At the e-IRG workshop in Amsterdam, Primeur Magazine had the opportunity to talk to Barend Mons who is chairing the High Level Expert Group on the European Open Science Cloud, an advisory group to the European Commission. To be successful, the European Science Cloud needs a lot of experts to operate it, Barend Mons told us. Data stewards that have a lot of knowledge about managing and maintaining data. Experts who are well respected with a solid career path. Barend Mons also discussed several other findings of the Expert group, whose report will be published very soon. Read further...

At the EGI Conference 2016 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Primeur Magazine had the opportunity to talk to Tiziana Ferrari from EGI.eu in order to assess the status of EGI and how the services are being developed for the new user communities. EGI today counts for 650.000 CPU cores which are federated across the worldwide network of e-infrastructures. EGI has a stable Cloud infrastructure with 22 Cloud providers across Europe. Today, there are 230 active research projects with 41.000 active users. This is a very important result for EGI. EGI is more and more user driven and has a very strong network of competence centres, serving international user communities and research infrastructures. These research infrastructures are enabling mechanisms to allow technology providers, expert users and service providers to work together in developing the service portfolio. Read further...

Quantum computers are largely hypothetical devices that could perform some calculations much more rapidly than conventional computers can. They exploit a property called superposition, which describes a quantum particle's counterintuitive ability to, in some sense, inhabit more than one physical state at the same time. Read further...

The deployment of this new Italian supercomputer for research, co-designed by Cineca and based on the Lenovo NeXtScale platform, will begin in the middle of April. The new supercomputer, based on the next-generation of the Intel Xeon Phi product family alongside with Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family, will offer the scientific community a technologically advanced and energy-efficient high performance computing system. Read further...

The 2015 Bull-Joseph Fourier Prize was awarded to two teams for their significant contribution to the advancement of awareness of science and innovation and to the development of simulation methods. It was awarded by Catherine Rivière, President and CEO of GENCI and by Philippe Vannier, Executive Director, Big Data and Security and Director of Technology at Atos, before a large audience of representatives of the French scientific community. Read further...

ISC Group will be bringing five renowned experts in computational science to this year’s conference as part of its Distinguished Speaker series. Topics will include exascale computing efforts in the US, the next supercomputers in development in Japan and China, cognitive computing advancements at IBM, and quantum computing research at NASA. Read further...

The ISC Group, organizers of the annual ISC High Performance series, has launched the ISC Student Cluster Competition (SCC) Alumni Network. Maintained and managed via LinkedIn, the professional networking group was formed to establish and nurture mutually beneficial relationships between SCC team members and the High Performance Computing (HPC) community. Read further...

SHAPE (SME HPC Adoption Programme in Europe) is a pan-European programme supported by PRACE which aims to raise awareness and provide European SMEs with the expertise necessary to take advantage of the innovation possibilities created by HPC, thus increasing their competitiveness. Following the success of previous calls, PRACE aisbl launched a third SHAPE call for proposals. This call opened on 16 November 2015 and closed on 14 January 2016. The Selection Committee, made up of representatives of the PRACE Industrial Advisory Committee (IAC), the PRACE Board of Directors (BoD) and the PRACE IP Project, reviewed all applications and awarded eight innovative projects submitted by European SMEs for access to PRACE systems. Read further...

Scality, the storage that powers digital business, has started the production deployment of the Scality RING to power Los Alamos National Laboratory's (LANL) Trinity supercomputer, projected to be one of the world's fastest. Trinity, part of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) Programme, is expected to be the first platform large and fast enough to begin to accommodate finely resolved 3D calculations for mission-critical simulations. As part of the deployment, Scality is also working together with Los Alamos on MarFS, an open source software project that brings the power of object storage to all large-scale research computing environments, including the U.S. Department of Energy. Read further...

Speaking before industry executives and researchers, in the presence of French Minister of Economy, Emmanuel Macron, Atos Chairman and CEO, Thierry Breton, has revealed Bull sequana, the first exascale-class supercomputer offering a thousand times more performance than current petaflops-scale systems. Read further...

The OpenPOWER Foundation, a consortium of more than 200 technology companies, organisations and individuals innovating around the POWER processor, has introduced more than 50 new open innovations to help companies better solve grand challenges around Big Data. Many new community innovations are designed to be incorporated into the Open Compute Project product portfolio. Read further...

Physicist Professor Burkard Hillebrands from the University of Kaiserslautern receives an ERC Advanced Grant, one of the highest awards from the European Research Council (ERC). The Grant is endowed with an amount of more than 2,4 million euro. With this funding Professor Hillebrands will open up a new field of research: supermagnonics. He and his team will investigate macroscopic magnonic quantum phenomena with the aim to make data processing significantly more efficient. Read further...

DataDirect Networks (DDN) has made available the new DDN MEDIAScaler Converged Media Workflow Storage Platform. MEDIAScaler 2.0, the world's fastest, densest, most scalable media storage platform manages the complete workflow from ingest to archive and the Cloud in a single, unified appliance. Designed for use throughout post-production, broadcast and content delivery, the new MEDIAScaler delivers the power to accelerate highly concurrent media workflows, a wide range of media formats, and offers end-to-end digital content management from high performance ingest and processing to cloud collaboration and active archiving. Available today, the MEDIAScaler 2.0 platform will be showcased in the DDN booth at the upcoming NAB Show 2016, April 16-21 in Las Vegas. Read further...

MLB Network has deployed DDN's MEDIAScaler GS7K storage solution to accelerate and simplify its archive footage storage and access. As a producer of high definition Major League Baseball video content, MLB Network is a recognized innovation leader in sports video asset management. MLB Network captures and catalogues multi-petabytes of digital information each year and manages an active archive repository of more than 40 petabytes of data storage. With the adoption of DDN's MEDIAScaler, MLB Network has simplified the management of its live and archived video assets, sped up content access times, and powered its ability to provide high definition content wherever it is needed within the post production environment. Read further...

NEC Corporation of America (NEC), a provider and integrator of advanced IT, communications, managed services and biometric solutions, has launched a new HYDRAstor HS6 Series, HS6-5000A, specifically designed to scale and meet the large archival requirements of data generating industries such as Media & Entertainment. Read further...

IBM Research is planning a multi-year collaboration with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to create the Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Research (C3SR) which will be housed within the College of Engineering on the Urbana campus. Opening in the summer of 2016, the C3SR will integrate and advance scientific frontiers in both machine learning and heterogeneous computing systems optimized for new cognitive computing workloads. Read further...

Researchers have uncovered the existence of a dwarf "dark galaxy" lurking nearly 4 billion light-years away from Earth. The discovery was made when a team of researchers, including astronomers at the University of Illinois, using the Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), noticed subtle distortions in the image of gravitational lens SDP.81. The discovery paves the way to spot many more such objects, which could help astronomers address important questions on the true nature of dark matter. Read further...

The saying of philosopher René Descartes of what makes humans unique is beginning to sound hollow. 'I think - therefore soon I am obsolete' seems more appropriate. When a computer routinely beats us at chess and we can barely navigate without the help of a GPS, have we outlived our place in the world? Not quite. Welcome to the front line of research in cognitive skills, quantum computers and gaming. Read further...

IBM and the American Cancer Society (ACS) have signed a partnership to create the first advisor for people fighting cancer, powered by Watson cognitive computing. The initiative, announced at the 13th Annual World Health Care Congress, aims to provide cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers with trusted ACS resources and guidance personalized to an individual's unique journey against cancer. Read further...

Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory used neutrons to uncover novel behaviour in materials that holds promise for quantum computing. The findings, published inNature Materials, provide evidence for long-sought phenomena in a two-dimensional magnet. Read further...

UberCloud has developed quick-to-roll-out and easy-to-use containers based on OpenHPC for use in High Performance Computing (HPC), whether they be on-premise, or in the public or a private Cloud. Using popular Linux Container technology, UberCloud containers resolve the deployment challenges of traditional HPC environments with the goal to make HPC ubiquitous and widely available. UberCloud uses OpenHPC to develop pre-configured, ready-to-run software containers to ease usability, accessibility, and portability challenges for development and execution of HPC applications in public and private Cloud environments. UberCloud OpenHPC containers are one elegant way to deliver software packages effectively and efficiently into the Cloud, and execute them in a single-tenant environment. Read further...

INDIGO-DataCloud delivers open source software services to help developers, resource providers, e-infrastructures and scientific communities to overcome current challenges in the Cloud computing, storage and network areas. The first internal demo release of the INDIGO-DataCloud platform was presented on 4th and 5th April in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Read further...

IBM plans to extend its global partnership with Box to provide enterprises with the choice to store data regionally in Europe and Asia on the IBM Cloud. IBM Cloud will be available as part of Box's new Box Zones technology, which will enable businesses to adopt Box and store their data in select regions for the first time. IBM will also leverage Box Zones to support hybrid Cloud deployments with its deeply integrated enterprise content management solutions. Read further...