Scientists have created a crystal structure that boosts the interaction between tiny bursts of light and individual electrons, an advance that could be a significant step toward establishing quantum networks in the future. Read further...

The Academy of Finland has granted 13,6 million euro funding for research infrastructures. In total, the Finnish Research Infrastructure (FIRI) Committee granted funds for 47 infrastructure projects. Funding is granted yearly to the best national or international infrastructures utilized by Finnish researchers. CSC is part of four of these projects. Read further...

A new record for the fastest ever data rate for digital information has been set by researchers of the University College London (UCL) in the Optical Networks Group. They achieved a rate of 1.125 Tb/s as part of research on the capacity limits of optical transmission systems, designed to address the growing demand for fast data rates. Read further...

Intel has opened a second parallel computing centre at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), at the University of California, San Diego. The focus of this new engagement is on earthquake research, including detailed computer simulations of major seismic activity that can be used to better inform and assist disaster recovery and relief efforts. Read further...

The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) soon will boost scientific and industrial discovery and innovation even more effectively across the state by offering researchers the services of a powerful new supercomputer, to be built later this year by Dell. Read further...

Altera, now a part of Intel Corporation, will participate to Embedded World 2016, taking place 23-25 February 2016 in Nuremberg, Germany, during which the company will showcase a range of Altera and partner technology demonstrations at their stand in Hall 5. These will include a wide range of applications including industrial automation for smart factory "Industry 4.0", SIL3 functional safety, Qt5.x/OpenGL compliant graphics cores, real-time optical character recognition, video/vision processing and analytics. In addition, there will be a demonstration of an ADAS stereo vision video analytics application at the Intel stand in Hall 1, stand 338. Read further...

SURFsara will expand the capacity of the Cartesius national supercomputer in the second half of 2016. The contract with the supplier, Atos, an international expert in digital services, was signed in December. The models that researchers are working on are becoming increasingly complex and the data sets ever larger, hence they need more computing power. Read further...

Cray Inc. has issued financial results for the year and fourth quarter ended December 31, 2015. All figures are based on U.S. GAAP unless otherwise noted. For 2015, Cray reported total revenue of $724.7 million, which compares with $561.6 million for 2014. Net income for 2015 was $27.5 million, or $0.68 per diluted share, compared to $62.3 million, or $1.54 per diluted share for 2014. Net income results for 2014 benefited from a $52.6 million income tax benefit which was driven by a reduction of substantially all of the valuation allowance held against the company's deferred tax assets. Non-GAAP net income, which adjusts for selected unusual and non-cash items, was $53.0 million, or $1.30 per diluted share for 2015, compared to $24.3 million, or $0.60 per diluted share for 2014. Read further...

GridGain Systems, provider of the enterprise-grade In-Memory Data Fabric based on Apache Ignite, has made available GridGain Enterprise Edition 7.5. The GridGain In-Memory Data Fabric enables high-performance transactions that run 1,000x faster than disk-based approaches. It provides high speed transactions, real-time streaming and fast analytics in a single, comprehensive data access and processing layer. The solution powers existing or new applications in a distributed, massively parallel architecture on affordable, industry-standard hardware, which can be easily scaled by adding more nodes to the compute grid. Read further...

In recent years, some of the most exciting advances in artificial intelligence have come courtesy of convolutional neural networks, large virtual networks of simple information-processing units, which are loosely modelled on the anatomy of the human brain. Neural networks are typically implemented using graphics processing units (GPUs), special-purpose graphics chips found in all computing devices with screens. A mobile GPU, of the type found in a cell phone, might have almost 200 cores, or processing units, making it well suited to simulating a network of distributed processors. Read further...

Scientists at the University of Leeds will run the equivalent of password cracking software to find the chemical keys to defeating the Ebola virus. A team from the University's schools of Chemistry and Molecular and Cellular Biology have secured a GBP 200,000 grant from the Wellcome Trust to find drugs to cure the disease. Although several Ebola vaccines are being developed, there are currently no effective anti-viral drugs to treat people once they get infected. Read further...

Seven projects, many of which have applications to Wyoming issues - including wind farm efficiency, aerosol impacts on snowpack and snow melt, and cloud formation - were recently chosen to receive computational time and storage space on the supercomputer in Cheyenne. Read further...

Cornell physics and astrophysics professor Saul Teukolsky has been using supercomputers to solve Einstein's equations for black hole mergers for much of his career. Saul Teukolsky, the Hans A. Bethe Professor of Physics and Astrophysics, and the Cornell-founded Simulation of eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) collaboration group have been calculating and completing a full catalogue of theoretical solutions since 2000, when supercomputers first became capable of the task. Read further...

Understanding the complex geological processes that form supervolcanoes could ultimately help geologists determine what triggers their eruptions. A new study using an advanced computer model casts doubt on previously held theories about the Yellowstone supervolcano's origins, adding to the mystery of Yellowstone's formation. Read further...

For the first time, scientists have observed ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves, arriving at the earth from a cataclysmic event in the distant universe. This confirms a major prediction of Albert Einstein's 1915 general theory of relativity and opens an unprecedented new window onto the cosmos. Read further...

Black holes are the subject of much fascination, not just in science but also in popular media. For example, the 2014 movie "Interstellar" portrays a fast-rotating, supermassive black hole, into which the protagonist falls in order to probe its centre. Such a scenario may be more than the stuff of Hollywood magic, according to a research team led by Lior Burko, associate professor of physics at Georgia Gwinnett College, and including Gaurav Khanna, associate professor of physics at UMass Dartmouth, and Anil Zenginoglu, science coordinator at the Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling at the University of Maryland. Read further...

NICE has signed an agreement to be acquired by Amazon Web Services, the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted Cloud platform. With its software and services, NICE helps hundreds of customers all over the world optimize and centralize their HPC, Cloud and visualization resources while empowering distributed and mobile workforces. Read further...

Bell Business Markets and IBM have signed a new partnership to expand the Cloud computing services available through Bell Business Cloud. This partnership will give businesses across Canada access to the IBM Cloud via a secure, high-speed private connection from Bell, simplifying the way customers adopt and build out their hybrid Clouds. Read further...

The U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has authorized IBM to deliver IBM Cloud services at the highest security levels - known as Impact Level 5 - for Controlled Unclassified Information as defined by the Department of Defense (DoD), paving the way for DoD agencies seeking to take advantage of the innovations Cloud can offer and manage sensitive data. Read further...

VMware Inc., a global expert in Cloud infrastructure and business mobility, has advanced its enterprise-proven, hyper-converged software with a new release of VMware Virtual SAN. VMware is an expert in hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) software having sold to more than 3,000 customers in 21 months since the initial release of Virtual SAN. As the optimal foundation for the software-defined data centre, HCI systems are the fastest growing converged or integrated systems, and are expected to grow to $1.5 billion in revenues in 2016, according to IDC. Combining software-defined compute, storage and networking capabilities with off-the-shelf x86 hardware, HCI systems simplify IT operations and increase performance while lowering IT capital and operating expenditures. Read further...

VMware Inc. has made advancements to its Cloud management platform with the introduction of VMware vRealize Suite 7 featuring new releases of VMware vRealize Operations and VMware vRealize Log Insight along with VMware vRealize Automation 7 and VMware vRealize Business for Cloud 7. The suite's new product updates together with pricing and packaging enhancements are designed to help customers readily address the most common use cases VMware has identified in customers' journey to the Cloud. Read further...