Primeur weekly 2017-04-24

Primeur magazine

Edition: weekly - Issue: 2017-04-24

Focus

The Global Network Architecture consortium is a strong believer in good collaboration, sharing capacity and costs for transatlantic network connectivity

At the occasion of the recent news that research and education (R&E) networks in Europe and North America have joined forces to deploy links providing a total bandwidth of 740 gigabits per second (Gbit/s),Primeur Magazinehad the opportunity to interview René Buch, CEO of NORDUnet, one of the partners in this cross-atlantic collaboration that has been set up under the umbrella of the Global Network Architecture (GNA) initiative. Read further...

North Atlantic Network Collaboration Building Foundation for Global Network Architecture

Scientists around the world are increasingly collaborating to address global issues such as clean energy, medicine and protecting the environment. Their ability to share and analyse data is essential for advancing research, and as the size of datasets grows, the need for high-speed global network connectivity becomes ever more critical. That is why research and education (R&E) networks in Europe and North America have joined forces to find new ways to help facilitate and enable scientific collaboration. Between them, the R&E networks on the two continents have now deployed links providing a total bandwidth of 740 gigabits per second (Gbit/s). Read further...

Focus on Europe

British Met Office faces big challenges with Big Data

The Met Office is facing new and increasing challenges because of the huge volume of data that it manages and produces. Alex Longden, who leads the team responsible for data provision for the data re-use community and private weather sectors, examines the situation. Read further...

Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research enables researchers to meet with SURF

For the first time the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has brought researchers in direct contact with SURF and other providers of ICT resources for research. This happened on March 30, 2017 in the workshop ICT-infrastructure for Roadmap projects at SURFsara in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Read further...

RDA Europe-ENVRI Summer School on Data Management and Data Science

The Research Data Alliance, together with ENVRI, is organizing the RDA EU-ENVRI Summer School on Data Management and Data Science, taking place 12-16 June 2017 in Helsinki/Espoo, Finland. Participants can learn how to do FAIR compliant professional Data Management and receive experience and practice with the latest software to manage and analyse data. Read further...

PRACE 14th Call for Proposals shows the magnitude of PRACE 2

The 14th PRACE Call for Proposals yielded 113 eligible proposals of which 59 were awarded a total of close to 2 thousand million core hours. This brings the total number of projects awarded by PRACE to 524. Taking into account the 3 multi-year projects from the 12th Call that were renewed and the 10 million core hours reserved for Centres of Excellence, the total amount of core hours awarded by PRACE to more than 14 thousand million. Read further...

Prof. Dr. Michael M. Resch named new chairman of GCS Board of Directors

As of April 7, 2017, Prof. Dr. Michael M. Resch is the new chairman of the Board of Directors at the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS). Prof. Dr. Michael Resch succeeds Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Lippert, director of the Institute for Advanced Simulation at Forschungszentrum Jülich and head of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. Read further...

Hardware

Canada's most powerful academic supercomputer launched at Simon Fraser University

Simon Fraser University (SFU) in partnership with Compute Canada and WestGrid is launching Cedar, a new advanced research computing (ARC) system at the Burnaby campus. Cedar is Canada's most powerful academic supercomputer. Read further...

Pattern discovery over pattern recognition: A new way for computers to see

Jim Crutchfield wants to teach a machine to "see" in a new way, discovering patterns that evolve over time instead of recognizing patterns based on a stored template. It sounds like an easy task - after all, any animal with basic vision can see a moving object, decide whether it is food or a threat and react accordingly, but what comes easily to a scallop is a challenge for the world's biggest supercomputers. Read further...

Mellanox 25Gb/s Ethernet adapters chosen by major ODMs to enable next generation hyperscale data centres

Mellanox Technologies Ltd.'s ConnectX-4 Lx 25Gb/s OCP and PCIe Ethernet adapters have been adopted by major ODMs. The ConnectX-4 Lx 25 gigabit Ethernet adapters provide 2.5 times the data throughput at lowest latency needed for data centre applications while utilizing the same infrastructure as 10 gigabit Ethernet, thus maximizing the data centre return on investment. The company is currently shipping hundreds of thousands of Ethernet adapters every quarter, reflecting a growing demand for Mellanox Ethernet solutions. Read further...

Mellanox announces new executive appointments

Mellanox Technologies Ltd., a supplier of high-performance, end-to-end smart interconnect solutions for data centre servers and storage systems, has announced executive promotions of Samuel Attali, Albert Benzoni, Mike Dubman, Dazeng Feng, Tzahi Oved, and Asaf Wachtel to vice presidents and Roy Armoni and Eyal Frost to senior principal engineers. Read further...

New HPC cluster installed at Clarkson University

An Advanced Clustering team was on-site at Clarkson University to install a new cluster that the company built for Dr. Chen Liu, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dr. Liu was awarded a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to lead a four-person research team dedicated to acquiring a heterogeneous high-performance computing cluster. Read further...

Harnessing heat to power computers

One of the biggest problems with computers, dating to the invention of the first one, has been finding ways to keep them cool so that they don't overheat or shut down. Instead of combating the heat, two University of Nebraska-Lincoln engineers have embraced it as an alternative energy source that would allow computing at ultra-high temperatures. Read further...

Launch of new research line on network measurements and analytics

In an effort to ensure their scientific work has positive impact on the everyday lives of the billions of users of ICT communications worldwide, at IMDEA Networks they study the complexity of the various elements involved in the communication process, so that they can fine-tune them and create a more cohesive and harmonious whole. With this objective at heart the Institute launches a new line of research named "Network Measurements and Analytics". Read further...

DataDirect Networks to demonstrate converged appliance that accelerates immersive and traditional content creation and global distribution

DataDirect Networks (DDN) will showcase the latest technologies and best practices to meet and exceed the requirements of modern media workflows at the upcoming NAB Show 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada, April 22-27, 2017. High-resolution formats and new content distribution models, such as Virtual Reality and immersive 360, are driving exponential growth in scale, capacity and bandwidth needs. DDN MEDIAScaler delivers the industry's fastest and most scalable appliance for media, with transparent tiering for cost reduction and easy distribution. Read further...

Rescale announces ScaleX Labs with Intel Xeon Phi processors and Intel Omni-Path architecture

Rescale has introduced the ScaleX Labs with Intel Xeon Phi processors and Intel Omni-Path Fabric managed by R Systems. The collaboration brings lightning-fast, next-generation computation to Rescale's Cloud platform for big compute, ScaleX Pro. Read further...

Applications

Royal Canadian Institute for Science recognizes IBM's commitment to STEM

The Royal Canadian Institute for Science (RCIS) has awarded IBM Canada the 2017 William Edmond Logan Award at an award ceremony held at the MarS Discovery Centre in Toronto on April 20, 2017. The award recognizes outstanding contributions to the public awareness of science by an institution or an organisation. Read further...

WorldFlix announces new data protection technology that even a supercomputer won't be able to break

WorldFlix Inc. has significantly enhanced the security and privacy of its Swantry app with the addition of its new, proprietary protection technology, Parano, developed by its subsidiary Paranotek. Paranotek is a security software company that has developed Parano as a post-quantum, cryptographic protocol, designed to withstand sophisticated security hacks both currently in use and expected in the future from super and quantum computers. Popular apps on the market today, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, may be hacked as quantum computers come online without advanced encryption software such as Parano. The addition of Parano to Swantry has pushed the launch date of Swantry out to the end of the month as Paranotek files patents to protect the intellectual property of its software. Read further...

Call for Applications opened for DATA2PERSON - Big Data and Health

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has opened the call for applications with regard to DATA2PERSON - Big Data & Health. This call, as part of the COMMIT2DATA programme, aims to contribute to the development of effective, efficient, and responsible personal empowerment methods for a future healthy society. Consortiums of at least two academic departments and at least one public/private partner can apply for funding. The deadline for full proposals is 5 September 2017, 14.00 hours CEST. Read further...

IBM machine vision technology advances early detection of diabetic eye disease using deep learning

IBM has released the results of new research using deep learning and visual analytics technology to advance early detection of diabetic retinopathy (DR). The results, which classify the degree of severity of the disease in an eye image, exceed other currently published research efforts for severity classification using deep learning and pathology insights. Read further...

Predictive power

Few jobs are more massive than that of building a nuclear power plant, a project that takes years and billions of dollars to complete. But once a new plant is finished, how do engineers know it will operate as designed? Read further...

Dutch eScience Center organises Scientific Visualization event and Fifth National eScience Symposium

The Netherlands eScience Center (NLeSC) is organizing two major events in the near future. On June 20, 2017, "Scientific Visualization: From Archaeology to Astronomy" will take place in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. This is a one-day event where scientists and researchers from different disciplines meet to discover how visualization technologies impact scientific research. On October 12, 2017, the fifth edition of the Dutch National eScience Symposium will take place in the Amsterdam ArenA, The Netherlands. Read further...

OCF supporting scientific research at the Atomic Weapons Establishment

High Performance Computing (HPC) storage and data analytics integrator, OCF, is supporting scientific research at the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), with the design, testing and implementation of a new HPC, cluster and separate Big Data storage system. Read further...

A good night's sleep thanks to new machine learning algorithm

Despite spending at least one quarter to one third a day sleeping, good sleep can elude many people, and the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders remains primitive. Osaka University researchers have designed new technology that uses machine learning to model a personal sleep pattern based on the sounds made during sleep. Because the sounds can be recorded at home with no fancy devices, it is expected that doctors using this technology could diagnose patients under normal sleeping conditions, which is expected to lead to better treatment. Read further...

The Cloud

Oracle brings Oracle's flagship databases and developer tools to the Docker Store

Oracle is collaborating with Docker to release its flagship databases, middleware and developer tools into the Docker Store marketplace via the Docker Certification Programme. Together, Oracle and Docker enable developers to quickly build Cloud-native applications using Docker Enterprise Edition as their container platform and Oracle's databases and developer tools immediately available as Docker containers through the Docker Store. The Docker Certification Programme is a framework for partners to integrate and certify their technology to the Docker EE commercial platform. Read further...

IBM to deliver Docker Enterprise Edition for Linux on IBM systems

IBM at DockerCon17 has launched plans to make Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) available for Linux on IBMz Systems, LinuxONE and Power Systems to provide organisations with advanced performance and flexibility in developing and deploying business-critical applications across a hybrid Cloud environment. Docker EE, a new version of Docker's container management platform, is designed to give developers and systems administrators a streamlined approach to building, running and operating applications at scale. Read further...