The University of California, Berkeley's worldwide network of smartphone earthquake detectors has recorded nearly 400 earthquakes since the MyShake app was made available for download in February, with one of the most active areas of the world the fracking fields of Oklahoma. Read further...

Microsoft is doubling its investment in quantum research. It is already an important private partner of QuTech - a collaboration between TU Delft and TNO - and will be extending its cooperation with the Delft quantum institute. In addition to this, Microsoft is to set up its own lab on the campus at TU Delft. The lab will be led by Professor Leo Kouwenhoven, who has been hired by Microsoft for this position. He will remain a professor at TU Delft and continue to supervise PhD candidates and students. The position of director of research at QuTech will be filled (ad interim) by Professor Ronald Hanson. Read further...

From laptops to cellphones, today's technology advances through the ever-increasing speed at which electric charges are directed through circuits. Similarly, speeding up control over quantum states in atomic and nanoscale systems could lead to leaps for the emerging field of quantum technology. Read further...

Scientists from the Institute of Physics and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and MIPT have let two electrons loose in a system of quantum dots to create a quantum computer memory cell of a higher dimension than a qubit - a quantum bit. In their study published in Scientific Reports , the researchers demonstrate for the first time how quantum walks of several electrons can help to implement quantum computation. Read further...

Researchers in Aalto University, Finland, and P.L. Kapitza Institute in Moscow have discovered half-quantum vortices in superfluid helium. This vortex is a topological defect, exhibited in superfluids and superconductors, which carries a fixed amount of circulating current. Read further...

On December 1, 2016 the new e-IRGSP5 project, the follow-up project of e-IRGSP4, was launched to continue the support for the e-Infrastructure Reflection Group (e-IRG). The nine partners in the project consortium held their kick-off meeting December 12-13, 2016. The meeting was hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, one of the e-IRGSP5 partners. The e-IRGSP5 project will run for 24 months and is coordinated by Leibniz Universität Hannover (LUH) in Germany. Read further...

The European Commission is organizing an eInfrastructure Proposers' Day, taking place in Amsterdam on January 19, 2017 from 09:00 to 18:00 at the Infinity facilities, Amstelveenseweg 500, 1081 KL Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The objective of the event is to allow the consortia currently preparing proposals for EINFRA-12-2017 to present their concepts and get additional input from potential partners. Read further...

ARM has acquired Allinea Software, an industry expert in development and performance analysis tools that maximize the efficiency of software for high performance computing (HPC) systems. Currently, 80 percent of the world's top 25 supercomputers use Allinea's tools, with key customers including the US Department of Energy, NASA, a range of supercomputing national labs and universities, and private companies using HPC systems for their own scientific computation. Read further...

CWI fellow Martin Kersten has been appointed as one of the 2016 fellows of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). Martin Kersten was specifically selected for his work on the design and implementation of column store and main memory database systems. The award is a great scientific honour, as only 2 Dutch computer scientists - Edsger Dijkstra and Andrew Tanenbaum - have received this symbol of excellence prior to Martin Kersten. The predecessors of Martin Kersten also worked at CWI. Read further...

The objective of PRACE Preparatory Access is to allow PRACE users to optimise, scale and test codes on PRACE systems. Preparatory Access (PA) Type D offers users to start the optimisation work on a PRACE Tier-1 system to finally reach PRACE Tier-0 system scalability. Read further...

PRACE aisbl opened the fourth SHAPE call for proposals between 22 June and 9 September 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 four innovative projects submitted by European SMEs for access to PRACE systems. Read further...

DataDirect Networks (DDN) has partnered with Synergy Solutions Management to offer organisations access to a first-of-its-kind facility in North America where users can plan, design and test video surveillance and high performance computing (HPC) solutions and conduct training. The Synergy Innovations Lab, located near Vancouver, Canada, provides a fully-equipped testing lab that allows users to evaluate solutions within a mixed workload environment. Read further...

GridGain Systems, provider of enterprise-grade in-memory computing solutions based on Apache Ignite, has made available GridGain Professional Edition 1.8, a fully supported version of Apache Ignite 1.8. GridGain Professional Edition 1.8 includes an In-Memory SQL Grid, which extends the platform by providing in-memory distributed database capabilities. The In-Memory SQL Grid will help users dramatically speed up and scale out their SQL applications with minimal or no code changes. Users are now able to query data in GridGain using SQL through ODBC/JDBC and also modify the data using DML statements with no custom coding required. Enhanced geospatial functionality is also included. The In-Memory SQL Grid will make the GridGain in-memory computing platform easier to integrate and enable more functionality for a wide variety of use cases including web-scale applications and the Internet of Things (IoT). GridGain Professional Edition 1.8 also includes Redis protocol support and support for .NET Entity Framework 2nd-Level Cache and ASP.NET Session Caching. Read further...

One way to handle Big Data is to shrink it. If you can identify a small subset of your data set that preserves its salient mathematical relationships, you may be able to perform useful analyses on it that would be prohibitively time consuming on the full set. Read further...

Intersect360 Research is conducting its ninth annual HPC Budget Map survey. The objective of this survey is to identify how HPC budgets are distributed on a percentage basis, among and within categories such as hardware, software, facilities, staff, and services. Your input will provide the industry with insights on the HPC market. Read further...

IDC has once again recognized DataDirect Networks (DDN) as a leader in object storage in its "IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Object-Based Storage 2016 Vendor Assessment". This marks the fourth year that DDN has been ranked as a leader in object storage by the IDC MarketScape report, reflecting DDN's flexible, diversified product portfolio and unrivaled leadership in object storage at scale. Read further...

One of China's leading intelligent speech and language technologies' companies, iFLYTEK, has chosen Mellanox's end-to-end 25G and 100G Ethernet solutions based on ConnectX adapters and Spectrum switches for their next generation machine learning centre. The partnership between Mellanox and iFLYTEK will enable iFLYTEK to achieve a high speech recognition rate of 97 percent. Read further...

IBM has signed a new collaboration with the BMW Group, through which the companies will work together to explore the role of Watson cognitive computing in personalizing the driving experience and creating more intuitive driver support systems for cars of the future. Read further...

Fincantieri, one of the world's largest shipbuilding groups and number one by diversification and innovation is adopting a hybrid Cloud solution from IBM to improve the efficiency of designing, building and deploying new vessels in response to the growing global demand for shipbuilding. Read further...

The recent availability of large data sets leads to the challenge of identifying patterns and structures in them. These patterns can be deployed to improve the user experience, like finding better rankings for "the best hotels that are still available in the Christmas holiday near the city centre of Rome". Researcher Matteo Seminaroti from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam developed methods to improve sorting and ranking methods by using combinatorial optimization techniques for so-called seriation problems. He defended his PhD thesis, entitled "Combinatorial Algorithms for the Seriation Problem" on 2 December 2016 at Tilburg University. His research can be used for better and faster ranking Big Data in machine learning and data analysis. Read further...

A new NASA supercomputer project builds on the agency's satellite measurements of carbon dioxide and combines them with a sophisticated Earth system model to provide one of the most realistic views yet of how this critical greenhouse gas moves through the atmosphere. Read further...

Scientists in Japan have revealed that if a glassy solid possesses a planar (sheet-like) structure, it can exhibit enhanced thermal vibration motion due to the same mechanism known for the planar crystals - two-dimensional crystals, by using large-scale simulations on supercomputers. Read further...

Australian researchers from the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science have produced a remarkable high-resolution animation of the largest El Niño ever recorded. Read further...

Additive manufacturing researchers at the University of Pittsburgh's Swanson School of Engineering and simulation software company ANSYS Inc. are among 13 university-led proposals to capture an Early Stage Innovations grant from NASA's Space Technology Research Grants Programme. Read further...

Neuroscience and artificial intelligence experts from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine have taken inspiration from the human brain in creating a new "deep learning" method that enables computers to learn about the visual world largely on their own, much as human babies do. Read further...

When data sets get too big, sometimes the only way to do anything useful with them is to extract much smaller subsets and analyze those instead. Read further...

Barrow Neurological Institute and IBM Watson Health have issued results of a revolutionary study that has identified new genes linked to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. The discovery gives ALS researchers new insights that will pave the way for the development of new drug targets and therapies to combat one of the world's most devastating and deadly diseases. Read further...

Three years ago the White House launched the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative to accelerate the development and application of novel technologies that will give us a better understanding about how brains work. Read further...

Oracle Corporation has issued fiscal 2017 Q2 results. Total Revenues were $9.0 billion, flat in U.S. dollars and up 1% in constant currency. Non-GAAP Total Revenues were $9.1 billion, up 1% in U.S. dollars and up 2% in constant currency. Cloud software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) revenues were $878 million, up 81% in U.S. dollars and up 83% in constant currency. Non-GAAP SaaS and PaaS revenues were $912 million, up 87% in U.S. dollars and up 89% in constant currency. Total Cloud Revenues, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS), were $1.1 billion, up 62% in U.S. dollars and up 64% in constant currency. Cloud plus On-Premise Software Revenues were $7.2 billion, up 2% in U.S. dollars and up 3% in constant currency. Read further...