The human brain is an organ of incredible complexity, composed of a hundred billion interconnected nerve cells. However, even with the help of the most powerful supercomputers available, it is currently impossible to simulate the exchange of neuronal signals in networks of this size. Researchers of Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany, RIKEN, Kobe and Wako, Japan, and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm Sweden, have made a decisive step towards creating the technology to achieve simulations of brain-scale networks on future supercomputers of the exascale class. Simultaneously, the new algorithm significantly speeds up brain simulations on existing supercomputers. Read further...

A team of researchers led by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has demonstrated a new method for splitting light beams into their frequency modes. The scientists can then choose the frequencies they want to work with and encode photons with quantum information. Their work could spur advancements in quantum information processing and distributed quantum computing. The team's findings were published inPhysical Review Letters. Read further...

The ultimate goal of quantum information science is to develop a quantum computer, a fully-fledged controllable device which makes use of the quantum states of subatomic particles to store information. As with all quantum technologies, quantum computing is based on a peculiar feature of quantum mechanics, quantum entanglement. The basic units of quantum information, the qubits, need to correlate in this particular way in order for the quantum computer to achieve its full potential. Read further...

The steering group of the Dutch National Platform Open Science appointed former Delft University of Technology Rector Karel Luyben as the National Coordinator for Open Science. In this newly created role, Karel Luyben will work to achieve the Netherlands' open science ambitions and to strengthen the country's pioneering role in this field. This will benefit everyone. Open access to publications, for example, allows lecturers to read up on the most recent developments in their field and to incorporate them into their courses. Furthermore, it allows doctors and nurses to apply the latest medical methods for better care. Read further...

At the home of America's most powerful supercomputer, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), researchers often simulate millions or billions of dynamic atoms to study complex problems in science and energy. The OLCF is a US Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Read further...

Dell EMC has expanded its market-leading converged infrastructure (CI) system with the addition of the next generation Dell EMC VxBlock System 1000. The new system breaks the physical boundaries of traditional CI and offers enterprises even greater simplicity and flexibility to help accelerate their IT and digital transformation efforts. Read further...

Cray Inc. has issued financial results for the year and fourth quarter ended December 31, 2017. All figures are based on U.S. GAAP unless otherwise noted. For 2017, Cray reported total revenue of $392.5 million, which compares with $629.8 million in 2016. Net loss for 2017 was $133.8 million, or $3.33 per diluted share, compared to net income of $10.6 million, or $0.26 per diluted share in 2016. Non-GAAP net loss, which adjusts for selected unusual and non-cash items, was $40.5 million, or $1.01 per diluted share for 2017, compared to non-GAAP net income of $19.9 million, or $0.49 per diluted share in 2016. Read further...

By proclamation of the mayor and the county executive, February 16 is Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies Day in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County. Mayor Peduto and County Executive Fitzgerald recognized the now-retired scientific directors of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) for their service to the city's and county's technical base and scientific progress over 30 years. Read further...

With enormous computing power, the new supercomputer of the Johannes Kepler University has been introduced. Under certain conditions, the MACH-2 supercomputer can execute up to 77.4 trillion arithmetic operations per second. Read further...

In recognition of work to bring advanced IT and telecommunications to the fight to contain California wildfires, the WIFIRE, HPWREN, and AlertTahoe projects have been selected as recipients of the CENIC 2018 Innovations in Networking Award for Experimental Applications. Project leaders being recognized are Ilkay Altintas, San Diego Supercomputer Center; John Graham, Qualcomm Institute, University of California San Diego; Graham Kent, Nevada Seismological Laboratory, University of Nevada, Reno; and Frank Vernon, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego (UCSD). Read further...

Following the development of a virtual machine (JCIM), the 3D-e-Chem team now published a series of building blocks (nodes) and recipes (workflows) that can support complex computer-aided drug discovery efforts. The 3D-e-Chem team consists of cheminformatics and bioinformatics researchers from the Netherlands eScience Center, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Radboudumc Nijmegen, and BioAxis Research, including Stefan Verhoeven (eScience) and Chris de Graaf (PI, VU Amsterdam). Read further...

Researchers working with a University of Florida supercomputer have discovered that a common drug used to control high blood pressure also might help prevent or delay the onset of Type 1 diabetes in up to 60 percent of those at risk of getting the disease. Read further...

Fifteen research teams at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been allocated computation time on the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) sustained-petascale Blue Waters supercomputer after applying in the Fall of 2017. These allocations range from 75,000 to 582,000 node-hours of compute time over either six months or one year, and altogether total nearly four million node-hours (128 million core hour equivalents), valued at $2.48 million. The research pursuits of these teams are incredibly diverse, ranging anywhere from studies on very small HIV capsids to massive binary star mergers. Read further...

With the help of the Blue Waters supercomputer, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Blue Waters Professor Kaiyu Guan and NCSA postdoc fellow, Bin Peng implemented and evaluated a new maize growth model. The CLM-APSIM model combines superior features in both Community Land Model (CLM) and Agricultural Production Systems sIMulator (APSIM), creating one of the most reliable tools for long-term crop prediction in the U.S. Corn Belt. Read further...

Dan Jacobson is illuminating the workings of biological systems from the molecular scale up by leveraging Oak Ridge National Laboratory's (ORNL) supercomputing resources to create machine- and deep-learning techniques more easily understood by humans - an evolving field called explainable artificial intelligence (AI). Read further...

Nuclear physicists are using the U.S.' most powerful supercomputer, Titan, at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) to study particle interactions important to energy production in the Sun and stars and to propel the search for new physics discoveries. Direct calculations of these nuclear processes can contribute new and fundamental information to the fields of high-energy physics, nuclear science, and astrophysics, including how matter formed in the early universe and its relation to dark matter and the large-scale structure of the universe. Read further...

Most car owners in the United States do not think twice about passing over the diesel pump at the gas station. Instead, diesel fuel mostly powers our shipping trucks, boats, buses, and generators - and that is because diesel engines are about 10 percent more fuel-efficient than gasoline, saving companies money transporting large deliveries. Read further...

NEC Corporation and Tohoku University applied new technologies developed by NEC, which use AI to predict the characteristics of unknown materials, to the joint development of cutting edge thermo-electric conversion technology known as a thermoelectric (TE) device using spin current, and achieved 100 times better thermo-electric conversion efficiency over the course of approximately 1 year. Read further...

In a recent demonstration project, physicists from Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory used the Cori supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) to reconstruct data collected from a nuclear physics experiment, an advance that could dramatically reduce the time it takes to make detailed data available for scientific discoveries. Read further...

Artificial intelligence is helping people make better decisions about managing water resources. Scientists are taking the best tools of advanced computing to help make decisions about complex and pressing problems in managing Earth's resources, including water. A science panel on AI and water management headed by Suzanne Pierce of the Texas Advanced Computing Center met in Austin, Texas on February 17th at the 2018 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Read further...

Most recent advances in artificial-intelligence systems such as speech- or face-recognition programmes have come courtesy of neural networks, densely interconnected meshes of simple information processors that learn to perform tasks by analyzing huge sets of training data. Read further...

A new simulation of supermassive black holes - the behemoths at the centers of galaxies - uses a realistic scenario to predict the light signals emitted in the surrounding gas before the masses collide, said Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) researchers. Read further...

Researchers at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility used a 'reduced physics' fluid model of plasma turbulence to explain unexpected properties of the density profile inside a tokamak experiment. Modelling plasma's turbulent behaviour could help scientists optimize the tokamak performance in future fusion reactors like ITER. They discuss their findings inPhysics of Plasmas. Read further...

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin has partnered with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) to provide researchers with access to advanced computing resources as part of an effort to develop novel computational approaches for complex manufacturing and design problems. Read further...

Atos, a global expert in digital transformation, has been selected by ESA, the European Space Agency, to deliver and operate Copernicus Data and Information Access Services (DIAS). The DIAS will combine real-time geo data from Copernicus, the world's largest single Earth Observation programme, with data from multiple sources and turn it into information products for companies in sectors such as manufacturing, insurance, utilities, agriculture, forestry, urbanism and emergency services. Read further...

Oracle has signed an agreement to acquire Zenedge, which helps secure critical IT systems deployed via Cloud, on-premise or hybrid hosting environments. Customers leverage Zenedge's Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) mitigation products to secure their applications, networks, databases and APIs from malicious Internet traffic. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), Zenedge's products and 24/7 virtual Security Operations Center (SOC) defend over 800,000 web properties and networks globally. Read further...

NEC Corporation has announced its membership to the OpenMSA Community, an open source ecosystem launched by UBiqube for promoting virtualized network orchestration and multi-vendor support. In addition to its participation in the community, NEC will provide system integration (SI) services for network infrastructure integration within a multi-vendor network product environment based on OpenMSA. Read further...