The race for quantum computing is on: Industry giants, such as Google, IBM, and Microsoft, and leading international research centres and universities are involved in the global effort to build a quantum computer. It is not known yet when this new technology can become a reality, but the world is getting ready. The greatest expectation about the quantum computer is that it could break the security of all classical data transfer networks. Today, sensitive data such as personal communication or financial information are protected using encryption algorithms that would take a classical supercomputer years to crack. A quantum computer could conceivably do this in a few seconds. Read further...

A young researcher from the Technische Universität München (TUM) and Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) user recently won the Gerhard Ertl Young Investigator Award 2018. Read further...

Humans have long tried to explain how stars came to light up the night sky. The wide array of theories throughout history have one common - and correct - governing principle that astrophysicists still use to this day: by understanding the stars and their origins, we learn more about where we come from. Read further...

In January, GigaSpaces reported strong worldwide growth and profitability for 2017. The provider of an in-memory computing (IMC) platform that unifies fast-data analytics, A.I. and real-time applications announced that the company has achieved over 200% year-over-year revenue growth in France. The results reflect growing demand from new and existing customers for software and services that smash Big Data barriers to drive greater business impact with instant information, simpler decisions, and faster operations. Read further...

Atos, a global expert in digital transformation, has launched the Atos Joseph Fourier Award 2018 in partnership with GENCI, the French National Equipment for Intensive Computing. This award follows the 250th anniversary of the birth of famous French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier, whose work has largely contributed to the mathematical modelling of physical phenomena, which is at the heart of digital technologies today. Read further...

Cavium Inc., a provider of semiconductor products that enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise, data centre, wired and wireless networking, has reached a major milestone in its collaboration with Microsoft in the Open Compute Community with ThunderX2 Arm-based servers demonstrating the Project Olympus Platform. Read further...

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has named John L. Hennessy, former President of Stanford University, and David A. Patterson, retired Professor of the University of California, Berkeley, recipients of the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award for pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures with enduring impact on the microprocessor industry. John L. Hennessy and David A. Patterson created a systematic and quantitative approach to designing faster, lower power, and reduced instruction set computer (RISC) microprocessors. Their approach led to lasting and repeatable principles that generations of architects have used for many projects in academia and industry. Today, 99% of the more than 16 billion microprocessors produced annually are RISC processors, and are found in nearly all smartphones, tablets, and the billions of embedded devices that comprise the Internet of Things (IoT). Read further...

Mellanox Technologies Ltd.'s Ethernet solutions, including Spectrum switches, ConnectX-5 network cards and the LinkX family of cables were selected by the Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) for all of its communications infrastructures, from the commercial network to the enterprise network. Read further...

GIGABYTE Technology, an industry expert in high-performance servers, graphics and gaming platforms with a broad portfolio of workstation products, and Cavium Inc., a provider of semiconductor products for enterprise, data centre, Cloud, wired and wireless networking, have made available ThunderXStation: the industry's first 64-bit Armv8 workstation platform based on Cavium's flagship ThunderX2 processor. Read further...

Cavium Inc., a provider of semiconductor products that enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise, data centre, Cloud, wired and wireless networking, has made available Packet Trakker, a programmable network telemetry suite supported by Cavium's XPliant family of programmable Ethernet switches. Read further...

Resolving the supercomputer challenge of searching and retrieving files could now be far simpler, with a tool developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory and released to the GitHub open-source software site. The Grand Unified File Index (GUFI) is designed using a new, hierarchical approach to storing file metada, allowing rapid parallel searches across many internal databases. Queries that would previously have taken hours or days can now be run in seconds. Read further...

Using supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), an international team led by William (Bill) Kelly, formerly at AgResearch New Zealand's Grasslands Research Centre, and including scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI), a DOE Office of Science User Facility, generated a reference catalogue of rumen microbial genomes and isolates cultivated and sequenced from the Hungate1000 collection. One of the largest targeted cultivation and sequencing projects to date, the collection was produced through the coordinated efforts of rumen microbiology researchers worldwide. Read further...

Optalysys Ltd., an innovative technology company commercialising light-speed optical co-processors for AI/Deep Learning, has successfully built the world's first implementation of a Convolutional Neural Network using their Optical Processing Technology. Read further...

NVIDIA has launched NVIDIA RTX, a ray-tracing technology that brings real-time, cinematic-quality rendering to content creators and game developers. NVIDIA RTX is the product of 10 years of work in computer graphics algorithms and GPU architectures. It consists of a highly scalable ray-tracing technology running on NVIDIA Volta architecture GPUs. Architected to support ray tracing through a variety of interfaces, NVIDIA partnered closely with Microsoft to enable full RTX support for applications that use Microsoft's new DirectX Raytracing (DXR) API. Read further...

The lithium-ion battery has transformed the portable electronics industry and is making inroads into energy storage on the electric grid and electrically powered transportation. Today, research laboratories around the world are seeking to develop beyond-lithium-ion batteries that are even more powerful, cheaper, safer and longer lived. Read further...

Recent developments in neuroscience set high requirements for sophisticated data management, not least when implantable Brain Machine Interfaces are used to establish electronic communication between the brain's nerve cells and computers. A new method developed by researchers at Lund University in Sweden makes it possible to recode neural signals into a format that computer processors can use instantly. The method has now been published in the respected scientific journal,Neuroinformatics. Read further...

Professor Ole-Christoffer Granmo has, in secret, developed a solution which will be quicker, simpler, and more precise than established methods for self-learning machines. The results were presented at a seminar at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research. Read further...

Daily weather patterns, brain activity on an electroencephalogram (EEG) and heartbeats on an electrocardiogram (EKG) each generate lines of complex data. To analyze this data, perhaps to predict a storm, seizure or heart attack, researchers must first divide up this continuous data into discrete pieces - a task that is difficult to perform simply and accurately. Read further...

An international research team produced an analogue of a solid-body crystal lattice from hybrid photon-electron quasiparticles - polaritons. In the resulting polariton lattice, certain particles' energy does not depend on their speed. At the same time, the lattice's geometry, particle concentration and polarization properties can still be modified. This opens up new perspectives for study of quantum effects and the use of optical computing. Results of the study were published inPhysical Review Letters. Read further...

Scientists from Australia and China have drawn on the durable power of gold to demonstrate a new type of high-capacity optical disk that can hold data securely for more than 600 years. The technology could offer a more cost-efficient and sustainable solution to the global data storage problem while enabling the critical pivot from Big Data to Long Data, opening up new realms of scientific discovery. Read further...

A next-generation X-ray beamline now operating at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory brings together a unique set of capabilities to measure the properties of materials at the nanoscale. Read further...

Mellanox Technologies Ltd., a supplier of high-performance, end-to-end smart interconnect solutions for data centre servers and storage systems, has developed a solution that enables users to simplify and reduce the cost to extend existing non-virtualized on-premise data centres to Microsoft Azure. Read further...

Cavium Inc., a provider of semiconductor products that enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise and Cloud data centres, is collaborating with Microsemi Corporation and Marvell, providers of semiconductor solutions, to demonstrate a reference architecture for accelerating and scaling out NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF). The architecture has been demonstrated live on ARM64 and x86 architectures at the OCP Summit 2018 in San Jose, California. Read further...