During the e-IRG Open Workshop, recently held in Belval/Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg,Primeur Magazinehad the opportunity to talk with Professor Rudi Balling who is heading the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine at the University of Luxembourg. This is an interdisciplinary centre which has under one roof experimental and computational biology, programmers, IT, engineers, physicists and mathematicians, and at the same time is reaching out to questions in health, particularly in the domain of neuro-degenerative diseases. The main emphasis is on Parkinson's disease which is the second most common neuro-degenerative disease next to Alzheimer's. The researchers at the centre are trying to figure out the mechanisms of orthogenesis: where is the disease coming from? Is it hereditary? Is it environmentally triggered? The researchers are trying to develop computational models to mathematically describe the diseases. This is very similar to what happens when you design an air plane. You do not launch 1,000 air planes to count how many come down but first you do the design on the computer with simulations. Read further...

PicoCluster LLC will demo the Raspberry PI 2 cluster, or Pico, January 6-9, 2016 at the Sands, booth 70974, at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada. Read further...

The AXA Research Fund has awarded to ICFO - The Institute of Photonic Sciences a Chair, which is both permanent and pioneering on a global scale, for a quantum information technology project that will focus on risks associated with data privacy. The Chair has a budget of 1.7 million euro, bringing AXA's support to science in Spain to approximately 10 million euro. Read further...

IBM has opened its global headquarters for Watson Internet of Things (IoT), launching a series of new offerings, capabilities and ecosystem partners designed to extend the power of cognitive computing to the billions of connected devices, sensors and systems that comprise the IoT. These new offerings will be available through the IBM Watson IoT Cloud, the company's global platform for IoT business and developers. Read further...

Two young researchers, recognised for their outstanding performance in the PRACE Summer of HPC 2015 programme, have been awarded. On 15 December 2015 the Summer of HPC awards ceremony took place at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC), Spain where dr. Oriol Pineda, PRACE Member of the Board of Directors, presented awards to Alberto García García from Spain and to Simos Kazantzidis from Greece. Read further...

Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from institutions in Canada, Europe, Japan and the United States are invited to apply for the seventh International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences, to be held June 26 to July 1, 2016, in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Applications are due February 15, 2016. The summer school is sponsored byCompute/Calcul Canada, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) with funds from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) and the RIKEN Advanced Insti­tute for Computational Science (RIKEN AICS). Read further...

Allinea has released version 6.0 of their HPC development tools suite Allinea Forge and Performance Reports. Building on their commitment to serving the scientific HPC community, Allinea has been demonstrating the new features at SC15 this year. Read further...

Scientists from the Heat and Mass Transfer Technological Center (CTTC) at the Technical University of Catalonia in Spain, have harnessed the extreme performance of the Mira supercomputer with their in-house multi-physics CFD code as a result of collaboration on scalable debugging for the high-end system between Allinea Software and Argonne National Laboratory. After participating in the Argonne Training Programme for Extreme Scale Computing (ATPESC) at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) in the US, scientists from the CTTC had the opportunity to use ALCF's supercomputer, Mira - a 10-petaflops IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer equipped with 786,432 processors and 768 terabytes of memory - to test the performance and scalability of their CFD code, TermoFluids. The focus was set on the first level of parallelisation based on a distributed memory model and MPI communications. Read further...

Intersect360 Research is conducting its first HPC study on processing elements. The objective of this special research is to understand usage, planned adoption, and perspectives on the multiple processing architecture options in the market, or coming to market in the near term. Your input will provide the industry with valuable insights on the processing elements for HPC. Read further...

BittWare, an industry-leading board supplier for over 25 years specializing in high-performance FPGA platforms, has joined the OpenPOWER Foundation, an open development community based on the POWER microprocessor architecture. BittWare joins a growing roster of technology organisations working collaboratively to build advanced server, networking, storage, and acceleration technology as well as industry-leading open source software. All of this is aimed at delivering more choice, control, and flexibility to developers of next-generation, hyperscale, and Cloud data centres. The OpenPOWER Foundation makes POWER hardware and software available to open development for the first time, as well as making POWER intellectual property licensable to others, greatly expanding the ecosystem of innovators on the platform. Read further...

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has introduced network management and visualization software for virtual networks, designed to give network operators end-to-end visibility of their entire network. Network Node Manager i (NNMi) provides organisations with complete visibility into their network topologies, maintains control, and extends their insight into the virtual switching fabric of their entire network. Read further...

The power of Thunder could be felt in the basement of the Air Force Research Laboratory's Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base during a ribbon-cutting ceremony welcoming AFRL's third supercomputer to its Information Technology complex. Thunder is part of the DOD High Performance Computing Modernization Programme. It joins two other large systems - Spirit and Lightning - already located at the centre. The Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI) ICE X is named Thunder after the Air Force's P-47 Thunderbolt and its subsequent namesake, the A-10 aircraft, both of which have played key roles in significant armed conflict for the U.S. military. Read further...

The registration of the 2016 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC16) has been officially launched worldwide. Meanwhile, the ASC16 committee issues the call for competition application. This initiative provides a unique opportunity for organisations and individuals with acceptable application examples. Read further...

Whenever news breaks about what Earth's climate is expected to be like decades into the future or how much rainfall various regions around the country or the world are likely to receive, those educated estimates are generated by a global climate model. But what exactly is a climate model? And how does it work? At its most basic, a global climate model (GCM) is a computer software programme that solves complex equations that mathematically describe how Earth's various systems, processes and cycles work, interact and react under certain conditions. It's math in action. Read further...

Genetically identical sibling cells do not always behave the same way. So far this has been attributed to random molecular reactions. Now systems biologists of the University of Zurich have discovered an overlooked consequence of the spatial separation of cells into a nucleus and a cytoplasm. Building on top of this insight they could predict with supercomputers the activity of genes in individual human cells. Read further...

The van Leeuwenhoek Centre for Advanced Microscopy (LCAM), a collaboration of the Netherlands Cancer Institute, the AMC-UvA and the UvA's Faculty of Science, is according to Euro-BioImaging one of the leading microscopy centres in Europe. The centre has therefore been officially endorsed as a node of this European consortium. Read further...

The heart as a simulation: In a new project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) scientists of TU Dresden explore the computational modelling of the human heart. They hope to gain a better understanding of its complex operation and thus better treatments for cardiac patients. The computer simulations are going to be developed at the Institute for Structural Analysis headed by Prof. Michael Kaliske. Read further...

At the 2015 Supercomputing Conference in Austin, Texas, HPC and visualization provider Exxact Corporation announced its first ever ranking in the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. Codenamed the Yoda, the Exxact developed supercomputer was placed at no. 227 on the list featuring 7,920 cores, a Rmax value of 417.0 teraflops, and a Rpeak value of 831.0 teraflops. Read further...

ClusterVision and UberCloud formally have integrated UberCloud Application Containers with Trinity, ClusterVision's private Cloud solution, at Computing Insight UK 2015 (CIUK 2015) in Coventry, UK on 9 December 2015. Trinity provides a complete HPC cluster manager on top of a Cloud platform capable of managing HPC, general IT, and Big Data, bringing the flexibility of Platform-as-a-Service to HPC. Read further...

AT&T and IBM are expanding their long-term strategic relationship to bring businesses a full suite of advanced networking, application and hosting services. Under the agreement, AT&T will transition its managed application and managed hosting services unit to IBM. IBM will then align these managed service capabilities with the IBM Cloud portfolio. IBM will also acquire equipment and access to floor space in AT&T data centres currently supporting the applications and managed hosting operations. Read further...