An international team of more than 200 astronomers from 18 countries has published the first phase of a major new radio sky survey at unprecedented sensitivity using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) telescope. The survey reveals hundreds of thousands of previously undetected galaxies, shedding new light on many research areas including the physics of black holes and how clusters of galaxies evolve. A special issue of the scientific journalAstronomy & Astrophysicsis dedicated to the first twenty-six research papers describing the survey and its first results. The Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy ASTRON works together with SURF to efficiently transform the massive amounts of data into high-quality images. Read further...

At the eScience Conference in Amsterdam, the Netherlands,Primeur Magazinehad a conversation with Joeri van Leeuwen, a Dutch astronomer who gave a presentation at the final day of the conference. From the presentation,Primeur Magazineunderstood that making magnificent astronomical pictures requires a lot of handwork, a lot of ticking and counting. Joeri van Leeuwen has automated this process using machine learning, which is an interesting topic to talk about. Further more,Primeur Magazinelearned that there is a lot of development concerning the very big data telescope called LOFAR and a lot of infrastructure is needed to get that up and running. Joeri van Leeuwen recently also installed a new one - actually it is an old one which is upgraded at Westerbork. This one also has some magnificent GPU/FPGA equipment in it. First, however,Primeur Magazinewanted to discuss the machine learning topic. Read further...

Including the calls that closed early last year, more than 700 million euro of budget has been allocated to e-Infrastructure related projects. This can be concluded from data collected and aggregated in the e-IRG e-Infrastructure Knowledge Base maintained by the e-IRGSP projects. The Knowledge Base counts basic e-Infrastructure projects, European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) projects, and Research and HPC projects with a strong e-Infrastructure component. With 140 million euro of budget the GÉANT projects (GN4-1 and GN4-2) get the biggest amount of money. EOSCHub, with 33 million euro is the third largest funding project. In total, the Knowledge Base lists close to 100 e-Infrastructure projects, providing details about each one. Read further...

The German Government considers access and use of HPC infrastructure necessary for the competitiveness of science and industry. Without simulation on HPC systems and supercomputers, fundamental research for energy, material and social sciences, and climate research are not possible. HPC is also needed for innovative products in key areas of the Germany economy, including electronic equipment, automotive, airplanes, and new drugs. This was confirmed in a detailed answer to the German parliament. It confirms the HPC policy laid out two years ago by Germany. Read further...

On 21 February, King Willem Alexander opened the Microsoft Quantum Lab on the campus of TU Delft. With the lab, Microsoft strengthens quantum research in Delft, a research area where TU Delft ranks among the world's best. The QuTech Research Institute, a collaboration between TU Delft and TNO, is working with industry on the development of quantum computers and a quantum internet. Microsoft, which now has its own laboratory in Delft, is one of the most important companies that collaborates intensively with Delft quantum researchers. Read further...

ISARA Corp., a provider of agile quantum-safe security solutions, has introduced new and updated tools that make it easy to test and implement crypto-agility and quantum-safe cryptography directly into existing systems and begin protecting IT infrastructure from emerging threats. Read further...

Leading quantum technology experts from around the world have explored their respective regional and national goals for the future of the field, in a new focus issue ofQuantum Science and Technology(QST). Read further...

Many of the world's largest cities are built near coasts, be it along rivers or oceans. Humanity relies on waterways for transportation, trade, and sustenance. However, waterways can also unleash devastating floodwaters that lead to billions in damage, loss of life, and years-long clean-up efforts. Read further...

From 11 to 14 March 2019, Warsaw will host a world-class experts event in supercomputers - thanks to Supercomputing Frontiers Europe 2019 (SCFE2019). The European edition of the conference, which for five years has been presenting the most innovative, largest scale solutions in computational sciences from all over the world, is organised by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling, University of Warsaw (ICM UW). Read further...

The Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) has issued the high level results of a follow up assessment of the market impact of the Open Compute Project worldwide. For a second year, OCP has engaged IHS Markit, a world leader in critical information, analytics and solutions, to determine the adoption and impact of OCP gear in the technology industry. Since its inception, OCP has worked to drive innovation in and around the data centre industry, bringing together thousands of engineers from nearly two hundred member organisations. The demands on the modern data centre continue to expand with the growth of IOT, security and edge computing, as well as increasing energy consumption requirements. Read further...

Excelero has appointed High-Performance Computing (HPC) pioneer Sven Breuner as Field Chief Technical Officer (CTO.) With over a decade of leadership in the HPC industry, Sven Breuner will help expand the innovative capabilities in Excelero's award-winning NVMesh solution by anticipating customers' future requirements while bringing deep technical and product knowledge to the field teams. Read further...

The worlds of AI and HPC have an insatiable appetite for more and more performance. With the rise of GPUs being used to run a lot of these AI frameworks, it is only fitting that vScaler put the fastest system in the world to the test. One of NVIDIA's DGX-2 servers arrived onsite recently, and vScaler's engineers have integrated this with their internal vScaler lab facility. Read further...

Cray's Board of Directors has elected Stephen E. Gold as a member of the Board and appointed him to the Strategic Technology Assessment Committee. Read further...

Atos' supercomputer, the BullSequana X1000, is now operational at CALMIP - Calcul en Midi-Pyrénées, one of the biggest multi-scale inter-university supercomputing centres in France. Christened Olympe, the supercomputer will be used as part of the CADAMIP project over the period 2018-2022, to enable the university community to advance on over 200 projects in the sectors of materials, fluid mechanics, universe sciences and chemistry. Read further...

The first supercomputer designed and built under the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) by C-DAC at the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi was dedicated by Hon'ble Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi to India's scientific and research community in order to strengthen the research and development activities in the country. Named "PARAM Shivay", the supercomputer uses more than one lakh twenty thousand compute cores (CPU + GPU cores) to offer a peak compute power of 833 TeraFlops. Read further...

Mellanox Technologies Ltd.'s 200 Gigabit HDR InfiniBand technology and solutions have set new performance records, delivering leading efficiency and scalability to high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, Cloud, storage and other data intensive applications. HDR InfiniBand shipments began in the fourth quarter of 2018 connecting more than ten thousand end-points. In the first quarter of 2019, HDR InfiniBand will connect multiple tens-of-thousand compute and storage end-points in supercomputing, hyperscale and Cloud data centres around the globe. Furthermore, during the first quarter of 2019, more than twenty of the world's largest high-speed smart modular switch systems are being delivered to multiple data centres, demonstrating the growing demand for the fastest InfiniBand solutions across many application domains. Read further...

Super Micro Computer is launching new Edge systems designed for artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G workloads. Read further...

In 2018 construction began on the most architectonically distinctive elements of the new Stuttgart central train station. The so-called "Kelchstütze" are a set of massive, chalice-shaped columns that will cradle windows to bring natural light into the subterranean station. At a height of over 12 meters and a diameter of approximately 32 meters, the elegantly curving forms of reinforced concrete promise to become a landmark in the city. Read further...

The Netherlands eScience Center and the Lorentz Center are looking for researchers who want to join the Lorentz-eScience competition and organize a workshop at the Lorentz Center@Snellius, Leiden, the Netherlands. The Lorentz-eScience competition aims to host a leading-edge workshop on digitally enhanced research - efficient utilization of data, software and e-infrastructure. The workshop should bring together researchers from the academic community and the public/private sector. Read further...

It is used regularly by global tech giants such as Google and Facebook, but now "deep learning" is set to become a key weapon in the fight against tuberculosis in cattle. Livestock scientists at Scotland's Rural College (SRUC) have been awarded GBP 337,000 for a project which will use highly advanced computers to predict the Bovine tuberculosis (bTB) status of dairy cows. Read further...

As part of NERSC's commitment to preparing users and their applications for its next-generation Perlmutter supercomputer, the NERSC Exascale Science Applications Programme (NESAP) recently hosted the first NERSC-9 GPU hackathon. Read further...

Barcelona Supercomputing Center's (BSC) researcher Natasa Przulj has led the creation of a new artificial intelligence-based computational method that accelerates the identification of new genes related to cancer. The method and its results, which have been biologically tested, have been published inNature Communications. Read further...

A research team from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) reported a novel non-linear device with the founding property coming from perovskite nanowires. They showed that hybrid perovskite-derived, inorganic-framework nanowires can acquire semi-metallicity, and proposed negative differential resistance (NDR) devices with excellent NDR characteristics that resulted from a novel quantum-hybridization NDR mechanism, implying the potential of perovskite nanowires to be realized in next-generation electronic devices. Read further...

Clarkson University has recently been awarded a three-year National Science Foundation grant for hosting a Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) Site entitled "High Performance Computing with Engineering Applications". This exciting new REU site will fund talented undergraduate students for ten weeks in the summer to work with experienced faculty mentors to investigate novel HPC solutions for engineering problems. Professors Daqing Hou and Yu Liu of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department will co-lead the REU site. Read further...

Hyperion Research announced that a Cloud Application Assessment Tool the market analyst firm designed, is available free of charge to the public. This tool is an interactive grading system to assess the characteristics of HPC applications to help understand whether they fit better on an on-premise HPC system or are they well suited for running in a public Cloud. Read further...