China firmly ranks first and second at the TOP500 of fastest supercomputers in the world for some time already. But where is China heading? Depei Qian, Beihang University/Sun Yat-sen University gave an overview of China's effort in HPC in the next 5 years at the HPC in Asia workshop at ISC-HPC ISC'17 in Frankfurt. He started his presentation with a historical overview of HPC in China. Read further...

BOINC Monitor is a very cool Windows gadget for monitoring the progress of lots of tasks. Version 9.70 was released recently. Read further...

The 8th Irish Supercomputer List was released on June 22, 2017 featuring two new Top-500 class machines. The new entrants from an undisclosed software company feature at spots 196 and 197 on the 49th TOP500 Supercomputer List, each with a Linpack Rmax of 819.16 TFlop/s. This more than doubles the Irish HPC capacity, which is up from 1.46 PFlop/s in November 2016, to 3.01 Pflop/s. These are the 2nd and 3rd highest Irish TOP500 rankings of all time. Ireland has ranked on the TOP500 list 29 times over a history of 23 years with a total of 18 machines. Over half of these machines (11) and rankings (18) have been in the last 6 years, representing Ireland's increasing pace of HPC investment. Read further...

On 20 June 2017, PRACE - Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe - and the CHPC - Centre for High Performance Computing, South Africa - signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) at the PRACE booth at ISC 2017. The inspiration for this MoU came from informal meetings between PRACE and the CHPC that took place at the International Conference on Research Infrastructure (ICRI) 2016, in October 2016 in Cape Town, South Africa. Read further...

The French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur, de la Recherche et de l’Innovation) and GENCI, the French national agency in charge of funding and making available large-scale facilities in high performance computing, hailed the signing of a contract, with ATOS Bull, for providing a new supercomputer that will further increase the scientific and economic competitiveness of both France and Europe, with an investment effort of 24 million euro. Read further...

At the International Supercomputing Conference 2017 (ISC 2017), Huawei announced the establishment of its High-Performance Computing (HPC) Global Center of Excellence (CoE). The HPC CoE located at Huawei Munich OpenLab will enable Huawei and partners to better co-innovate a platform for incubating industry solutions in the HPC, and Cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AI) domains, thereby catalyzing the industry transformation. Read further...

The Russian RSC Group has presented its ultra high-dense scalable and energy efficient RSC Tornado cluster solution at ISC'17 international exhibition. RSC has demonstrated a full set of components for modern HPC computing systems of various scale with 100% liquid cooling in 'hot water' mode including high-performance computing nodes based on Intel Xeon Phi 7290 and Intel Xeon E5-2697А v4 processors and world's first Intel Omni-Path high-speed interconnect switch with 'hot water' liquid cooling. Read further...

NVM Express Inc., the organisation that developed the industry standard NVM Express (NVMe) specification for accessing solid-state drives (SSDs) on a PCI Express (PCIe) bus as well as across Fabrics, has completed and released its NVMe 1.3 specification. NVM Express has delivered on its commitment to Enterprise, Cloud, and Client customers by adding capabilities that meet the unique needs of each of these market segments, including Virtualization and Streams. The reach of the interface has expanded its support for the Mobile sector by adding the Boot Partitions feature, which enables bootstrapping of an SSD in a low resource environment. These features have been added while maintaining low latency and high performance - making an NVMe device ready to take advantage of next generation bus speeds, including PCIe 4.0. The NVM Express 1.3 specification is available now for download. Read further...

DataDirect Networks (DDN) has achieved recognition in the prestigious "Storage Unicorns" list. "Storage Unicorns" are private storage companies deemed to have a valuation of $1 billion or more - a statistical rarity of very successful ventures. The list has been compiled by well-respected Condor Consulting Group. Read further...

Verne Global, a provider of highly-optimised, secure, scalable and 100% renewably-powered data centre solutions, have added powerDIRECT+, a reduced-cost compute environment engineered specifically for the next generation of power intensive computing. With the addition of powerDIRECT+, Verne Global has expanded its compute environments to equip CIOs with streamlined and cost-effective data centre options, breaking the decades-old model of one-size-fits-all data centre design. Read further...

Cisco and NetApp have expanded the portfolio of the industry's fastest growing integrated infrastructure and certified reference systems with a new offering that is uniquely designed for emerging business challenges. Read further...

Cisco has unveiled intent-based networking solutions that represent one of the most significant breakthroughs in enterprise networking. The introduction is the culmination of Cisco's vision to create an intuitive system that anticipates actions, stops security threats in their tracks, and continues to evolve and learn. It will help businesses to unlock new opportunities and solve previously unsolvable challenges in an era of increasing connectivity and distributed technology. Read further...

Super Micro Computer Inc., a global expert in compute, storage and networking technologies including green computing, delivers the Intel Omni-Path Architecture (Intel OPA) in the new generation, high-performance, X11 8U SuperBlade systems supporting the upcoming Intel Xeon Processor Scalable Family - codenamed Skylake. Read further...

Super Micro Computer Inc., a global expert in compute, storage and networking technologies including green computing, has launched new dual socket servers and upcoming single-socket solutions supporting AMD EPYC, the latest AMD family of high-performance processors. Read further...

The leading deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, Caffe2, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, and Baidu PaddlePaddle now leverage Mellanox's smart offloading capabilities to provide world-leading performance and near-linear scaling across multiple AI servers. Mellanox RDMA and In-Network Computing offloads and NVIDIA GPUDirect are key technologies enabling users to maximize their application performance and system efficiencies. Read further...

Mellanox's Ethernet and InfiniBand interconnect solutions have been chosen to accelerate the new AMD EPYC data centre platforms. Mellanox 25, 50 and 100G Ethernet and EDR InfiniBand represent the ideal networking solutions to connect AMD EPYC CPUs, delivering the highest return on investment for Cloud, Web2.0, Big Data, Machine Learning, storage and high-performance computing infrastructures. Read further...

Every day our bodies come under a barrage of toxic agents - cigarette smoke, the sun, free radicals and other carcinogenic substances - that create damaging lesions in our DNA that can initiate cancer and other human diseases. Fortunately, nature has provided living organisms with repair processes to seek out and remove such dangerous lesions; repair allows the DNA to be restored to its original base sequence so it can carry out its fundamental jobs: to be replicated and to be copied into a sister molecule, RNA, for the manufacture of proteins and other tasks. Read further...

The petascale Comet supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) on the UC San Diego campus has emerged as a key resource in what is considered to be the most advanced dark matter research quest to-date, with a group of international researchers recently announcing promising results after only one month of operation with a new detector. Read further...

Some problems are so challenging to solve that even the most advanced computers need weeks, not seconds, to process them. Now a team of researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Notre Dame has created a new computing system that aims to tackle one of computing's hardest problems in a fraction of the time. Read further...

For most people, it is a stretch of the imagination to understand the world in four dimensions but a new study has discovered structures in the brain with up to eleven dimensions - ground-breaking work that is beginning to reveal the brain's deepest architectural secrets. Read further...

High Performance Computing (HPC) is an enabler of the recent developments and tremendous success in the field of machine learning and Big Data. It connects research from mathematics, computer science, including hardware and software, and application fields such as engineering, natural sciences, economics, and many more. Read further...

Researchers from the University of Luxembourg, in cooperation with the University of Strasbourg, have developed a computational method that could be used to guide surgeons during brain surgery. Read further...

Evolution takes eons, but it leaves marks on the genomes of organisms that can be detected with DNA sequencing and analysis. As methods for studying and comparing genetic data improve, scientists are beginning to decode these marks to reconstruct the evolutionary history of species, as well as how variants of genes give rise to unique traits. A research team at the University of Texas at Arlington led by assistant professor of biology Todd Castoe has been exploring the genomes of snakes and lizards to answer critical questions about these creatures' evolutionary history. For instance, how did they develop venom? How do they regenerate their organs? And how do evolutionarily-derived variations in genes lead to variations in how organisms look and function? Read further...

On 21 June 2017, the Commission set up the new High Level Expert Group European Open Science Cloud. Its mission is to advise the Commission on the measures needed to implement the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Read further...

At ISC17, Huawei released the public-Cloud-based HPC Cloud Solution 2.0. Compared with the previous version, this version has been enhanced in performance. HPC Cloud Solution 2.0 is co-developed by Huawei and Mellanox based on InfiniBand and is the first HPC public Cloud solution providing 100 Gbit/s EDR computing network capabilities in the industry. In addition, this solution uses high-performance local storage to improve the overall HPC computing performance and instant data erase and storage encryption to enhance security. The HPC solution will be firstly rolled out on Open Telekom Cloud, a public Cloud platform jointly provided by Huawei and Deutsche Telekom in Europe. Read further...