At the Digital Infrastructures for Research Conference in Krakow, Poland,Primeur Magazinehad the opportunity to talk with Yannick Legré, Director of EGI, the European-rooted federation for advanced computing and data research. EGI's aim is to serve the research communities in Europe and provide them with the necessary resources to overcome the scientific challenges. EGI is federating slightly less than 900,000 computing cores that it is providing through its 325 computing and data centres in Europe and in more than 50 countries as well. The resources that EGI provides to the different research communities are very important. The more challenging part is to federate all the actors throughout Europe. This is what the EGI Federation has been successful at with all the different actors contributing and collaborating together to serve the scientists. Read further...

Researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are playing key roles in two recently funded computing projects with the goal of developing cutting-edge scientific applications for future exascale supercomputers that can perform at least a billion billion computing operations per second - 50 to 100 times more than the most powerful supercomputers in the world today. Read further...

Researchers at Aalto University and the University of Jyväskylä have developed a new method of measuring microwave signals extremely accurately. This method can be used for processing quantum information, for example by efficiently transforming signals from microwave circuits to the optical regime. Read further...

EUROSERVER, a European Union-funded research project, is paving the way toward lower energy consumption in data centres. Based on the concept of chiplets, where multiple silicon subsystems are mounted in an integrated device, along with an associated new groundbreaking system architecture, the project has enabled more energy-efficient servers and has even inspired start-ups motivated by the new technology. Read further...

PRACE has awarded three contractors in the third and final phase of its Pre-commercial Procurement (PCP). PRACE started this pre-commercial procurement (PCP) to obtain R&D services which should result in future PRACE HPC systems to become more energy efficient. Read further...

On behalf of PRACE, Prof. Dr. Anwar Osseyran, director of SURFsara and Chair of the PRACE Council has welcomed Serge Bogaerts (MSc) as the new Managing Director of PRACE aisbl. Serge Bogaerts will support the transition to PRACE 2 in his new full-time role. As Secretary of the PRACE Council he already gathered extensive knowledge of PRACE. Read further...

This year's Digest offers the reader an interesting variety of industrial PRACE supported projects and their results. In the Editorial Anders Rhod Gregersen, Chief Specialist at Vestas Wind Systems A/S, Denmark and Chair of the PRACE Industrial Advisory Committee highlighted the importance for European companies to have access to PRACE infrastructure. The PRACE SHAPE programme offers European SME's the resources of PRACE High Performance Computing to increase their competitiveness. This is the second time the PRACE Digest focuses on industry. Read further...

In the search for the mysterious dark matter, physicists have used elaborate computer calculations to come up with an outline of the particles of this unknown form of matter. To do this, the scientists extended the successful Standard Model of particle physics which allowed them, among other things, to predict the mass of so-called axions, promising candidates for dark matter. The German-Hungarian team of researchers led by Professor Zoltán Fodor of the University of Wuppertal, Eötvös University in Budapest and Forschungszentrum Jülich carried out its calculations on Jülich's supercomputer JUQUEEN (BlueGene/Q) and presents its results in the journalNature. Read further...

Bright Computing, a provider of hardware-agnostic cluster and Cloud management software, has supplied its industry-leading Bright Cluster Manager software to Stony Brook University, which will be used to automatically deploy a new OpenStack high-performance computer (HPC) cluster. The cluster will further build the University's computational capacity and capability to conduct Big Data analyses. Read further...

DataDirect Networks (DDN) has issued the results of its annual High Performance Computing (HPC) Trends survey, which showed that end users in the world's most data-intense environments, like those in many general IT environments, are increasing their use of Cloud. However, unlike general IT environments, the HPC sector is overwhelmingly opting for private and hybrid Clouds instead of public. They are also increasingly choosing to upgrade specific parts of their environments with flash as they modernize their data centres. Managing mixed I/O performance and rapid data growth remain the biggest challenges for HPC organisations driving these infrastructure changes according to the survey. Read further...

This month, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas (UT) at Austin has made available Corral 3, a high-performance parallel file system created to store, share, and publish digital data for researchers across the University of Texas System and around the world. Coupled with TACC's world-class computational services, the system enables researchers to undertake both mathematical and visual analyses of the ever growing digital data collections which are enabling the multitude of Big Data driven discoveries today. Read further...

Mellanox Technologies has launched a new open source software initiative to enable advanced open networking platforms such as routers, load balancers, and firewalls. A key part of the initiative is the release of the first ever software development kit: OpenNPU SDK, for the company's most advanced network processor unit (NPU), the NPS-400. Read further...

Mellanox Technologies Ltd.'s innovative Multi-Host interconnect technology has been adopted by multiple OEMs. Multi-Host technology improves data centre economics, allowing OEMs to build scale-out heterogeneous compute and storage platforms direct connectivity between multiple compute elements, storage elements and the network. According to OEM benchmark results, Mellanox Multi-Host enhances the data centre performance by 150 percent while reducing data centre costs by nearly 30 percent. Read further...

The Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Programme (HPCMP) has awarded Cray with a $26 million supercomputer contract for a Cray XC40 supercomputer and three Cray Sonexion storage systems. Read further...

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has completed its acquisition of SGI, a global expert in high performance solutions for compute, data analytics and data management, for $7,75 per share in cash. Read further...

The Centre for Modelling & Simulation (CFMS) in Bristol, a specialist in high value design capability has made available its new supercomputer at an opening ceremony, held 25th October 2016. Read further...

Baylor University has selected a Cray CS400 cluster supercomputer, further demonstrating its commitment to transformative research. The Cray system will serve as the primary high performance computing (HPC) platform for Baylor researchers and will be supported by the Academic and Research Computing Services group (ARCS) of the Baylor University Libraries. Read further...

The United States Department of Defense (DoD) has selected SGI ICE XA for two of its Army Research Laboratory Defense Supercomputing Resource Center (ARL DSRC) systems. The upgrades are part of a technology insertion, known as TI-16, for their High Performance Computing Modernization Programme (HPCMP). Read further...

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) annual conference, most recently held as XSEDE16 in Miami last July, is transforming into an independent entity designed to unite the high-performance computing and advanced digital research community. The Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing conference (PEARC) will welcome all who care about using advanced digital services for research. The PEARC17 Conference will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana, July 9-13, 2017. Read further...

If you're building a quantum computer with the intention of making calculations not even imaginable with today's conventional technology, you're in for an arduous effort. Case in point: You're delving into new problems and situations associated with the foundational work of novel and complicated systems as well as cutting-edge technology. Read further...

We humans may be more aligned with the universe than we realize. According to research published in the journalPhysical Review C, neutron stars and cell cytoplasm have something in common: structures that resemble multistory parking garages. Read further...

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new technique for creating NV-doped single-crystal nanodiamonds, only four to eight nanometers wide, which could serve as components in room-temperature quantum computing technologies. These doped nanodiamonds also hold promise for use in single-photon sensors and nontoxic, fluorescent biomarkers. Read further...

One of the most detailed genomic studies of any ecosystem to date has revealed an underground world of stunning microbial diversity, and added dozens of new branches to the tree of life. The bacterial bonanza comes from scientists who reconstructed the genomes of more than 2,500 microbes from sediment and groundwater samples collected at an aquifer in Colorado. The effort was led by researchers from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley. DNA sequencing was performed at the Joint Genome Institute, a DOE Office of Science User Facility, and analyses were conducted with the aid of the CIPRES gateway and the Comet supercomputer, based at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego. Read further...

IBM has introduced new hybrid Cloud all-flash storage solutions developed to modernize and transform storage deployments, providing a strong bridge to the development of cognitive applications. These new solutions and software allow clients to store their valuable data where it makes the best business sense. Read further...

Although financial services firms are moving to adopt Cloud computing for less demanding workloads, firm-managed physical hardware will be required for the foreseeable future to handle the most throughput- and latency-sensitive compute workloads, according to TABB Group's latest research, "The Future of Grid Computing in a Cloud-Enabled World". The research considers the compute Grid's place in a Cloud-enabled world, addresses options for optimizing onsite system performance, and discusses total cost of ownership (TCO) considerations for onsite Grid components. Read further...