops of processing power - delivering capabilities that open the door to unprecedented graphics and sophisticated deep learning and computer vision applications. Read further...