A team of researchers led by Duke University and the University of Maryland has been tapped by the nation's "Q Branch" to take quantum computing efforts to the next level using one of the field's leading technologies - ion traps. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) invests in high-risk, high-payoff research programmes to tackle some of the most difficult challenges in the intelligence community. One of these challenges is dealing with encryption. Codes considered unbreakable by today's best supercomputers could be handled in a matter of hours by quantum computers. Read further...

ELIXIR, a major initiative to develop the infrastructure needed to coordinate and sustain Europe's bioinformatics resources, is the latest organisation to endorse Open Science by reporting their outputs on the open publishing platform F1000Research. The partnership is especially fitting, as the Open Access, Open Data, Open Source and Open Peer Review values that are central in ELIXIR's mission and community engagement strategy, are also central to F1000Research's unique model. Read further...

Early-stage postgraduate and late-stage undergraduate students are invited to apply for the PRACE Summer of HPC 2016 programme, to be held in July & August 2016. Consisting of a training week and two months on placement at top HPC centres around Europe, the programme affords participants the opportunity to learn and share more about PRACE and HPC, and includes accommodation, a stipend and travel to their HPC centre placement. Applications open 13 January 2016. Read further...

Taking place in Prague from 18-20 January 2016, the 11th HiPEAC conference will bring together the best minds in computer architecture and compilation to tackle the key issues facing the computing systems on which we depend. Low energy consumption takes centre stage, with experts showcasing solutions that will maximize the performance to power ratio. Other areas include security, which is of increasing concern as connected devices begin to pervade every aspect of our lives, as well as looking to the future of ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things. Read further...

Nanotechnologists at the University of Twente research institute MESA+ have discovered a new fundamental property of electrical currents in very small metal circuits. They show how electrons can spread out over the circuit like waves and cause interference effects at places where no electrical current is driven. The geometry of the circuit plays a key role in this so called nonlocal effect. The interference is a direct consequence of the quantum mechanical wave character of electrons and the specific geometry of the circuit. For designers of quantum computers it is an effect to take account of. The results are published in theBritish Journal Scientific Reports. Read further...

DataDirect Networks (DDN) has announced the winners of the 2015 Pioneer User Awards. The awards recognize and celebrate visionary individuals, organisations and/or multiple people who are embracing leading-edge high performance computing technologies to shatter long-standing technical limits and to accelerate business results and scientific insights. The recipients of the DDN 2015 Pioneer Awards are Dr. Alf Wachsmann, CIO at Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine; Steve Furmedge, Director of Security Services at Public Transport Authority; and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. Read further...

NVIDIA has shifted its autonomous-driving leadership into high gear. NVIDIA has unveiled artificial intelligence technology that will let cars sense the world around them and pilot a safe route forward. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed DRIVE PX 2, an automotive supercomputing platform that processes 24 trillion deep learning operations a second. That's 10 times the performance of the first-generation DRIVE PX, now being used by more than 50 companies in the automotive world. Read further...

Detecting individual particles of light just got a bit more precise - by 74 picoseconds to be exact - thanks to advances in materials by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers and their colleagues in fabricating superconducting nanowires. Read further...

Imagination Technologies has introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2016 the latest developments and progress in driving widespread adoption of its MIPS family of CPUs. Read further...

The OpenPOWER Foundation has elected John Zannos, Canonical, Chair, and Calista Redmond, IBM, President of the OpenPOWER Foundation Board of Directors, effective January 1, 2016. John Zannos and Calista Redmond bring deep knowledge of the open technology development community and intimate familiarity with the Foundation's core mission, with both playing key roles within the Foundation since 2014. The new leadership will continue to guide the proliferation of OpenPOWER-based technology solutions built on IBM's POWER architecture in today's data centres. Read further...

Harnessing the power of computers to help create an economically, environmentally and socially sustainable future - that is the purpose of a major new grant issued by the National Science Foundation. The five-year, $10 million grant is part of NSF's Expeditions in Computing programme and will provide funding to establish a national and international research network, called CompSustNet, that will explore new research dimensions in "computational sustainability", a new field devoted to developing computational solutions to the challenges involved in creating a sustainable future. Read further...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $30 million in funding to three Expeditions in Computing projects. Each grant will provide $10 million over five years to interdisciplinary, multi-investigator research teams to support transformative computing and information technology research. The Expeditions projects constitute the largest single investments in computer and information science research NSF has made. Read further...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has granted a new $10 million award to Cornell University Computer Science Professor Carla Gomes, director of Cornell's Institute for Computational Sustainability. Carla Gomes leads one of three Expeditions in Computing projects, each of which has been awarded $10 million over five years by NSF. The grants support interdisciplinary, multi-investigator research teams working on transformative computing and technology. It represents some of NSF's largest investments in computer science research. Read further...

IBM and SoftBank Robotics Holdings Corp. (SBRH) are planning to offer a version of Watson for SoftBank Robotics' Pepper robots, aimed at global enterprise customers. IBM and SBRH will tap into data and knowledge across the "Internet of Things" to enable Watson-powered Pepper to make sense of the hidden meaning in data that traditional computers cannot comprehend - including social media, video, images and text. IBM Watson is the first open cognitive computing technology platform and represents a new era in computing where systems understand the world in the way that humans do: through senses, learning, and experience. Read further...

Antibiotic resistance has been called one of the world's most pressing health problems, with some studies suggesting that, absent major improvements in drug discovery, by 2050 more individuals will die from drug-resistant bacterial infections than cancer. To help stem this nightmare scenario, a team of researchers - with the aid of the Gordon supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center based at UC San Diego - has identified a class of possible antibiotics with the potential to disable previously drug-resistant bacteria. Read further...

Roughly 40 percent of all industrial property loss in the United States comes from fire, and fire is the leading cause of commercial property damage. For insurance companies, understanding how fires spread can help save their industrial clients from massive property and business interruption losses, ultimately saving both insurer and insured millions of dollars. Businesses with large warehouses are at particular risk, because as storage warehouses get bigger, providing adequate protection using traditional ceiling-mounted sprinkler systems is becoming more challenging. Read further...

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) chose SGI to facilitate the development of more advanced climate and weather models. The new SGI ICE XA system, named "Cheyenne", will perform some of the world's most data intensive calculations for weather and climate modelling to improve the resolution and precision by orders of magnitude. As a result, NCAR's scientists will provide more actionable projections about the impact of climate change for specific regions and assist agencies throughout the world develop more accurate weather predictions on a local and global scale. Read further...

Barbara Chapman, a researcher in programming languages, programming models, and compilers, has been named head of the Computer Science and Mathematics Group (CSM) under the new Computational Science Initiative at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. Barbara Chapman is also a professor of Applied Mathematics & Statistics and Computer Science at Stony Brook University, where she serves as a joint appointee affiliated with the university's Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS). Read further...

ViiMed, the US Pathways-as-a-Service platform, and E-Medicus, the Swiss Cloud-based eHealth company, have launched a promising international digital health partnership. This announcement comes a few months after E-Medicus entered an international partnership with T-Systems, a 100% subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, with the aim to globally improve care for chronically ill patients and to considerably simplify the research projects of university establishments and pharmaceutical companies. Read further...

Nimbix Inc., an expert in Cloud-based, High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure and applications, has selected Infomart Data Centers' Infomart Dallas to support the infrastructure needs of its upgraded HPC Cloud platform, JARVICE 2.0. Infomart Dallas provides Nimbix with a high-density data centre complete with industry-leading connectivity options, access to the core Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) network hub, and the low-cost power it needs to deliver its innovative HPC solutions. Read further...