Intel's RealSense computer vision platform has been lacking a low-powered way of recognizing what its depth-sensing cameras are seeing -- until now. The chip giant is buying Movidius, the designer of a range of system-on-chip products for accelerating computer vision processing. Movidius supplies chips to drone makers such as DJI and to thermal imaging company FLIR Systems, itself a supplier of DJI. Its chips help computers figure out what they are seeing through cameras like Intel's RealSense by breaking down the processing into a set of smaller tasks that they can execute in parallel. There are systems that already do this using GPUs, but those are relatively power-hungry, often consuming tens of watts. That's not a problem in fixed applications with access to mains electricity, or in cars, which have huge batteries and a way to recharge them. But in drones or other lightweight IoT devices, power consumption needs to be much lower. Read more at http://www.pcworld.com/article/3116063/internet-of-things/intel-buys-chip-maker-movidius-to-help-bring-computer-vision-to-drones.html

Today IBM announced the opening of the first OpenPOWER Research Facility (OPRF) at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. The OPRF will help drive the country’s National Knowledge Network initiative to interconnect all institutions of higher learning and research with a high-speed data communication network, facilitating knowledge sharing and collaborative research and innovation. OPRF has been established to provide India’s large research and development community with technical assistance and infrastructure to further indigenous research. With the opening of OPRF, scientists, students, developers and enterprises who are a part of the National Knowledge Network initiative can tap into the latest and best available OpenPOWER-based infrastructure, including the POWER processor, NVIDIA GPU accelerators and Mellanox networking solutions. With the opening of OPRF, scientists, students, developers and enterprises who are a part of the National Knowledge Network initiative can tap into the latest and best available OpenPOWER-based infrastructure to develop new age applications and solutions around eGovernance, healthcare, education, agriculture, and HPC. Read more at http://insidehpc.com/2016/08/60130/

Scientists at the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) discovered a use for perovskites that could propel the development of quantum computing. Considerable research at NREL and elsewhere has been conducted into the use of organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites as a solar cell. Perovskite systems have been shown to be highly efficient at converting sunlight to electricity. Experimenting on a lead-halide perovskite, NREL researchers found evidence the material could have great potential for optoelectronic applications beyond photovoltaics, including in the field of quantum computers. Read more at https://www.hpcwire.com/2016/08/16/noaa-upgrades-river-flow-forecasting-new-crays/

Applications are now open for the annual SuperComputing Camp in Colombia. The five-day camp takes place Oct. 16-21 at CIBioFI at Universidad del Valle in Santiago de Cali. SC-Camp is an initiative of researchers inspired by this idea that offers undergraduate and master students state-of-the-art lectures and programming practical sessions upon High Performance and Distributed Computing topics. SC-Camp is a non-profit event, addressed to all students including those that lack of financial backup. Usually, students applying in due time receive a partial or total grant, including meals, accommodations, lectures access, and programming challenges. The camp will focus on topics such as parallel programming, distributed systems, cloud computing, virtualization, and much more. Read more at http://insidehpc.com/2016/09/register-for-supercomputing-camp-in-columbia/

Nominations are open for the Elsevier Foundation Awards for Early-Career Women Scientists in the Developing World, a high-profile honor for scientific and career achievements by women from developing countries in five regions: Latin America and the Caribbean, the Arab region, Sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South Asia, and East and South-East Asia and the Pacific. The theme for 2017 will be engineering and innovation. Nominations will be accepted through September 15, 2016. The awards are sponsored and organized by The Elsevier Foundation, the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD) and The World Academy of Sciences for the advancement of science in developing countries (TWAS). The competition will be judged by a distinguished panel of international scientists; one winner from each region will be announced in February 2017 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston. The five winners will each receive a cash prize of US$5,000 and all-expenses paid attendance at the AAAS meeting. The winners will also receive one-year access to Elsevier’s ScienceDirect and Scopus. Learn more at https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/call-nominations-deadline-extended-elsevier-foundation-awards-early-career-women-scientists-developing-world/

With the rapid growth in computing and communications technology, the past decade has witnessed a proliferation of powerful parallel and distributed systems and a huge increase in demand for practice of high performance compilation, computing, and communications (HP3C). The HP3C has moved into general and embedded computing and has become a key factor in defining future research and development activities in many academic and industrial branches. The HP3C-2017 conference will provide an international forum for experts in academia, industry, and government to discuss their new ideas, research results, applications and experience on all aspects of high performance computing compilation, and communications. We invite you to submit a paper for HP3C-2017 International Meeting and join us for a premier conference in this vibrant city. We invite submissions in all areas of the HP3C field, broadly defined. We will continue to accept abstracts after the deadline for as long as space is available. We encourage you to submit early. Abstract submission deadline is set for January 10, 2017. Read more at http://hp3c.net/cfp.html

Submissions are now open for the ISC 2017 conference Research Paper Sessions, which aim to provide first-class opportunities for engineers and scientists in academia, industry and government to present research that will shape the future of high performance computing. Submissions will be accepted through December 2, 2016. The Research Paper Sessions will be held from Monday, June 19, through Wednesday, June 21, 2017. ISC High Performance (ISC 2017) will once again be held at Forum Messe Frankfurt. Submitted research papers will be reviewed by the ISC 2017 Research Papers Committee, which is headed by Dr. Pavan Balaji of Argonne National Laboratory, with Prof. Dr. David Keyes from KAUST acting as Deputy Chair and Dr. Julian Kunkel from Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum as Proceedings Chair and Dr. Rio Yokota of Tokyo Institute of Technology as Proceedings Deputy Chair. Read more at http://insidehpc.com/2016/09/call-for-research-papers-isc-2017/

Using a unique computational approach to rapidly sample, in millisecond time intervals, proteins in their natural state of gyrating, bobbing, and weaving, a research team from UC San Diego and Monash University in Australia has identified promising drug leads that may selectively combat heart disease, from arrhythmias to cardiac failure. Reported in the September 5, 2016 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Early Edition, the researchers used the computing power of Gordon and Comet, based at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego; and Stampede, at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin, to perform an unprecedented survey of protein structures using accelerated molecular dynamics or aMD – a method that performs a more complete sampling of the myriad shapes and conformations that a target protein molecule may go through. The computing resources were provided by the National Science Foundation-funded Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) program, one of the most advanced collections of integrated digital resources and services in the world. Learn more at http://www.sdsc.edu/News%20Items/PR20160905_heart_disease.html

The Bridges system at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) entered production operations last month, in support of advances in science, research, engineering, and education. Following approval by the National Science Foundation (NSF), this status change marks the transition to completing integration with other Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) compute resources, which will streamline use for the approximately 400 research projects that are already using Bridges. The NSF-funded PSC Bridges system, with components acquired from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and enhanced by PSC’s novel architecture, is a uniquely flexible resource for HPC and Big Data that emphasizes an exceptionally rich software environment, interactivity, and large memory. These factors contribute to its usability and value for a wide range of applications. Bridges also introduces important new technologies for the benefit of the research community. Bridges was the first installation of Intel’s Omni-Path Architecture (OPA) fabric and introduced the HPE Integrity Superdome X servers with 12 terabytes (TB) of RAM to research computing. The system will also provide users with early access to NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs. Learn more at https://www.psc.edu/index.php/news-and-media/press-releases/2405-bridges-becomes-operational

Engineers at Sandia are developing new datacenter cooling technologies that could save millions of gallons of water nationwide. In different parts of the country, people discuss gray-water recycling and rainwater capture to minimize the millions of gallons of groundwater required to cool large data centers. But the simple answer in many climates, said Sandia National Laboratories researcher David J. Martinez, is to use liquid refrigerant. Based on that principle, Martinez — engineering project lead for Sandia’s infrastructure computing services — is helping design and monitor a cooling system expected to save 4 million to 5 million gallons annually in New Mexico if installed next year at Sandia’s computing center, and hundreds of millions of gallons nationally if the method is widely adopted. It’s now being tested at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, which expects to save a million gallons annually. Learn more at http://insidehpc.com/2016/09/new-cooling-method-for-supercomputers-to-save-millions-of-gallons-of-water/

A new study from the United States Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) used high-performance computing capabilities and innovative visualization tools to model, in unprecedented detail, how the power grid of the eastern United States could operationally accommodate higher levels of wind and solar photovoltaic generation. The analysis considered scenarios of up to 30 percent annual penetration of wind and solar. Whereas previous studies have investigated operations in one-hour intervals, NREL’s Eastern Renewable Generation Integration Study (ERGIS) analyzed a year of operations at 5-minute intervals, the same real-time interval used by grid operators for scheduling resources. “By modeling the power system in depth and detail, NREL has helped reset the conversation about how far we can go operationally with wind and solar in one of the largest power systems in the world,” said the Energy Department’s Charlton Clark, a DOE program manager for the study. Learn more at https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/nrel-supercomputing-model-assists-wind-solar-generation-study/