It has been a year ago since President Obama announced the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) as a whole-of-Nation effort to sustain and enhance U.S. leadership in high-performance computing (HPC). Despite the fact China has gained the first place in the TOP500 supercomputing listing, a lot of progress has been made in the U.S. The National Strategic Computing Initiative Executive Council, headed by the U.S. Office of Science and Technology and the Office of Management and Budget, with members from many other government bodies, has released a "National Strategic Computing Initiative Strategic Plan". The Strategic U.S. goals are now to develop capable exascale computing by the mid-2020s. The plan also emphasizes data analytics support. It also wants to develop new post-Moore technologies, such as neuromorphic computing and quantum computing. So globally the plans very much resemble the European plans, as presented by the European Commission. Read further...

The U.S. White House has published a plan "Advancing Quantum Information Science - National Challenges And Opportunities" that outlines the government plans for Quantum Information Science (QIS) in the U.S. For one it will play a key role in the U.S. National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) as quantum computing is one of the promising technologies to produce post-exascale supercomputers in the mid 2020s. But there are many more promising applications for quantum technologies. On an international scale, similar activities as what the White House proposes are already taking place in Europe, where the European Commission announced plans for a 1 billion European quantum technology flagship project and national quantum technology initiatives in for instance the Netherlands and the UK. Read further...

At the ISC 2016 Conference in Frankfurt, Germany,Primeur Magazinehad the opportunity to talk with Gianluca Degliesposti, Executive Director Enterprise Business Unit EMEA at Lenovo. He is responsible for Data Centre Group product units and solutions, different centres and platforms, and setting up programmes within EMEA. Lenovo was present at ISC 2016 to reconfirm its role in the HPC market and enterprise vertical segments. After the acquisition of System x from IBM several people were not completely convinced that Lenovo was carrying on at the HPC side while in reality Lenovo has been moving forward even better in this segment from a sales point of view and from the product development point of view. Lenovo has been quite successful in overall cases, like Cineca for instance. Lenovo is customer-centric in HPC without any specific problem. Read further...

After the workshop on International Cooperation following ISC 2016 in Frankfurt, Germany,Primeur Magazinehad the opportunity to talk with Happy Sithole, Director of CHPC, the Centre for High Performance Computing in South Africa, about the new Lengau supercomputer, the Student Cluster Competition and the upcoming International Conference on Research Infrastructures - ICRI 2016, which will be organized in Cape Town, October 3-5, 2016. Lengau is the name of the new Petascale supercomputer, that has just been installed at CHPC. Lengau means cheetah in seTswana, one of the South African languages. Currently, this machine has 1,008 nodes of Haswell processors which provides a computing capability of 782,9 teraflops. This is only the first phase. In the coming weeks, the installation of the second phase will be performed which will provide a sustained petaflop machine. Read further...

Scientists have started to develop a sample machine that will play a part in the development of a new era supercomputer capable of a billion-billion calculations per second, researchers said. The National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin is developing the exascale supercomputer with the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), said Meng Xiangfei, assistant director of the centre. Read further...

IBM is committing powerful resources, technology and pro bono expertise to help scientists, the public health community, and humanitarian agencies in the fight against the Zika virus. As part of its IBM Impact Grant programmes, IBM is providing technology and talent to Brazil's Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), a research institution affiliated with the Brazilian Ministry of Health and one the most prominent science and technology health institution in Latin America. Fiocruz plans to help track the spread of Zika by using technology developed by IBM to analyze clues ranging from anecdotal observations recorded by the general public on social media, to official data about human travel patterns. Read further...

Red Hat Inc. has made available Red Hat Satellite 6.2, its systems lifecycle management tool across physical, virtual, and private and public Cloud environments. Red Hat Satellite 6.2 introduces remote execution and extends capabilities for container management and security. Read further...

Mellanox Technologies Ltd., a supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data centre servers and storage systems, has been honoured with the Award for Technology Innovation from global web 2.0 service leader Baidu Inc. The award recognizes Mellanox's achievements in designing and delivering a high-performance, low latency interconnect technology solution that positively impacts Baidu's business. Mellanox Technologies received the award at the 2016 Baidu Datacenter Partner Conference, Baidu's annual gathering of key data centre partners, and was the only interconnect provider in this category. Read further...

Medallia, a Customer Experience Management (CEM) provider, has chosen Mellanox Open Composable Network (OCN) Ethernet devices for its next generation of 100GbE end-to-end solution. With the addition of Mellanox OCN architecture and devices, Medallia can now seamlessly upgrade its current 40/100GbE data centre to 50/100 GbE as the company reaches Hyperscale Infrastructure efficiency, achieves unprecedented throughput and latency, and delivers lightning-fast, rock-solid application performance for its customers. Read further...

Heterogeneous parallel computing combines various processing elements with different characteristics that share a single memory system. Normally multiple cores - like the 'multicores' in some smart phones or personal computers - are combined with graphic cards and other components to process large quantities of data. Read further...

Super Micro Computer Inc., an expert in compute, storage, and networking technologies and green computing has announced volume shipments of SuperServer solutions based on the new Intel Xeon Phi processor - formerly code named Knights Landing - with integrated or external Intel Omni-Path Architecture (Intel OPA) next generation fabric as options. Read further...

Like a whirlpool, a new light-based communication tool carries data in a swift, circular motion.Described in a study published on July 28, 2016 by the journalScience, the optics advancement could become a central component of next generation computers designed to handle society's growing demand for information sharing. It may also be a salve to those fretting over the predicted end of Moore's Law, the idea that researchers will find new ways to continue making computers smaller, faster and cheaper. Read further...

Penguin Computing, a provider of high performance, enterprise data centre and Cloud solutions, is delivering an energy-efficient, high-performance computing cluster to the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). Read further...

NVM Express Inc., the organisation that developed the NVM Express specification, which enables the full performance potential provided by non-volatile memory storage technology, has reported the results of its fifth NVM Express (NVMe) Plugfest. The event was a distinct success, with the highest attendance to date. Read further...

Researchers from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech), the Technological Institute for Superhard and Novel Carbon Materials (TISNCM), the National University of Science and Technology MISiS, Russia, and Rice University, USA used computer simulations to find how thin a slab of salt has to be in order for it to break up into graphene-like layers. Based on the computer simulation, they derived the equation for the number of layers in a crystal that will produce ultrathin films with applications in nanoelectronics. Their findings were published inThe Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, which has an impact factor of 8.54. Read further...

Computer chips have stopped getting faster. For the past 10 years, chips' performance improvements have come from the addition of processing units known as cores. In theory, a programme on a 64-core machine would be 64 times as fast as it would be on a single-core machine. But it rarely works out that way. Most computer programmes are sequential, and splitting them up so that chunks of them can run in parallel causes all kinds of complications. Read further...

KnuEdge, delivering LambdaFabric neural computing technology that accelerates machine learning and signal processing, in partnership with the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at UC San Diego, have launched the Heterogeneous Neural Networks (HNN) Conference, to be held in spring 2017 in San Diego, California. The event will also include a KnuEdge-sponsored research paper competition, challenging participants to enable the next-generation of machine learning performance and efficiency through developing heterogeneous neural network algorithms. Read further...

Princeton University and the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) are participating in the accelerated development of a modern high-performance computing code, or software package. Supporting this development is the Intel Parallel Computing Center (IPCC) Programme, which provides funding to universities and laboratories to improve high-performance software capabilities for a wide range of disciplines. Read further...

Red Hat Inc., a provider of open source solutions, has made available Red Hat JBoss Data Grid 7. The latest version of Red Hat's leading in-memory data management technology, which can be used as a distributed cache, NoSQL database, or event broker, introduces enhancements to help organisations generate insights for continuous business optimization through real-time data analytics, contributing to greater agility and competitiveness. Read further...

Teradata, a Big Data analytics company, has purchased Big Data Partnership, an EMEA-based services provider of Big Data solutions and training. Big Data Partnership has deep expertise in disruptive technologies, including Apache Hadoop, and helps its clients discover how to become more data driven and data savvy through data science and the adoption of the latest Big Data technologies. Read further...

The fifth international Women in HPC workshop will take place at SC16, Salt Lake City, USA, on November 13, 2016. The workshop will address the under-representation of women in the HPC community by discussing and addressing the challenges faced by women and how to improve the opportunities provided to women. Read further...

Lawrence Fellow Aurora Pribram-Jones is one of two recipients of the Howes Scholar award presented by the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) Programme at its annual programme review. The award, presented on July 26, was established to honour Fredrick Anthony Howes, who managed the DOE Applied Mathematical Science Programme during the 1990s. Each year, a recent graduate of the CSGF programme is selected for the award based on his or her demonstrated scientific achievement, leadership and service. Read further...

Scientists increasingly rely on computers to gain insights about the world through simulations, data analytics or visualizations. These computational investigations typically rely on scientific software that makes it possible to perform virtual experiments and explore laboratory research data with reliable, reproducible results, whether one is using a desktop computer or the nation's most powerful supercomputers. Read further...

A project to make movement of the largest datasets more efficient has tested for the first time networking hardware components necessary for scheduling network bandwidth using Software Defined Networking (SDN). Researchers from the National Science Foundation's XSEDE collaboration of supercomputing sites reported at the XSEDE16 conference in Miami how they tested transfer of Big Data between two XSEDE sites, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) and the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) at the University of Tennessee. Read further...

A new ALS-gene, NEK1, has been identified by research groups in the Netherlands and the United States. As described in their publication inNature Genetics, mutations in this gene are responsible for an increased risk of ALS - amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Read further...

The international consortium of researchers connected to the patient-driven Project MinE has identified a new ALS gene, named C21orf2. In their publication inNature Genetics, they present a total of six genetic regions that were found to increase the risk of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Researchers and ALS associations from 15 countries collaborated in this genome-wide association study in ALS, which is the largest one to date. Read further...

FogHorn Systems, a developer of "edge intelligence" software for industrial and commercial Internet of Things (IoT) applications, has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by March Capital and GE Ventures. Additional Series A funding was provided by Robert Bosch Venture Capital GmbH, Yokogawa Electric Corporation and Darling Ventures. The company also converted an additional $2.5 million of initial seed capital provided by March Capital and The Hive, the Palo Alto-based AI and Big Data studio that co-created FogHorn. Read further...

Developers and IT managers across the U.S. cited IBM Bluemix as one of the fastest growing and one of the most widely adopted platforms as a service (PaaS) according to a new survey from the analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). Read further...

Oracle has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire NetSuite, the very first Cloud company. The transaction is valued at $109.00 per share in cash, or approximately $9.3 billion. Read further...

The University of Warwick has led the development of a Cloud-based microbial bioinformatics resource, which is believed to be the largest of its kind in the world. The Cloud Infrastructure for Microbial Bioinformatics or CLIMB project is a resource for the UK's medical microbiology community and international partners. It will support their research by providing free Cloud-based computing, storage, and analysis tools. Read further...

The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) has received an $7 million boost from the Australian Government, matched dollar-for-dollar by the NCI collaborating partners. The funding will ensure the ongoing delivery of NCI's supercomputing services to more than 4,000 researchers in more than 80% of Australian universities, together with government science agencies, medical research institutes, and industry, and will pave the way for the next-generation peak system. Read further...