Right after the Award Ceremony of the HPCAC-ISC Student Cluster Competition 2017 at ISC, Session Chair Frank Baetke introduced Professor Thomas Sterling from Indiana University to the audience that was ready for the 14th edition of the legendary "HPC Year in Review" series. As the 2017 theme, Thomas Sterling had picked "Planning for Exascale" instead of machine learning or Deep Learning, explaining that we now have a fairly clear picture of what exascale is going to be. Read further...

SKA Organisation and CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, have signed an agreement formalising their growing collaboration in the area of extreme-scale computing. The agreement establishes a framework for collaborative projects that addresses joint challenges in approaching Exascale computing and data storage, and comes as the LHC will generate even more data in the coming decade and SKA is preparing to collect a vast amount of scientific data as well. Read further...

As climate change accelerates, IBM is galvanizing the global science community with a massive infusion of Crowd computing resources, weather data, and Cloud services to help researchers examine the effects of climate change, and explore strategies to mitigate its effects. IBM pledges to help direct the equivalent of up to $200 million for up to five climate-related projects judged to offer the greatest potential impact, and will then broadly share the experiments' results. Read further...

The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), led by President Hideyuki Tokuda, Ph.D., developed the world's smallest and lightest quantum-communication transmitter (SOTA) onboard the microsatellite SOCRATES. The team succeeded in the demonstration of the first quantum-communication experiment from space, receiving information from the satellite in a single-photon regime in an optical ground station in Koganei city. SOTA weighs 6 kg and its size is 17.8 cm length, 11.4 cm width and 26.8 cm height. It transmits a laser signal to the ground at a rate of 10 million bits per second from an altitude of 600 km at a speed of 7 km/s. The team succeeded in correctly detecting the communication signal from SOTA moving at this fast speed. This is a major step toward building a global long-haul and truly-secure satellite communication network. Read further...

Members of the public have been learning about quantum physics as part of an innovative pop-up lab being run by the University of Sussex at Spitalfields Market, London. Read further...

Cray will provide a Cray Urika-GX system to the Alan Turing Institute through a collaboration between Cray, Intel, and the Institute. Hosted at the University of Edinburgh in the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), the Cray Urika-GX system will provide researchers at the Alan Turing Institute with a dedicated analytics hardware platform, enabling the development of advanced applications across a number of scientific fields including engineering and technology, defense and security, smart cities, financial services and life sciences. Read further...

The Secretary for Environment of Mexico City (SEDEMA), Tanya Müller, and the Director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Mateo Valero, have signed an agreement to develop modelling tools that will allow to evaluate both management and quality air improvement policies in the city. This agreement is a new step in the collaboration between BSC and SEDEMA, which have already cooperated in the development and launching of a weather forecast system for Mexico City and its metropolitan area. Read further...

A group of BSC researchers will participate in the 7th edition of the JLESC workshop. Researchers from different departments including Rosa Maria Badia, Leonardo Bautista, Kai Keller, Paula Córdoba, Kim Serradell, Antoni Peña, Xavier Martorell and David Torrents will be at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications on the University of Illinois campus to give talks in technical sessions from 17-19 July. The latest edition of the workshop will focus on topics such as application and numerical libraries, parallel programming, runtime and tools, resilience, big data, I/O and visualisation, and Cloud for High Performance Computing (HPC). Read further...

This evening, Boris Koprivnikar, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Public Administration of the Republic of Slovenia, signed the EuroHPC declaration in the presence of the European Commission Vice-President Ansip and the Commissioner Gabriel. Slovenia becomes this way the ninth Member State signing this declaration and aiming at working together to coordinate the European efforts in High Performance Computing. Read further...

The Cray XC50 supercomputers and the Cray CS line of cluster supercomputers will be available with the new Intel Xeon Scalable processors. With increased performance and advancements in reliability and serviceability, the new Intel Xeon processors are powerful building blocks in providing Cray XC50 and Cray CS customers with flexible, integrated, and high-performing supercomputing platforms. Read further...

Asetek has received an order from a new European OEM customer to service demand for an High Performance Computing (HPC) installation. The company also announced an increase of its contract with the United States Department of Defense (DoD) Environmental Security Technology Certification Programme (ESTCP). Read further...

This study evaluates performance of the Optane 3D Xpoint device. A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) team ran several input/output (I/O) benchmarks and application-level benchmarks on Xeon servers with two NVME-attached solid state drives (SSDs): the Optane and the HGST SN100. The I/O benchmarks evaluate latency and bandwidth with various read/write scenarios. The application-level benchmarks use the memory map abstraction to access out-of-core data structures using either system mmap or a C++ User Level Cache (ULC) with smart pointers. System mmap caches pages at a 4K granularity. ULC can cache at arbitrary granularity settable by the applications, and the ULC evaluation utilizes several sizes from 4K to 1M. Read further...

Boston has launched the Boston Quattro 22128-T featuring Intel Xeon processor Scalable family with codename Skylake. Read further...

Penguin Computing, provider of high performance computing, enterprise data centre and Cloud solutions, has completed the company's major technology transition to the Intel Xeon Scalable platform for all Penguin Computing product lines. Read further...

Super Micro Computer Inc., a global expert in high-performance, high-efficiency server, storage technology and green computing, has released a comprehensive line of new X11 generation server and storage solutions featuring the new Intel Xeon Scalable processor family with the strongest support for NVMe storage and 100G/25G Ethernet in the industry. Read further...

Super Micro Computer Inc. has released a comprehensive line of new X11 generation server and storage motherboard and chassis solutions fully optimized for the new Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Read further...

Fujitsu has made available its new, fully refreshed range of dual- and quad-socket PRIMERGY servers and octo-socket PRIMEQUEST business critical server systems designed for Intel Xeon Scalable processors. These combine exceptional performance, flexible configuration options, and optimized system designs to meet the changing computing demands driven by digitalization, including advanced analytics and Artificial Intelligence. With its latest server models, Fujitsu offers a full set of workload-optimized servers that make a perfect foundation for building secure, agile, multi-cloud data centers: the IT architecture for a human-centric, digital world. Read further...

For decades, computer chips have increased efficiency by using "caches", small, local memory banks that store frequently used data and cut down on time- and energy-consuming communication with off-chip memory. Read further...

The Director of Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Mateo Valero, and the Director for Innovation and Knowledge of Aigües de Barcelona, Maria Monzó, have signed a collaboration agreement whereby the Research Center will contribute with its know-how in machine learning, Big Data, neural networks and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools applied to the water home supply. Read further...

DARPA has awarded contracts to five research organisations and one company that will support the Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) programme: Brown University; Columbia University; Fondation Voir et Entendre - The Seeing and Hearing Foundation; John B. Pierce Laboratory; Paradromics Inc.; and the University of California, Berkeley. These organisations have formed teams to develop the fundamental research and component technologies required to pursue the NESD vision of a high-resolution neural interface and integrate them to create and demonstrate working systems able to support potential future therapies for sensory restoration. Four of the teams will focus on vision and two will focus on aspects of hearing and speech. Read further...

A cure for cancer, HIV and other stubborn diseases has evaded the brightest minds for generations. But with supercomputers - computing systems that can calculate, analyze and visualize extremely large amounts of data - researchers are gaining a leg up in the fight for better treatments and cures. Read further...

The University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering and Georgia Tech have been selected to receive Department of Defense Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funding under the Hierarchal Identify Verify Exploit (HIVE) programme. Georgia Tech and USC are to receive total funding of $6.8 million over 4.5 years to develop a powerful new data-analysis and computing platform. Read further...

In a study published in the July 11, 2017 issue ofNeurology Genetics, an official journal of the American Academy of Neurology, researchers at the New York Genome Center (NYGC), The Rockefeller University and other NYGC member institutions, and IBM have illustrated the potential of IBM Watson for Genomics to analyze complex genomic data from state-of-the-art DNA sequencing of whole genomes. The study compared multiple techniques - or assays - used to analyze genomic data from a glioblastoma patient's tumour cells and normal healthy cells. Read further...

IBM will be the first major Cloud provider to launch bare metal servers powered by the next generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors globally on the IBM Cloud. New IBM Cloud bare metal servers powered by the Intel Xeon Silver 4110 processor and Intel Xeon Gold 5120 and 6140 processors will be designed to help deliver greater performance and generate faster insights from Big Data workloads, and will offer the global reach and security-rich environment of the IBM Cloud. Read further...

WekaIO, a venture backed high-performance Cloud storage software company, has emerged from stealth to introduce the industry's first Cloud-native scalable file system that delivers unprecedented performance to applications, scaling to Exabytes of data in a single namespace. Headquartered in San Jose, California, WekaIO has developed the first software platform that harnesses flash technology to create a high-performance parallel scale out file storage solution for both on-premises servers and public Clouds. Read further...