During the Workshops Day at ISC'17 in Frankfurt, Germany,Primeur Magazinewas able to interview Erwin Laure from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, the largest engineering school in Sweden. KTH has a long history of providing the best HPC services to Swedish academia. These days, this is an essential part for an engineering school and for science. KTH is very happy to provide world-class systems. There are systems which are on the tier-1 level in the European PRACE scheme for the Swedish researchers but KTH also needs to keep up the pace. Read further...

The ETP4HPC Workshop at ISC'17 in Frankfurt, Germany providedPrimeur Magazinewith an excellent occasion to interview Marc Morere who is in charge of the strategy of the scientific computing centre at Airbus for 14 years now. HPC is a topic where Marc Morere has been focusing on for a very long time. Airbus needs HPC to design aircraft and for the optimization of the machines. There are different parts involved: the aerodynamic part to auto-optimize the conception of the carburator and fuel during the flight; the acoustic part; the certification of the aircraft for the airport; the structural part of the aircraft to measure the stress; and the embedded systems in the aircraft. Read further...

Last week, the 4 European centres that together want to procure 4 supercomputers, held an Open Dialogue Event in Brussels to explain in detail what this procurement is all about. It is a joint procurement organised by a project, called PPI4HPC. There are five partners in the procurement project: GENCI and CEA - that work together on the procurement on one system, CINECA, Forschungszentrum Juelich, and Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). The four official procurers are BSC, CINECA, JUELICH, and GENCI. Read further...

The BOINC community lately has been very active in various domains. A new version has been released for which testers are needed. A committee has been formed to propose improvements to the BOINC project with new propositions lying on the table. There is a THOR crunching challenge coming up. Finally, two new sites have joined BOINC. Read further...

Scientists at the University of Sydney are entering a new phase of development to scale up the next generation of quantum-engineered devices. These devices will form the heart of the first practical topological quantum computers. Read further...

Engineers at Australia's University of New South Wales (UNSW) have invented a radical new architecture for quantum computing, based on novel 'flip-flop qubits', that promises to make the large-scale manufacture of quantum chips dramatically cheaper - and easier - than thought possible. Read further...

The University of Copenhagen plays a central role in an ambitious Microsoft multi-million dollar investment. The tech company and the university have signed a long-term collaboration agreement on the development of a general-purpose, scalable quantum computer. This is a project which opens up tremendous new opportunities for science and technology. Read further...

Physicists from the University of Basel have developed a memory that can store photons. These quantum particles travel at the speed of light and are thus suitable for high-speed data transfer. The researchers were able to store them in an atomic vapor and read them out again later without altering their quantum mechanical properties too much. This memory technology is simple and fast and it could find application in a future quantum Internet. Read further...

Asetek has received an order from a new channel partner to service demand from a new OEM customer for an undisclosed High Performance Computing (HPC) installation. All parties remain undisclosed at this time. Read further...

For almost seventy years now, magnetic tapes and hard disks have been used for data storage in computers. In spite of many new technologies that have been developed in the meantime, the controlled magnetization of a data storage medium remains the first choice for archiving information because of its longevity and low price. As a means of realizing random access memories (RAMs), however, which are used as the main memory for processing data in computers, magnetic storage technologies were long considered inadequate. That is mainly due to its low writing speed and relatively high energy consumption. Read further...

The next e-IRG Workshop will take place in Tallinn, Estonia, 3-4 October 2017. The main objective of the e-IRG workshop is the contribution towards some main directions in the development of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Key areas that will be explored include governance, funding, services and data-related aspects. Sustainability will be a cross-cutting theme. Special attention is given on the national perspectives on EOSC development. Read further...

Univa, a data centre workload optimization company, has announced the open source availability of the Universal Resource Broker (URB) adapter for Kubernetes. This new URB adapter will be of interest for organisations running Apache Mesos frameworks that are looking to deploy Kubernetes and Mesos workloads on a common infrastructure. The release of the URB adapter for Kubernetes marks a significant open source contribution by Univa and demonstrates its commitment to the Kubernetes community and to helping users get the most from their infrastructure investments. Read further...

Data analysis is central to nearly every aspect of research these days - not to mention finance, government and almost all aspects of modern life. Our capacity to capture and generate data that describe the intricate workings of the world requires tools to synthesize that data and turn it into insights - whether for making business decisions, personalizing health care, or understanding plate tectonics. Read further...

Avitas Systems, a GE Venture, is partnering with NVIDIA to use some of the latest advances in artificial intelligence computing to optimize the use of robotics for inspection and better detect defects on industrial assets with advanced data analytics. Read further...

Computers require an increasing amount of processing power to ensure that demanding programmes run smoothly. Current technology will not be able to keep up for long, and a new concept is needed in the long term: together with their partners in the collaborative project 'Invasive Computing', computer scientists at Friederich-Alexander-Universität (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg are developing a method to distribute processing power to programmes based on their needs which will enable computers to cope with future processing requirements. Read further...

Super Micro Computer Inc., a global expert in compute, storage, and networking technology and green computing, has introduced its latest fully configured, ready to deploy software-defined storage (SDS) solution at VMworld 2017. Read further...

Canada's newest and largest radio telescope, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) has formally launched at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in Penticton, British Columbia. Proudly supported by CoolIT Systems with a custom Direct Liquid Cooling solution, the CHIME telescope will map out the entire northern sky each day, aiming to constrain the properties and evolution of Dark Energy over a broad swath of cosmic history. Read further...

Cray Inc. has signed a solutions provider agreement with Vanguard Infrastructures in order for Vanguard to develop, market, and sell on premise and Cloud-as-a-Service cybersecurity solutions that fuse supercomputing technologies with an open, enterprise-ready software framework for Big Data analytics. Vanguard has also purchased a Cray Urika-GX system. Read further...

Solarflare, a pioneer in the development of software defined NICs, is now able to boost the performance of NGINX, the world's most popular open source application delivery platform for high traffic sites, powering over 300 million properties. Test results show that servers with standard XtremeScale NICs, deliver 60% higher NGINX connection rates, 35% more container throughput, 50% lower latency - all while eliminating system jitter. For NGINX service providers, that means more application delivery with less server capital. Solarflare will be demonstrating NGINX performance testing in the Solarflare booth at the NGINX User Conference. Read further...

An innovative web-based portal for accessing high performance computing services has matured beyond the beta phase and now is available to HPC centres worldwide. The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) has launched Open OnDemand 1.0, an open-source version of OSC OnDemand, the Center's online, single-point-of-entry application for HPC services. Read further...

Cancer was first diagnosed 3,500 years ago in ancient Egypt. There, doctors removed tumours in a manner not dissimilar to what is done today: by surgically excising them from the body. Surgery remains the most frequently used approach to treat cancer, but it is not without its complications. Modern tools, from sterile, stainless steel scalpels to MRI imaging, have led to fewer complications and far better outcomes than in ancient Egypt, but haven't fundamentally altered the risks. Removing too little of a tumour can lead to a relapse; too much - especially in a critical area like the brain - can harm a patient. Read further...

CureMatch co-founders Igor Tsigelny, Ph.D. and Razelle Kurzrock, M.D. along with colleagues from the San Diego Supercomputer Center and UCSD Moores Cancer Center have published a study in the journalCancer Biology & Therapy, highlighting the role of a specific molecular mutation in eosinophilic cystitis, a rare inflammatory bladder condition associated with painful and bloody urination. Read further...

IBM plans to make a 10-year, $240 million investment to create the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab in partnership with MIT. The lab will carry out fundamental artificial intelligence (AI) research and seek to propel scientific breakthroughs that unlock the potential of AI. The collaboration aims to advance AI hardware, software and algorithms related to deep learning and other areas, increase AI's impact on industries, such as health care and cybersecurity, and explore the economic and ethical implications of AI on society. IBM's $240 million investment in the lab will support research by IBM and MIT scientists. Read further...

Fast Radio Bursts, or FRBs, are one of the hottest topics in astronomy right now. These intense blasts of radio energy reach us from outside the galaxy, lasting only milliseconds before they disappear once more. Astronomers aren't sure what causes them, and none of these bursts have ever repeated - except one, FRB 121102, which made headlines with the identification of its host galaxy, sitting nearly 3 billion light-years away. Read further...

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, produces hundreds of millions of proton collisions per second. But researchers working on the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment, which involves physicists from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), can only record 2,000 of those collisions, using one of the detectors installed on the accelerator. So in the end, this technological marvel leaves the physicists wanting more. They are convinced that the vast volume of uncaptured data holds the answers to several unresolved questions. Read further...

Insilico Medicine has announced that its founder and CEO, Alex Zhavoronkov will present the company's latest research on the application of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) for validation, quality control, reconstruction and management of health care data on Blockchain platforms at the AI and Blockchain for Healthcare Innovation Forum in Basel, Switzerland, September 12-13, 2017. Read further...

Huawei has unveiled the FusionServer G series heterogeneous computing platform at HUAWEI CONNECT 2017, bringing to market two heterogeneous servers: FusionServer G5500 and G2500. These servers are primarily positioned to build the Huawei intelligent Cloud hardware platform, Atlas, and highlight a significant achievement Huawei has made in actualizing its Boundless Computing strategy. Boundless Computing pushes the boundaries traditionally confined to general purpose CPUs and enables heterogeneous acceleration for a computing efficiency boost. Read further...

The U.S. Army's Logistics Support Activity (LOGSA) awarded IBM a contract to continue providing Cloud services, software development and cognitive computing, constituting the technical infrastructure for one of the U.S. federal government's biggest logistics systems. Read further...