At CloudScape VII, held in March 2015 in Brussels,Primeur Magazinehad the opportunity to interview Joe Baguley, Chief Technology Officer at VMware for EMEA, about hybrid Cloud adoption. The reality is now that we need to not only look at public Cloud computing but at a distributed computing platform spanning both public and private providers, in fact at multiple physical locations, and it does not matter so much who owns those resources. The other interesting thing is the adoption and interest container technology, and in the Horizon2020 research looking at micro services projects. The future is pretty bright for Cloud computing in Europe. It is becoming the de facto standard. Read further...

SoftLayer, an IBM company, has opened a second Cloud data centre in the Netherlands, located in Almere, just outside of Amsterdam. The new facility helps meet the rapid growth of IBM Cloud by doubling its SoftLayer capacity in the region, and provides even more options in the country and region for redundant data storage and geographically isolated services, ideal for creating secure and comprehensive back-up and recovery strategies. Read further...

Cloud applications are changing the way we compute: from storage and security, to collaboration, content and beyond, the Cloud is providing new opportunities for higher education institutions to rethink and re-architect every aspect of their cyberinfrastructure. Cloud service integration on campus is a key focus for today's higher education IT departments, who are leveraging the Cloud to improve operating efficiency while preserving data and taking advantage of advanced security services now available at Cloud scale. At the Internet2 Global Summit in Washington, D.C. IT leaders in the research and education (R&E) community have the opportunity to discuss and collaborate on the latest advances in Cloud technologies, share experiences and discover innovative ways of enhancing and deploying advanced technologies on campuses. Read further...

HP has introduced a new Cloud access security platform designed to complement the existing HP Atalla Cloud security portfolio, and expand its leadership in data-centric security. HP's commitment to data-centric security was demonstrated by its recent acquisition of Voltage Security, a provider of high performance tokenization and encryption. With the introduction of the new HP Cloud Access Security Protection platform, HP has now partnered with Cloud access security broker Adallom to bring enhanced Cloud security monitoring, governance and control capabilities to the portfolio. Read further...

DATA4 has opened their second data centre in Milan, thereby expanding the Milan campus by an additional 2,200 m2 of net technical space and a further 4.2MW of IT power. The addition of this new generation data centre brings the total capacity on the campus to 4,500 m2 and 7.8MW. Read further...

PRACE - the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe - celebrates its 5th anniversary. In the past five years, PRACE has made an enormous leap from a project-based consortium to a fully-fledged international association of 25 countries with an office in Brussels and multiple projects that it leads or co-operates in. Read further...

Rock Flow Dynamics, a provider of software and services to the oil and gas industry, is now a globally authorized reseller of Altair's PBS Professional, its high-performance computing (HPC) workload manager and job scheduler for clusters, Clouds, and supercomputers. Read further...

IFP Energies nouvelles (IFPEN) and Inria have just signed a framework agreement relating to research in the field of high-performance and real-time computation applied to energy technologies. The objective for both parties is to cooperate on the joint development of methodologies and algorithms derived from digital sciences research in order to anticipate the needs of industry. Read further...

After a brief period of testing and validation, Galileo, the new supercomputer installed at Cineca, Bologna entered into full production. The investment is the result of an action of joint development with INFN and the University of Milano-Bicocca, which partially funded the acquisition costs of the new system. Read further...

ARM is licensing functional safety support across its Cortex-A, Cortex-R and Cortex-M processor families to deliver even stronger alignment for automotive use as the industry seeks to meet rapidly rising compute demands. This will help the ARM ecosystem shape next generation technologies as vehicle manufacturers plan increasingly complex driver assistance and infotainment systems. ARM-based SoCs are already widely used in the automotive sector. Read further...

The European Commission (EC) funded project in the field of high-performance computing (HPC) prolongs its optimization services after the official project end in April 2015 with a dedicated centre hosted at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Garching, Germany. An AutoTune book with details on tuning methods and the plugins developed in the project will be published by co-ordinator Prof. Dr. Michael Gerndt, Technische Universität München, in April. Read further...

Developer of the world-famous Candy Crush Saga, King Digital Entertainment, has chosen EXASOL to power its data analytics in order to deliver a superior gaming experience to its 149 million daily active users. The company, which offers more than 195 games in over 200 countries and currently generates over one petabyte of data a year, understands that analysing data and acting on insights generated by 1.5 billion game plays per day gives King the edge over its competitors. To power these analytics, King has chosen to use a combination of open source Hadoop and the fastest in-memory analytic database in the world, EXASOL's scalable, self-tuning EXASolution. Read further...

Applied Micro Circuits Corporation, a global expert in computing and connectivity solutions, and E4 Computer Engineering SpA, a supplier of customized solutions for high performance computing and enterprise data centres, have signed a collaboration to develop E4's new product series, the ARKA RK003. Read further...

A Spanish-led team of European researchers at the University of Cambridge has created an electronic device so accurate that it can detect the charge of a single electron in less than one microsecond. It has been dubbed the 'gate sensor' and could be applied in quantum computers of the future to read information stored in the charge or spin of a single electron. Read further...

Bright Computing, an expert in high performance infrastructure management solutions for Cloud, Big Data and HPC, has signed a partnership with CVIS, a Dutch-based company that delivers innovative high performance computing (HPC) solutions to organisations in the Benelux region. Read further...

Bright Computing, a provider of hardware-agnostic cluster and Cloud management software, will release the newest version of its OpenStack management software at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver. The summit will take place May 18-22, 2015 at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, British Columbia. Read further...

Allinea Software, an expert in software tools for High Performance Computing and CSCS, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, revealed insight into a partnership that is helping scientists in research and industry to exploit Piz Daint - Europe's most powerful supercomputer. Read further...

Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has officially opened its new Spin Phenomena Interdisciplinary Center (SPICE), which will facilitate interactions between the many diverse fields that study spin-related phenomena - at a level that each field could not achieve on its own. Thereby, SPICE addresses one of the grand challenges of the new century: to shorten the time of discovery of novel phenomena and the creation of new multi-functional advanced materials that need the knowledge of more than one field to emerge. SPICE is sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the German federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Read further...

Altair has signed an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) agreement with Cray Inc. PBS Professional is now Cray's preferred workload manager and job scheduler. The three-year agreement represents an expansion of Altair's long-standing partnership with Cray, a global expert in supercomputing and high-performance computing (HPC) systems. Under the terms of the agreement, Cray can more easily integrate PBS Professional as the preferred scheduler on Cray systems, with the ability to bundle PBS Professional units with new systems shipped anywhere in the world. Read further...

At this moment all bets are off and it is unclear whether we will ever learn the outcome of this competition. Scientists at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and elsewhere are developing technology that can resist attacks using quantum computers. These cryptosystems need to be in place before big quantum computers become a reality, which is expected some time after 2025. Even if the scientists win that race quantum computers can still decrypt communication that we encrypt today with current technologies if the attacker has retained this data. Read further...

Intersect360 Research is conducting its eighth annual HPC Site Census survey. Your input will help technology and services suppliers better understand the server, storage, network, and software technology currently in use at High Performance Computing sites. Responses must be received from qualified HPC respondents and received no later than May 8, 2015. Read further...

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center and Cray Inc. have finalized a new contract for a Cray XC40 supercomputer that will be the first NERSC system installed in the newly built Computational Research and Theory facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Read further...

The Government of Canada invests CAD 100 million (about 75 million Euro) in digital research infrastructure. Economic Action 2015 proposes to provide CAD 1.33 billion over six years, starting in 2017–18, to the Canada Foundation for Innovation to support advanced research infrastructure. Read further...

Four Cray Inc. customers will be among the first to implement Seagate's latest high performance computing storage technology. Combined, the implementations of these four customers in the government, weather, oil and gas, and university sectors will consume more than 120 petabytes of storage capacity. Read further...

The University of Minnesota is boosting its research infrastructure with a mountain of computing power. Supercomputer Mesabi recently became the newest addition to the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI). Sporting a name that shares the Ojibwe word for "immense mountain", Mesabi is projected to be among the five fastest supercomputers used for academic purposes in the country. Its computing capabilities will drive the University of Minnesota research forward and open up new possibilities in a wide range of academic fields. Read further...