During the 4th National eScience Symposium, held in Amsterdam ArenA last October,Primeur Magazinehad the opportunity to talk with Wilco Hazeleger, the organizer of the event and also responsible for the Netherlands eScience Center. There were 500 people registered for the 4th National eScience Symposium and about 400 participants actually attended the event, which is a great number, according to Wilco Hazeleger. There were researchers from different domains getting together and finding a communality in digital technology. A wonderful highlight was that in one of the first keynote talks Fernando Pérez from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the USA showed what the challenges are and what researchers really can do with digital technology in all kinds of application domains. It appears that what the Netherlands eScience Center does, is kind of similar as to what happens in Berkeley. If this is a communality across the world, then the eScience Center is on a good track here. Read further...

The Exascale Computing Project (ECP) has selected its fifth Co-Design Center to focus on Graph Analytics - combinatorial (graph) kernels that play a crucial enabling role in many data analytic computing (DAC) application areas as well as several ECP applications. Read further...

MaX - Materials design at the Exascale - is a user-focused, problem-oriented European Centre of Excellence. It works at the frontiers of the current and future High Performance Computing (HPC) technologies, to enable the best use and evolution of HPC for materials research and innovation. Read further...

IBM has launched an industry-first initiative to build commercially available universal quantum computing systems. "IBM Q" quantum systems and services will be delivered via the IBM Cloud platform. While technologies that currently run on classical computers, such as Watson, can help find patterns and insights buried in vast amounts of existing data, quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be seen because the data doesn't exist and the possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous to ever be processed by classical computers. Read further...

The encryption codes that safeguard internet data today won't be secure forever. Future quantum computers may have the processing power and algorithms to crack them. Read further...

ISC High Performance is offering a full-day programme for industrial HPC users, specifically addressing challenges in the industrial manufacturing, transport and logistics sectors. The Industrial Day, which will be offered on June 20, is designed and chaired by high performance computing experts, Dr. Alfred Geiger of T-Systems and Dr. Marie-Christine Sawley of Intel Data Center Group. The new programme is a reflection of their own experiences derived from working with user communities, as well as expectations of past years' attendees. Read further...

ECMWF's Council of Member States met on 28 February and 1 March 2017 in an extraordinary session to consider proposals to host ECMWF's data centre. This meeting took place at the end of an extensive process of evaluation by a panel of international experts and representatives of the Centre's Member States, who reviewed bids on criteria ranging from financial and technical aspects and environmental impact to capability to deliver. Read further...

Intel and SURFsara will work together to harness the power of Intel's new CPU architectures for deep learning. This will enable SURFsara to support researchers to train and develop more accurate and powerful models with neural networks that are more complex and on data sets that are larger than the ones typically trained today. Read further...

From 16 to 18 May 2017, PRACE will organise the fourth edition of its Scientific and Industrial Conference - PRACEdays17 - under the motto "HPC for Innovation: when Science meets Industry" in Barcelona, Spain, where the PRACE Ada Lovelace Award for HPC will be presented. PRACE initiated this Award in 2016 at PRACEdays16, and Zoe Cournia from Greece was the inaugural awardee. Read further...

ESI Group, pioneer and expert in Virtual Prototyping solutions, has acquired Scilab Enterprises SAS, publisher of Scilab, widely regarded as the most compelling open source alternative to MATLAB, the commercial software for analytical numerical solutions. Scilab provides a world class powerful environment for engineering computation and scientific applications. Read further...

The OpenMP Architecture Review Board (ARB) celebrates this year the 20th anniversary of its incorporation and of the release of the first OpenMP API specification for parallel processing. The first two events that will form part of the official celebrations are hereby announced. Read further...

Fujitsu has received RIKEN's order for the "Deep learning system", which in terms of operations will be one of the largest-scale supercomputers in Japan specializing in AI research. The RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project will use the new system, scheduled to go online in April 2017, as a platform to accelerate R&D into AI technology. Read further...

Today's society is growing in population and productivity puts ever higher demands on the Internet, and without scientific developments to provide ways meeting our traffic needs, it will begin to clog. Mapping photons to a metal surface and converting them to a particular kind of electron oscillations, called plasmons, researchers from Switzerland, Germany and the US collaborated to develop a new way to impart information into the light signals sent over the Internet's optical fiber networks. Read further...

A pioneering new technique to produce cutting-edge, versatile microchips could revolutionize the speed, efficiency and capability of the next generation of computers. Read further...

Super Micro Computer Inc., a global expert in compute, storage and networking technologies including green computing, has introduced its new SuperBlade that delivers a better initial acquisition cost structure than traditional blade servers, rack mount and OCP servers with the density and operational efficiency of blade servers in an open Rack Scale Design enabled architecture. Read further...

As with many fields, computing is changing how geologists conduct their research. One example: the emergence of digital rock physics, where tiny fragments of rock are scanned at high resolution, their 3D structures are reconstructed, and this data is used as the basis for virtual simulations and experiments. Read further...

Early this year, about 30 neuroscientists and computer programmers got together to improve their ability to read the human mind. The hackathon was one of several that researchers from Princeton University and Intel, the largest maker of computer processors, organized to build software that can tell what a person is thinking in real time, while the person is thinking it. Read further...

Applications are now being accepted for the Student Volunteers programme at the SC17 conference to be held November 12-17 in Denver, Colorado. Both undergraduate and graduate students are encouraged to apply. Read further...

Rice University researchers have modeled a nanoscale sandwich, the first in what they hope will become a molecular deli for materials scientists. Read further...

In March 2016 Insilico Medicine initiated a research collaboration with Life Extension (LE) to apply advanced bioinformatic methods and deep learning algorithms to screen for naturally occurring compounds that may slow down or even reverse the cellular and molecular mechanisms of aging. Today, Life Extension (LE) launched a new line of nutraceuticals called GEROPROTECT, and the first product in the series called Ageless Cell combines some of the natural compounds that were shortlisted by Insilico Medicine's algorithms and are generally recognized as safe (GRAS). Read further...

It will be open 24 hours a day, and will never close down for festivals or take a holiday. The machine will provide sensible and personal advice for young people who contact its chat service. This is the aim of Professor Ole-Christoffer Granmo at the University of Agder (UiA). Read further...

The computer gathers relevant disease information from 200 documents in just a few seconds. Doctors have no chance at matching its tempo. Read further...

Using new computer algorithms, it is possible to adjust specific properties of three-dimensional objects, such as the sounds they produce or how stable they are. Read further...

Unlike the assembly of a machine, there is no "one-size-fits-all" approach to medicine. Darryl Thelen, Harvey D. Spangler Professor in mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison), conducts research with this notion in mind while using computational models of the musculoskeletal system and high-throughput computing resources to refine knee surgical procedures. Read further...

Cisco and IBM have introduced new solutions for VersaStack, converged infrastructure jointly developed by the two companies. VersaStack helps organisations reduce complexity and automate processes to accelerate the delivery of applications. The additional technologies extend VersaStack to include hybrid Cloud capabilities and also take advantage of the latest software defined storage technologies to address Cloud-scale applications. Read further...

Continuing to help organisations simplify Cloud adoption by bringing the benefits of the Cloud inside their own data centres, Oracle has expanded the Oracle Cloud at Customer portfolio with the availability of Oracle Exadata Cloud Machine. Oracle is offering organisations the ultimate in choice and flexibility in where they deploy the world's most advanced database Cloud for mission-critical workloads. Organisations can now deploy Oracle Exadata in a number of ways, including as a Cloud service inside their own data centre, in the Oracle Cloud, and in a traditional on-premises environment. Read further...

Oracle has started a new collaboration with Pluralsight, a technology learning platform for software developers and Silver level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork. Through the collaboration, developers will gain access to three new Oracle learning pathways on the Pluralsight platform including Oracle Cloud: Java Development, Oracle Cloud: Node.js Development and Oracle Cloud: IaaS Foundations. They will also be able to leverage two new Oracle Cloud courses including Oracle Cloud for Developers and Oracle Compute Cloud Service Foundations. The announcement was made at Oracle Code San Francisco, the first of a new global series of developer-focused events. Read further...