For the 17th year Professor Thomas Sterling from Indiana University held his traditional HPC Achievement and Impact analysis at ISC 2020 Digital. This time, due to COVID-19, it was not a live keynote but a presentation in a video setting. Professor Sterling usually is more hardware-oriented in his keynote but now he mixed in more software, at least on the application side. He summarized his overview in one pithy and appropriate expression: "A World in Hope". Read further...

Teleportation is most commonly the stuff of science fiction and, for many, would conjure up the immortal phrase "Beam me up Scotty". However, a new study has described how its status in science fact could actually be employed as another, and perhaps unlikely, form of entertainment - live music. Read further...

Last year, Google produced a 53-qubit quantum computer that could perform a specific calculation significantly faster than the world's fastest supercomputer. Like most of today's largest quantum computers, this system boasts tens of qubits - the quantum counterparts to bits, which encode information in conventional computers. Read further...

The HPC-AI Advisory Council (HPCAIAC) in collaboration with the ISC Group revealed the teams topping the 2020 leaderboard for the ninth annual ISC-HPCAIAC Student Cluster Competition (SCC). Read further...

Frédéric Hannoyer, 48, Ecole Polytechnique Paris, Ecole des Ponts Paris, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been appointed as SiPearl's Chief Operating Officer. This electronics and semiconductor industry executive's previous achievements include setting up product and service activities and major programmes at international and European level. In addition to his extensive network, Frédéric Hannoyer brings to SiPearl his proven track record heading up activities and execution for complex industrial and technological projects, managing in-house teams as well as clients, suppliers and partners. Read further...

The Academy of Finland has received a one-off increase of 81 million euro in its budget authority through the Finnish Government's fourth supplementary budget. In accordance with the supplementary budget, the Academy will target funding to support the National Roadmap for Research, Development and Innovation and its objectives relating to solutions for a sustainable and developing society. These include strengthening, broadening and increasing the effectiveness of the competence spearhead and grouping research and the networks that utilise it into larger competence centres and ecosystems. In line with the roadmap, the objectives focus on supporting partnerships. The Academy will also target funding at research into crisis preparedness and security of supply as well as into strengthening the expertise of the EuroHPC ecosystem. Read further...

The positioning of a supercomputer in Sofia is good not only for the image of Bulgaria, but will also support the development of the economy, attracting foreign investors in the field of high technology. "With the construction of the supercomputer we will establish ourselves as a digital hub in the region." This was stated by the Minister of Economy Emil Karanikolov at an official ceremony in Sofia Tech Park, where a symbolic first sod of the building of the Bulgarian supercomputer, which will be part of the European network EuroHPC, was made. The project for the high-performance machine is implemented by the consortium "Petascale Supercomputer - Bulgaria" with as leading partner "Sofia Tech Park" AD. Read further...

Researchers at the University of Aberdeen are benefiting from an investment in High Performance Computing (HPC). The new HPC cluster, called Maxwell, is supporting ground breaking research at the University's Centre for Genome-Enabled Biology and Medicine (CGEBM) and provides a centralised HPC system for the whole University with applications in medicine, biological sciences, engineering, chemistry, maths and computing science. The new HPC system is designed, integrated and managed by high performance compute, storage, Cloud and AI integrator, OCF. The supercomputer is part of the University's expansion to improve facilities for staff and students. Read further...

The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) selected 19 projects during the evaluation of its first research and innovation call. These projects will help the EuroHPC JU to draw on the skills and knowledge of European SMEs and industry to put its ambitious work plan into action and develop HPC applications and services. Read further...

IT4Innovations National Supercomputer Center presents an updated viaRODOS application, which was developed within the RODOS project and which cooperates with the Floreon+ system. The application uses data sources provided by the National Traffic Information Center (NDIC), which falls under the Directorate of Roads and Motorways (DRM) of the Czech Republic. Users thus receive the most up-to-date data on traffic on roads and in selected cities in the Czech Republic. Read further...

The Human Brain Project (HBP) announces the start of its final phase as an EU-funded FET Flagship. The European Commission has signed a grant agreement to fund the HBP with 150 million euro from now until 2023. Over the next three years, the project will narrow its focus to advance three core scientific areas - brain networks, their role in consciousness, and artificial neural nets - while expanding its innovative EBRAINS infrastructure. EBRAINS offers the most comprehensive atlas and database on the human brain, directly coupled with powerful computing and simulation tools, to research communities around neuroscience, medicine and technology. Currently transitioning into a sustainable infrastructure, EBRAINS will remain available to the scientific community, as a lasting contribution of the HBP to global scientific progress. Read further...

Tachyum Inc. has joined the Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) Open Compute Project as part of the company's efforts to help redesign traditional IT infrastructure technology to better serve the technical needs of modern data centres. Read further...

Northern Data AG, a large global providers of high-performance computing (HPC) solutions, is now welcoming SBI Crypto as a new strategic shareholder. Read further...

DDN's data infrastructure is used in the NVIDIA supercomputer that achieved the 7th position in the most recently announced TOP500 supercomputing list, revealed during ISC High Performance 2020 Digital conference. DDN AI400X all-flash systems complement the fast deployment and high-performance capabilities of the NVIDIA DGX A100 cluster, dubbed Selene. The largest industrial supercomputer in the United States, NVIDIA's Selene is supported by 7PB of DDN AI400X all-flash storage. Read further...

Whether it's sending the grandparents a few pictures of the kids, streaming a movie or music, or surfing the Internet for hours, the volume of data our society generates is increasing all the time. But this comes at a price, since storing data consumes huge amounts of energy. Assuming that data volumes continue to grow in future, the related energy consumption will also increase by several orders of magnitude. For example, it is predicted that energy consumption in the IT sector will rise to ten petawatt-hours, or ten trillion kilowatt-hours, by 2030. This would be equivalent to around half of the electricity produced worldwide. Read further...

The HPC-AI Advisory Council (HPCAIAC) in collaboration with the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore have announced the teams competing in the co-organized, third annual APAC HPC-AI Competition supporting ongoing student development and mastery in high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) disciplines. Comprised of undergraduate and graduate competitors from some of Asia Pacific's leading academic institutions, thirty teams complete the 2020 roster and will compete across the region in an all remote contest. Winning teams will be announced in November, during the US' SC20 Conference, followed by an official award ceremony in the new year at the SupercomputingAsia 2021 (SCA21) Conference which is scheduled for March 2021 in Singapore. The champion team will go on to compete in the 2021 ISC-HPCAIAC Student Cluster Competition in Frankfurt, Germany next June. Read further...

Northern Data AG, a large global provider of high-performance computing (HPC) solutions, continues to enjoy a very successful 2020 with the signing of 180 MW of capacity with a new customer. Read further...

Magnetism offers new ways to create more powerful and energy-efficient computers, but the realization of magnetic computing on the nanoscale is a challenging task. A critical advancement in the field of ultralow power computation using magnetic waves is reported by a joint team from Kaiserslautern, Jena and Vienna in the journalNano Letters. Read further...

Physicists at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and Lanzhou University in China developed a simple concept that could improve significantly magnetic-based data processing. Using ultrashort electric pulses in the terahertz range, data can be written, read and erased very quickly. This would make data processing faster, more compact and energy efficient. Read further...

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego a $5 million grant to develop a high-performance resource for conducting artificial intelligence (AI) research across a wide swath of science and engineering domains. Called Voyager, the system will be the first-of-its-kind available in the NSF resource portfolio. In addition to the $5 million acquisition award, an equivalent amount of funding is expected to support community engagement and operation of the resource. Read further...

Tohoku University Graduate School of Engineering, Graduate School of Information Sciences, and NEC Corporation have started research and development of a materials integration system utilizing NEC's vector supercomputer SX-Aurora TSUBASA to accelerate the development of carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) for aircraft. This R&D is being conducted under the Cross-ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Programme, a national project led by the Cabinet Office, Government of Japan, aiming to reduce the development costs, manufacturing costs, and development period of composite materials for next-generation aircraft by up to 50% when compared with conventional methods. Read further...

Collisions between neutron stars involve some of the most extreme physics in the Universe. The intense effects of vast matter density and magnetic fields make them computation-hungry to simulate. A team from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) used artificial intelligence on the advanced graphics-processing-unit (GPU) nodes of the XSEDE-allocated supercomputers Bridges at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) as well as Stampede2 at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to obtain a correction factor that will allow much faster, less detailed simulations to produce accurate predictions of these mergers. Read further...

Researchers at University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Virginia Tech were awarded a $5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to synergize two complementary technologies - large-scale data visualization and artificial intelligence - to create the Smart Amplified Group Environment (SAGE3) open-source software. Read further...

Nearly every drug that is, or has ever been, used was derived from nature - harnessing compounds created by organisms over eons to fight diseases. But decades ago, biochemists postulated that it might be possible to design a new drug from scratch by linking up amino acids in precise ways. Read further...

Wear and friction are crucial issues in many industrial sectors: What happens when one surface slides across another? Which changes must be expected in the material? What does this mean for the durability and safety of machines? Read further...

The research team of Assistant Professor Masahiko Sato and Professor Yasushi Todo of the National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS), National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS) has succeeded using computer simulation in reproducing the high-pressure plasma confinement observed in the Large Helical Device (LHD). This result has enabled highly accurate predictions of plasma behaviour aimed at realizing an economical helical fusion reactor. Read further...

Researchers at the UC San Diego Center for Microbiome Innovation (CMI), the world's leading microbiome research organisation, have expanded their Panasas high-performance computing (HPC) storage infrastructure with an additional two petabytes of ActiveStor data storage to support the growing number of I/O-intensive tasks related to COVID-19 research. Read further...

Red Hat Inc., a global provider of open source solutions, has announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides the operating system backbone for the top three supercomputers in the world and four out of the top 10, according to the newest TOP500 ranking. Already serving as a catalyst for enterprise innovation across the hybrid Cloud, these rankings also show that the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform can deliver a foundation to meet even the most demanding computing environments. Read further...

Atos, a global expert in digital transformation, and GENCI, the French national high-performance computing organisation, and the CEA, reveal that Joliot-Curie supercomputer with its 22 petaflop/s peak computing power is the most powerful supercomputer in France dedicated to academic and industrial open research, and the third most powerful research computer in Europe, according to the TOP500 ranking published on 22 June 2020. This supercomputer is derived from the co-design work carried out by the CEA with Atos for more than 20 years, and which made it possible to define current power computing architectures. The Joliot-Curie supercomputer ranks in 34th position in the TOP500 and is powered by Atos' BullSequana XH2000 platform and the latest AMD Rome processors. Read further...

NETSCOUT Systems Inc., a provider of service assurance, security, and business analytics, is collaborating with Oracle to help customers gain end-to-end visibility for service assurance and security of mission-critical applications and services across their hybrid Cloud infrastructures. NETSCOUT is a Gold level member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). Read further...