EuroHPC is a concrete initiative to fund a world-class European supercomputing infrastructure during 2018-2026 to meet the demands of European research and industry. The first ambitious objective of EuroHPC is to acquire at least two pre-exascale systems to Europe by 2020. One exaflop means processor computing power corresponding to 1018floating point operations per second. Read further...

On 23 January 2019,Primeur Magazinewas in Luxembourg to meet with Per Öster from CSC, the Finnish IT Center for Science. Luxembourg is the seat of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking which just had its first Call out for pre-exascale hosting entities.Primeur Magazinetalked with Per Öster about the consortium CSC is heading and the proposal it is preparing as candidate hosting entity for one of the pre-exascale machines that will be procured by EuroHPC. CSC has a long history in HPC, having gone through all the different European initiatives, from DEISA over PRACE to the current EuroHPC activities. Read further...

Recently the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU) opened a call for pre-exascale supercomputers: "Call For Expression of Interest for the Selection of Hosting Entities for Precursors to Exascale Supercomputers". 250 million euro funding from direct EuroHPC funding is available. This needs to be matched by the countries involved in the pre-exascale systems. So the total budget is 500 million euro. This budget should be used for the acquisition of at least two pre-exascale supercomputers with a performance between 150 Petaflop/s and 1 Exaflop/s and for the operating costs of the system. Power envelope should be between 10-15 MW. Read further...

Each year,Primeur Magazinesits together with Thomas Sterling and Satoshi Matsuoka to discuss the state of exascale computing in the world, and perhaps do some predictions for the upcoming year. We recap the current year but do not look back, only forward. How close are we to exascale? When will it be reached? The bumpy road seemed a bit less bumpy this year. Satoshi Matsuoka is now at Riken, overlooking the Post-K supercomputer developments in Japan. Thomas Sterling pointed to the Summit that could be a prototype architecture, a blueprint for a real exascale system. So, is the finish line in sight? Let us listen to the experts. Read further...

A new research collaboration between the Enabling Practical-Scale Quantum Computing (EPiQC) project led by the University of Chicago and IBM will help bring the promising future of quantum computing closer to the present by sharing resources and training the next generation of quantum computer scientists. Read further...

Quantum Xchange, provider of the first quantum key distribution (QKD) network in the U.S., has been named a finalist of the 2019 South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Innovation Awards. Now in its twenty-second year, the annual awards programme brings together the most innovative, exciting and forward-thinking technology advancements in the connected world. Quantum Xchange’s submission for the Innovation in Connecting People category, "Secure Connectivity in the Quantum Age", highlighted the company's ability to secure communications and provide unprecedented privacy through QKD as society's current encryption standards become threatened by quantum computers. Read further...

ColdQuanta, a pioneer in the development of commercial products used in ultracold-atom quantum devices and research efforts, is making a strategic investment in quantum computing in a new Madison-based branch of ColdQuanta together with a sponsored research award to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This first award funds the programme for 18 months to develop core performance aspects of the quantum computer making it suitable for commercialization. Read further...

The Galicia Supercomputing Center (CESGA) and Appentra Solutions will host the 4th CESGAHACK at the Galicia Supercomputing Center, in Santiago de Compostela, from 25th to 29th March 2019. Read further...

Arjen van Rijn, the Institute Manager of Nikhef and a long-time member of the EGI community, was elected to be the next EGI Council Chair. Read further...

The EGI Conference 2019 will take place in Amsterdam, 6-8 May 2019, as a forum for the EGI Community to discuss the state of the art of the EGI Federation, future and emerging trends, requirements and experiences: national, local and at the level of the data centre. Read further...

Bright Computing, a global expert in cluster and Cloud infrastructure automation software, has signed a partnership with Chip ICT, a reseller operating across Belgium and the Netherlands. Read further...

CoolIT Systems, a world expert in scalable liquid cooling technology for data centres and HPC systems, has announced that Ken Dyer has joined the company as Chief Intellectual Property Counsel. Read further...

Mellanox Technologies Ltd., a supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data centre servers and storage systems, has issued preliminary financial results for its fourth quarter and fiscal year 2018. Read further...

Asetek, the creator of the all-in-one liquid cooler and a global expert in liquid cooling solutions for gaming PCs and DIY enthusiasts, has made available its highest performance all-in-one (AIO) liquid cooler to date, designed in collaboration with Intel. The Asetek 690LX-PN liquid cooler is approved for the Intel Xeon W-3175X processor. The all new Asetek 690LX-PN liquid cooler features extreme performance to enable overclocking up to 500 watts (W) and provides stable operation for demanding workstation and content creation workloads. Together, the 690LX-PN liquid cooler and Intel Xeon W-3175X processor provide the ultimate experience for professional content creators, CAD artists and game developers. Read further...

As home to three top-ranked supercomputers of the last decade, the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has become synonymous with scientific computing at the largest scales. Getting the most out of these science machines, however, requires a willingness to experiment with problems and systems of every size and scale. This is especially important as technology vendors introduce new system architectures and as scientists' problem-solving toolkit expands to include artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced data analysis. Read further...

The next big supercomputer is out for bid. A "request for proposal", or RFP, for Crossroads, a high-performance computer that will support the USA's Stockpile Stewardship Programme, was released on 31 January 2019. The RFP is a joint effort of the New Mexico Alliance for Computing at Extreme Scale (ACES), a collaboration between Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories. Read further...

What if we could predict, in real-time, crop productivity and water use for the entire United States corn belt? Using the help of NCSA's Blue Waters supercomputer, Kaiyu Guan, principal investigator on theGeophysical Research Lettersstudy, and assistant professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Blue Waters professor at NCSA has found a way to simulate and project crop growth and water use to help ensure food security and environmental sustainability, while also optimizing farm efficiency for the entire American corn belt. Read further...

A study, published inNature Communications, suggests that being genetically programmed to rise early may lead to greater wellbeing and a lower risk of schizophrenia and depression. The study was conducted by an international collaboration, led by the University of Exeter and Harvard Medical School and funded by the Medical Research Council. Read further...

Deep learning is one of the most popular and widely used machine learning methods due to its success with autonomous vehicles, speech recognition and image classification, to name a few emergent technologies. But what exactly is deep learning, and how can it best be applied to lab projects? Read further...

A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) team has successfully deployed a widely used power distribution grid simulation software on a high-performance computing (HPC) system, demonstrating substantial speed-ups and taking a key step toward creating a commercial tool that utilities could use to modernize the grid. Read further...

Black holes are known for their voracious appetites, binging on matter with such ferocity that not even light can escape once it's swallowed up. Less understood, though, is how black holes purge energy locked up in their rotation, jetting near-light-speed plasmas into space to opposite sides in one of the most powerful displays in the universe. These jets can extend outward for millions of light years. Read further...

A new telescope will take a sequence of hi-res snapshots with the world's largest digital camera, covering the entire visible night sky every few days - and repeating the process for an entire decade. That presents a Big Data challenge: What's the best way to rapidly and automatically identify and categorize all of the stars, galaxies, and other objects captured in these images? Read further...

Whether it is high-temperature superconductors and improved energy storage to bendable metals and fabrics capable of completely wicking liquids, materials scientists study and understand the physics of interacting atoms in solids to ultimately find ways to improve materials we use in every aspect of daily life. Read further...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $5 million to bring together the Clowder community. Clowder, an open source data management tool based on active curation, was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in conjunction with the Coordinated Science Lab (CSL) and Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) department. Read further...

WekaIO, an innovation expert in high-performance, scalable file storage for data intensive applications, has become a supporting organisation of the MLPerf benchmark suite. Alongside companies like NVIDIA, NetApp and Qualcomm, WekaIO will contribute its expertise to efforts to define the machine learning (ML) benchmarks for the industry. Read further...

Since 2016, the Helix Nebula Science Cloud (HNSciCloud) project has been investigating the hybrid Cloud model to support the deployment of high-performance computing and Big Data capabilities for scientific research. On 29 November 2018, the HNSciCloud project partners organized their Final Public Session - the HNSciCloud Results of the Pilot Phase Public Event - at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, to present the two hybrid Cloud platforms developed during the project that started in January 2016. Read further...