The ETP4HPC Workshop at ISC'17 in Frankfurt, Germany allowedPrimeur Magazineto talk with Michael Malms, who is working at the ETP4HPC Office. His responsibility is to bring together strategic documents like the multi-annual roadmap (SRA), orchestrate workshops, and also pushing certain ideas like the extreme-scale demonstrator idea that the ETP4HPC Workshop focused on. Michael Malms has 30 years of experience in systems development. He worked for IBM before in the mainframe development arena. He then moved on to HPC Systems. He led a team working on blades for the Supercomputing Center in Barcelona in 2004. This team also delivered the compute node for Roadrunner in 2008. So Michael Malms has some experience in this area. Read further...

The Primeur Magazine team has collected a list of over 1750 organisations in the world that are somehow connected to HPC. This is the largest directory of HPC organisations in the universe. The organisations range from HPC hardware component manufacturers to organisations that use HPC. Read further...

The Primeur Magazine team has collected a list of over 1750 organisations in the world that are somehow connected to HPC. This is the largest directory of HPC organisations in the universe. The organisations range from HPC hardware component manufacturers to organisations that use HPC. Read further...

The Universities Space Research Association (USRA), as part of an ongoing joint collaboration with NASA and Google Inc. to operate a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has upgraded its current quantum annealing computer to a D-Wave 2000Q system. The computer offers the promise for solving challenging problems in a variety of applications including machine learning, scheduling, diagnostics, medicine and biology among others. Read further...

Rapid development in quantum computing over the past few years has brought it from an exotic theoretical possibility to a technology with tangible prototypes. Its ultimate potential is hard to assess, but some researchers expect it to be revolutionary in terms of what it will do for the complexity of problems computing can address. On September 28, 2017, a collective of theorists and experimentalists will take the stage for this Hot Topic of the 5th Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF), September 24-29. A panel of experts will guide the session through the theoretical and algorithmic obstacles of quantum computing and into the present status and realistic future prospects. Read further...

Modern parallel computer architectures are capable of processing huge amounts of data at high speed. This allows for the increasing use of imaging techniques as sensors to control machines and process plants. In the new European collaborative project TOMOCON twelve research institutions and 15 renowned industrial companies work together on the development of imaging-based industrial process control. The network is coordinated by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf. Read further...

German tech company DeepL launches DeepL Translator, a breakthrough in neural machine translation that delivers translations of unrivaled quality. From today, it is available to everyone, free of charge on www.DeepL.com. Read further...

A tool that makes large databases work smarter, not harder, could unlock the potential of Big Data to drive medical research, inform business decisions and speed up a slew of other applications that today are mired in a worldwide data glut. Read further...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced its support of a Lehigh University-led research team that will advance machine learning by tying together techniques drawn from the fields of statistics, computer science, and applied mathematics. Read further...

Errors in Artificial Intelligence which would normally take a considerable amount of time to resolve could be corrected immediately with the help of new research from the University of Leicester. Read further...

Ace Computers and BeeGFS have teamed to deliver a complete parallel file system solving storage access speed issues that slow down even the fastest supercomputers. BeeGFS eliminates the gap between compute speed and the limited speed of storage access for these clusters - stalling on disk access while reading input data or writing the intermediate or final simulation results. Read further...

Cray Inc. has delivered a Cray CS cluster supercomputer to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. The four-cabinet Cray CS400 system will power collaborative applied research with industry partners at the university's new research facility - the John Mica Engineering and Aerospace Innovation Complex ("MicaPlex") at Embry-Riddle Research Park. Read further...

ScaleMP, a provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, delivering technology for software-defined computing and software-defined memory products, has completed a $10 million funding round. The investment follows deeper and broader adoption of ScaleMP's technology by server and storage OEMs. The funds will further accelerate the company's growth, enhance the company’s products and technology, and expand ScaleMP's support for its OEM partners. Read further...

Optalysys Ltd., a start-up pioneering the development of light-speed optical co-processors, has demonstrated the latest prototype of its breakthrough technology for genomic searching at the Genome 10k / Genome Science conference. Optalysys partner, Earlham Institute (EI), presented the latest sequence alignment results produced using the prototype at the conference. Read further...

The University of Southern Mississippi has acquired a supercomputer to support research and training in computational and data-enabled science and engineering. The acquisition was made possible through a $622,986 Major Research Instrumentation grant from the National Science Foundation. Read further...

During major epidemics, cramped airplane cabins are fertile ground for the spread of infection, but new research suggests changing routine boarding protocols could be a key to reducing rampant transmission of disease. In response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak that grounded hundreds of international flights, Florida State University Associate Professor of Computer Science Ashok Srinivasan set out to investigate the mechanics of infection spread on high-occupancy aircraft. Under Ashok Srinivasan's leadership, his team found that current zoned boarding procedures may play an outsized role in spreading disease, and they offered a raft of policy suggestions that could, if strategically implemented, mitigate transmission. The research appeared in the journalPhysical Review. Read further...

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS) jointly announced that Shaden Smith of the University of Minnesota and Yang You of the University of California, Berkeley are the recipients of the 2017 ACM/IEEE George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships. Shaden Smith is being recognized for his work on efficient and parallel large-scale sparse tensor factorization for machine learning applications. Yang You is being recognized for his work on designing accurate, fast, and scalable machine learning algorithms on distributed systems. Read further...

If you have ever had to wait those agonizing minutes in front of a computer for a movie or large file to load, you'll likely sympathize with the plight of cosmologists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory (ANL). But instead of watching TV dramas, they are trying to transfer, as fast and as accurately as possible, the huge amounts of data that make up movies of the universe - computationally demanding and highly intricate simulations of how our cosmos evolved after the Big Bang. Read further...

A research team at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) has shown for the first time how laser modulation of magnetic properties in materials is influenced by thermal effects and how the process occurs under moderate experimental parameters. At the same time, the scientists discovered a previously unknown dependence on the thickness of the magnetic layer. This is an important clue for our theoretical understanding of optically controlled magnetic data storage media. The findings are published at August 25th in the journalScientific Reports. Read further...

By listening to the acoustic signal emitted by a laboratory-created earthquake, a computer science approach using machine learning can predict the time remaining before the fault fails. Read further...

Most modern websites store data in databases, and since database queries are relatively slow, most sites also maintain so-called cache servers, which list the results of common queries for faster access. A data centre for a major web service such as Google or Facebook might have as many as 1,000 servers dedicated just to caching. Read further...

The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center has acquired a supercomputer that is the latest step in a long-running weather prediction arms race. The system, named Thor, models global weather patterns and provides individual air bases and army units with specific forecasts for areas as small as 17 square kilometers. The computer system is comprised of nearly 1,000 individual blade servers. When constructed in May 2016, Thor was the 150th most powerful supercomputer on earth, according to TOP500, which rates supercomputer speeds. Read further...

VMware and Dell EMC have signed a new partnership for VMware Cloud on AWS, which will bring Dell EMC data protection to VMware Cloud on AWS. Delivered, sold and supported by VMware as an on-demand service, and running on elastic, bare-metal AWS infrastructure, VMware Cloud on AWS is powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, the unified SDDC that integrates vSphere, VMware vSAN and VMware NSX virtualization technologies. The extended partnership with Dell EMC will offer customers of VMware Cloud on AWS integrated data protection capabilities with Dell EMC's Data Domain and Data Protection Suite for Applications solutions, providing back-up and recovery solutions for workloads running in VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware Cloud on AWS customers will also have the option to easily add Dell EMC data protection through a few simple clicks when ordering new on-demand services. Read further...

Oracle has made significant enhancements to the Oracle Internet of Things (IoT) Cloud. The offering now features built-in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning that powers Digital Twin and Digital Thread capabilities. As such, customers and partners can quickly gain operation-wide visibility and leverage predictive insights from connected assets. These insights can increase deployment times, reduce costs, improve business outcomes, and accelerate new market opportunities. Combining the power of Oracle IoT Cloud and enterprise applications, Oracle also introduced new industry solutions for digital field service, smart connected factories, and digital fleet management. Read further...

At VMworld 2017, VMware Inc. has launched new releases of VMware Integrated OpenStack and VMware vRealize Network Insight to help customers modernize their data centres to increase business and developer agility while introducing increased networking and security capabilities. Additionally, VMware is unveiling a new VMware vSAN offering to accelerate the adoption of distributed IT by reducing the cost and complexity of expanding enterprise IT features beyond the data centre. Read further...

Fujitsu Limited and VMware Inc. have expanded their global partnership in Cloud to empower the digital transformations of enterprises. Fujitsu plans to partner with VMware to deliver VMware Cloud solutions as a service on the Fujitsu Cloud Service, K5. Fujitsu is scheduled to commence worldwide roll-out in the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2017 (January - March 2018). Fujitsu and VMware plan to expand solutions coverage to VMware Cloud Foundation as well. Read further...

At VMworld 2017, VMware Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, have made available VMware Cloud on AWS. Born out of the strategic alliance announced in October 2016, VMware Cloud on AWS brings VMware's software-defined data centre (SDDC) to the AWS Cloud, allowing customers to run applications across operationally consistent VMware vSphere-based private, public, and hybrid Cloud environments, with optimized access to AWS services. VMware Cloud on AWS is delivered, sold, and supported by VMware as an on-demand, elastically-scalable Cloud service that removes barriers to Cloud migration and Cloud portability, increases IT efficiency, and opens up new opportunities for customers to leverage a hybrid Cloud environment. Read further...

At VMworld 2017, VMware Inc. and Pivotal Software Inc., in collaboration with Google Cloud, have unveiled Pivotal Container Service (PKS), a new product that enables enterprises and service providers to deliver production-ready Kubernetes on VMware vSphere and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with constant compatibility to Google Container Engine (GKE). The new offering is expected to become available in calendar Q4 2017, and ship as a standalone product able to integrate with Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) and VMware's software-defined data centre (SDDC) infrastructure. Read further...