Each year we ask supercomputing experts Satoshi Matsuoka, Professor at the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center and Department of Mathematical and Computing Sciences, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and Thomas Sterling, Professor at the School of Informatics and Computing and Chief Scientist and Associate Director CREST, Indiana University, how we are doing on the road to exascale. It seems like each year the road seems to become a little bit longer. When we started this series several years ago, it looked like we would definitely be finished by 2018. Now Satoshi Matsuoka and Thomas Sterling would be happy if we can have a sustainable exascale system by 2021 or 2022, although there could always be a one-shot machine designed to have a LINPACK exascale performance. Satoshi Matsuoka and Thomas Sterling see a lot of things happening on the road to exascale: new architectures, new computing paradigms. There is also a lot happening in international collaboration. And is HPC still useful in the time of Big Data? Let's listen to what Satoshi and Thomas have to say. Read further...

This is the second part of the interview “Another year on the road to exascale". Satoshi Matsuoka and Thomas Sterling discuss the apparent slow down in supercomputing performance in the TOP500 and the new initiatives in hardware design for exascale systems. Read further...

This is the third part of the interview “Another year on the road to exascale". In this part, Thomas Sterling and Satoshi Matsuoka focus on applications. There are emerging trends like the possibility to manage large complex workflows. Weak scaling: is that still useful in the exascale era, and can we get to strong or stronger scaling? Read further...

This is the fourth part of the interview "Another year on the road to exascale". Here Satoshi Matsuoka and Thomas Sterling discuss the relation between HPC and Big Data. The two will merge they already said in previous interviews. And slowly the whole world is starting to agree. They also note that HPC is becoming more mainstream. Read further...

This is the fifth part of the interview "Another year on the road to exascale". In this part, Thomas Sterling and Satoshi Matsuoka explain the collaborations between Japan, the USA and Europe, and how also other countries benefit from international collaboration. Only the collaboration with China is not running smoothly, also because of the US export restrictions. Read further...

This is the sixth part of the interview "Another year on the road to exascale". We are not there yet, at exascale, and it will still take some time to get there. What will be the next steps taken by the community? Thomas Sterling and Satoshi Matsuoka discuss in this part the new wave of architectures they expect and the innovative memory architectures. Read further...

On May 31, 2016, VORtech celebrated its 20th anniversary with an event in the Meisjeshuis in Delft. VORtech Computing specializes in scientific software development, combining thorough knowledge of mathematical modelling, simulation and computer science with state of the art software development methods. Under the theme "Models and Data, hindsight and forecast" VORtech explored the intersections of predicting with physical models and with data. There were contributions by Arthur Veldman, professor in Computational Modelling at the University of Groningen, and by Geurt Jongbloed, professor in Mathematical Statistics at the Delft University of Technology. Afterwards, during the celebration drinks in the hall and on the terrace of the Meisjeshuis, Primeur Magazine had the opportunity to talk with Mark Roest and Edwin Vollebregt, the two founders of VORtech Computing. Edwin Vollebregt, the V from VORtech, studied applied mathematics at the Technical University of Delft. Mark Roest, the R from VORtech, has a background in physics. He is now the general manager of VORtech. Read further...

One of the unique aspects of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's (OLCF's) Titan supercomputer is its hybrid architecture, consisting of both CPUs and GPUs. Recently, those GPUs played a big role in helping advance US Department of Energy (DOE)-funded scientific discovery. Researchers came together to use Titan's GPUs for two X-Stack project teams to develop demonstrations for their research prototypes, which addressed domain-specific languages (DSLs) - computer languages specialized to a particular application domain - in the exascale era. Read further...

What once took months by some of the world's leading scientists can now be done in seconds by undergraduate students thanks to software developed at the University of Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing, paving the way for fast, secure quantum communication. Researchers at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) at the University of Waterloo developed the first available software to evaluate the security of any protocol for Quantum Key Distribution (QKD). Read further...

You can't sign up for the quantum internet just yet, but researchers have reported a major experimental milestone towards building a global quantum network - and it's happening in space. With a network that carries information in the quantum properties of single particles, you can create secure keys for secret messaging and potentially connect powerful quantum computers in the future. But scientists think you will need equipment in space to get global reach. Read further...

Royal Philips and SURFsara have signed a new collaboration with the aim to connect the Philips HealthSuite Cloud platform to the SURFsara National Research Infrastructure to provide new Cloud-based research services. Read further...

From 2013 until earlier this year, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) formed part of EUBrazilCC, a project aimed at promoting cooperation between Europe and Brazil while supporting a scientific and knowledge-based society as the key to sustainable and equitable socio-economic development. At the centre of this partnership were three use cases requiring cooperation between Brazil and Europe in the areas of data provision, services and expertise. Read further...

Univa, an innovator of workload management products, has made available its Grid Engine 8.4.0 product. Enterprises can now automatically dispatch and run jobs in Docker containers, from a user specified Docker image, on a Univa Grid Engine cluster. This significant update simplifies running complex applications in a Grid Engine cluster and reduces configuration and OS issues. Grid Engine 8.4.0 isolates user applications into their own container, avoiding conflict with other jobs on the system and enables legacy applications in Docker containers and non-container applications to run in the same cluster. Read further...

IBM has expanded its portfolio of software-defined infrastructure solutions with cognitive features to help clients improve the management of computing resources to achieve faster, results from data-driven applications and analytics. Read further...

It's not often you celebrate a billionth "birthday" so to be able to celebrate two at the same time must be pretty rare. On 17 May 2016, Eduroam clocked up two amazing milestones - registering both one billion roaming authentications, either in-country or international, since the beginning of the year and the one billionth international authentication - when users are connecting from outside their home country - since the service was launched Read further...

Cisco and IBM have signed a global collaboration to provide instant Internet of Things (IoT) insight at the edge of the network. Now, businesses and organisations in remote and autonomous locations will be able to tap the combined power of IBM's Watson IoT and business analytics technologies and Cisco's edge analytics capabilities to more deeply understand and act on critical data on the network edge. Read further...

New fundamental research by University of Texas (UT) at Dallas physicists may accelerate the drive toward more advanced electronics and more powerful computers. The scientists are investigating materials called topological insulators, whose surface electrical properties are essentially the opposite of the properties inside. Read further...

NASA's flagship supercomputer, Pleiades, received a boost in computing power with the installation of 1.008 Intel Xeon E5-2680v4 (Broadwell) nodes, bringing the system's theoretical peak performance to 6,28 Petaflop/s. Read further...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has granted a $30 million award to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) to acquire and deploy a new large scale supercomputing system, Stampede 2, as a strategic national resource to provide high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities for thousands of researchers across the U.S. This award builds on technology and expertise from the Stampede system first funded in by NSF 2011 and will deliver a peak performance of up to 18 Petaflops, over twice the overall system performance of the current Stampede system. Stampede 2 will be among the first systems to employ cutting edge processor and memory technology in order to continue to bridge users to future cyberinfrastructure. Read further...

Future Carnegie Mellon University engineers will design new innovative products more efficiently and effectively, thanks in part to a collaboration with ANSYS. The partnership brings together two world leaders in engineering, computer science and simulation technologies to impact the future of engineering education and research. Read further...

Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin Cancer Network will adopt Watson cognitive computing to help match cancer patients with clinical trials. The Froedtert & MCW Cancer Network is the first in Wisconsin and among the first cancer programmes in the nation to use Watson for Clinical Trial Matching. The matching programme is slated to begin this fall. Read further...

The atomic nucleus is highly complex. This complexity partly stems from the nuclear interactions in atomic nuclei, which induce strong correlations between the elementary particles, or nucleons, that constitute the heart of the atom. The trouble is that understanding this complexity often requires a tremendous amount of computational power. In a new study published inEuropean Physical Journal A, Susanna Liebig from Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany, and colleagues propose a new approach to nuclear structure calculations. The results are freely available to the nuclear physicists' community so that other groups can perform their own nuclear structure calculations, even if they have only limited computational resources. Read further...

In the United States, the use of natural gas for electricity generation continues to grow. The driving forces behind this development? A boom in domestic natural gas production, historically low prices, and increased scrutiny over fossil fuels' carbon emissions. Though coal still accounts for about a third of US electricity generation, utility companies are pivoting to cleaner natural gas to replace decommissioned coal plants. Read further...

Many of the Texas Advanced Computing Center's (TACC) feature stories highlight the impact of advanced computing for a specific research project. But for one of TACC's users, the introduction of advanced computing and computational expertise resulted in a fundamental shift in the direction of the institute. For over five years, the Center for Bioinformatics and Systems Biology (CBSB) at Wake Forest School of Medicine, has worked with TACC to advance numerous projects and found inspiration to design and build their own supercomputing cluster. Read further...

IBM plans to acquire EZ Legacy Ltd. (EZSource), an Israel-based application discovery company, to help developers quickly and easily understand and change mainframe code based on data displayed on a dashboard and other visualizations. Today's applications can be made up of millions of lines of code, and to update this code can take days or weeks. EZSource provides a visual dashboard to quickly and easily show developers which applications have changed to ease the process of modernizing applications, exposing APIs and more efficiently leveraging development resources. The planned acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2016 subject to completion of governmental review and customary closing conditions. Read further...