Earl Joseph and Bob Sorensen from IDC presented the latest HPC trends at ISC 2015 in Frankfurt, Germany. IDC has over 1000 analysts in 62 countries. These analysts are tracking all HPC servers sold each quarter, they publish over 85 research reports each year, they assist in collaborations between buyers, users and vendors, and they also assist governments in HPC plans. Next to organizing 4 HPC User Forum meetings each year, IDC also provides some new services. It is developing a worldwide ROI measurement system. IDC also is deploying a large research programme around High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA) and it does quarterly tracking of GPU/accelerators. For the ISC 2015 update, Earl Joseph and Bob Sorensen gave a global HPC market update and also one for Europe in particular. They presented an HPDA update to show where Big Data meets HPC. They also offered an ROI research update; talked about upcoming HPC User Forum meetings - the next one will be in Broomfield, Colorado, September 8-10, 2015; and presented the HPC Innovation Programme update. Read further...

At the Fortissimo Forum, held on 8 July, 2015 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands,Primeur Magazinetalked with Guy Lonsdale, CEO of Scapos, who presented the introduction to the Fortissimo project. Scapos is reponsible for the operational management of the project, in addition to the coordination of the Open Calls which brought in lots of new experiments to the project. Fortissimo is about the promotion of HPC and Cloud-based access to HPC simulation for manufacturing SMEs. It is part of an initiative called ICT Innovation for manufacturing SMEs (I4MS), which is funded under the Framework of the Factories of the Future Programme. Read further...

Both "big computing" presented at ISC 2015 and "Computing+" presented by Inspur reflect the trend of evolution of products at the data centre towards high density, low power consumption and intellectualization. This is why the exhibitors at this session demonstrated a lot of liquid cooling technology, high-density and integrated products. SmartRack-Scale Server, the innovative product with fusion architecture from China, has attracted attention from a great number of participating experts and users depending on the unique design idea and powerful actual application data. Read further...

According to a paper published in the journalNature Nanotechnology, scientists discovered a phenomenon in which the use of carbon nanotubes, under specific conditions, could potentially lead to more efficient water filtering with less expense and less impact on the environment. The researchers' study of nanotubes - material that shows promise for a variety of technologies - was enabled by crowd computing in which volunteers channel the surplus processing power of their computing devices to scientists for use in conducting simulations. Read further...

The BOINC project has transitioned to a community-based governance model. Read further...

An open source software project involving the University of Southampton to extend the capacity of computational mathematics and interactive computing environments has received over seven million euro in EU funding. The resulting code, together with associated data and research publications, will be made available for free on the Internet as open source software that other researchers can use. Read further...

In the Horizon 2020 session at ISC 2015 in Frankfurt, Germany, Chair Panagiotis Tsarchopoulos from the European Commission introduced four speakers: Jean-François Lavignon from Bull, Sergi Girona from PRACE, François Bodin from IRISA, and Karen Padmore from HPC Wales. But first, Panagiotis Tsarchopoulos started out by sketching the key HPC developments in the European Union. In 2012, a report has been issued titled "HPC: Europe's place in a global race". Afterwards, the Council on HPC in 2013 concluded in a document to the "Establishment of a European Technology Platform on HPC and a Strategic Research Agenda". This has led to the HPC chapter in the Horizon 2020 programme including three elements: Computer science evolving towards exascale HPC; achieving excellence in HPC applications; and providing access to best supercomputing facilities and services for both industry and academia via PRACE. Read further...

With the successful restart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), now operating at nearly twice its former collision energy, comes an enormous increase in the volume of data physicists must sift through to search for new discoveries. Thanks to planning and a pilot project funded by the offices of Advanced Scientific Computing Research and High-Energy Physics within the Department of Energy's Office of Science, a remarkable data-management tool developed by physicists at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory and the University of Texas at Arlington is evolving to meet the Big-Data challenge. Read further...

The OpenMP Architecture Review Board (ARB) has announced the full line-up of world-class keynote speakers, technical presentations, tutorials and panel sessions to be hosted at the inaugural OpenMPCon Developer Conference, which will be held in Aachen, Germany, 28-30 September, 2015. Read further...

CoolIT Systems' CEO & CTO, Geoff Lyon, has been selected as a finalist for Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur Of The Year Award 2015 in the Prairies region. This year, EY is celebrating the achievements of 43 entrepreneurial stars in the Prairies region through the prestigious EY Entrepreneur Of The Year awards programme. Read further...

Intersect360 Research, an analyst firm focused on high-performance data centre markets, including High Performance Computing (HPC), high-performance enterprise, Cloud, Big Data, and hyperscale, is restructuring access to its research reports in order to allow a greater number of organisations to benefit from the company's data and insights. Read further...

HP and NEC Corporation will collaborate to accelerate communications service provider (CSP) adoption of network functions virtualization (NFV) technology. The combination of the HP OpenNFV Platform with NEC's virtualized network functions and management systems will provide CSPs with robust carrier-grade, open source-based NFV solutions. Read further...

SGI, a global expert in high-performance solutions for compute, data analytics and data management, will widen customer access to SGI's industry-leading in-memory computing solution, the SGI UV 300H compute servers for the SAP HANA platform, with Dell. This will help enable Dell to meet customer demands for running SAP HANA at extreme capacity, adding to Dell's existing portfolio for the SAP HANA platform in enterprise environments. Read further...

An alliance led by IBM Research has produced the semiconductor industry's first 7nm (nanometer) node test chips with functioning transistors. The breakthrough, accomplished in partnership with GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung at SUNY Polytechnic Institute's Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (SUNY Poly CNSE), could result in the ability to place more than 20 billion tiny switches - transistors - on the fingernail-sized chips that power everything from smartphones to spacecraft. Read further...

Random-access memory, or RAM, is where computers like to store the data they're working on. A processor can retrieve data from RAM tens of thousands of times more rapidly than it can from the computer's disk drive. But in the age of Big Data, data sets are often much too large to fit in a single computer's RAM. The data describing a single human genome would take up the RAM of somewhere between 40 and 100 typical computers. Read further...

During a press tour at ISC 2015, Satoshi Matsuoka from the Tokyo Institute of Technology explained the liquid immersive cooled Tsubame KFC, and the plans for the new supercomputer Tsubame-3, that will not only run HPC workloads, but also will have Big Data and Cloud computing features. Read further...

Combining 26-year old data with supercomputer simulations, a team of scientists at Imperial College London have modelled Neptune's magnetic field in detail for the first time. The researchers find that the furthest planet from the Sun has a badly behaved magnetic field, but one that may help us understand the risks from 'space weather' around Earth. Lars Mejnertsen, of Imperial College London, presented their findings in a presentation on 8 July at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting at Venue Cymru, in Llandudno, Wales. Read further...

IBM and Mubadala Development Company, an Abu Dhabi-based investment and development company, have signed an agreement to bring IBM Watson to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The companies will collaborate to deliver powerful Watson Cloud-based cognitive computing to health care, retail, education, banking and finance organisations. The new joint venture will also create a broad regional ecosystem of partners, entrepreneurs, start-ups and app developers who will apply Watson in innovative ways throughout MENA. Read further...

On July 15, 2015, the team representing Beijing's Tsinghua University was crowned overall champion of the 4th ISC International Student Cluster Competition, the second time the Chinese team has won the award after their victory at the inaugural event in 2012. Held at the 2015 International Supercomputer Conference (ISC15), this is also the second world championship won by Tsinghua University this year, following hot on the heels of their ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge triumph in May. Read further...

Following the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) Dowling Review into the complexity of current business-university collaborations - which recommended as 'simple as possible' interfaces between user and scheme that 'hide the wiring' - Jisc announced power systems provider Rolls-Royce as the first company to join its high performance computing (HPC) agreement. Read further...

IBM is now offering NVIDIA Tesla K80 dual-GPU accelerators on bare metal Cloud servers. With the new offering, IBM Cloud is bringing high-speed performance to the SoftLayer Cloud infrastructure, enabling companies to build supercomputing clusters without having to expand their existing technology infrastructure. Read further...

OVH.com, a large Internet hosting company, has launched the world's first ARMv8 based public Cloud for scalable compute and storage powered by Cavium's flagship 48 core 64-bit ARMv8-A ThunderX workload optimized processor. Cavium is a provider of products that enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise, data centre, wired and wireless networking. These platforms will be available to OVH.com customers starting this quarter. Read further...

In the journalNatureprominent researchers from Canada, Europe and the U.S. have made a powerful call to major funding agencies, asking them to commit to establishing a global genomic data commons in the Cloud that could be easily accessed by authorized researchers worldwide. Read further...

i-Virtualize, a provider of Cloud and on-premises computing solutions across North America, has selected the VersaStack solution by Cisco and IBM to help its customers accelerate the installation of a system of infrastructure for Big Data and Analytics, Cloud and mobile computing. Read further...

To help companies support their complete quote-to-cash process in the Cloud, Oracle has expanded the Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud with two new products, Oracle Order Management Cloud and Oracle Global Order Promising Cloud. These two products provide modern order promising, management, visibility and fulfillment capabilities, and link the existing quote and sales process in Oracle Configure, Price, and Quote Cloud (Oracle CPQ Cloud) and the pick, pack and ship processes in Oracle Inventory Cloud to billing in Oracle ERP Cloud. Read further...