Google is making it easier for you to find information about the upcoming election. The company is updating its search so that information about polling places and who is on your ballot will appear directly within search results. Now, when you enter queries like "where is my polling place" or "who's on my ballot," Google will surface relevant results within the search in both Spanish and English. In both cases, you'll need to enter your home address where you're registered to vote in order for the correct results to be displayed (if you have your location saved in Google Maps it can also pull from there). If you're looking for a polling place, the results will show designated polling places in your area.

Businesses could dramatically cut the time taken to bring products and services to market with a new supercomputer. Its applications could include helping to create efficient engineering devices, solving complex genetic calculations, or optimizing the design of buildings. The high performance computing (HPC) facility could also help businesses from a range of science and engineering sectors cut the cost of product and service development. Access to the supercomputer, called Cirrus, is provided by EPCC, the UK's leading supercomputing center based at the University of Edinburgh. Clients will be able to use the £1 million machine to tackle their research and design challenges.

Deep learning efforts today are run on standard computer hardware using convolutional neural networks. Indeed, the approach has proven powerful by pioneers such as Google and Microsoft. In contrast neuromorphic computing, whose spiking neuron architecture more closely mimics human brain function, has generated less enthusiasm in the deep learning community. Now, work by IBM using its TrueNorth chip as a test case may bring deep learning to neuromorphic architectures.

A group of leading technology companies formed the Gen-Z Consortium, an industry alliance working to create and commercialize a new scalable computing interconnect and protocol. This flexible, high-performance memory semantic fabric provides a peer-to-peer interconnect that easily accesses large volumes of data while lowering costs and avoiding today’s bottlenecks. The alliance members include AMD, ARM, Cavium, Cray, Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, IBM, IDT, Lenovo, Mellanox Technologies, Micron, Microsemi, Red Hat, Samsung, Seagate, SK hynix, Western Digital Corporation and Xilinx. The consortium reflects a broader industry trend that recognizes the importance of open standards and their role in providing a level playing field to promote adoption, innovation and choice.

More than ever, academic and manufacturing researchers from across Ohio are turning to the high performance computing power offered by the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC). An abundance of that research was on display at OSC’s semi-annual Statewide Users Group (SUG) meeting. Attendees shared and gained insight into topics ranging from auto safety and dark matter to gene flow and a myriad of chemistry-related topics. They also heard two keynote addresses, and the competition portion of the meeting featured 27 posters and 12 flash talks.

The roar can be deafening. Cooling fans and power supplies whoosh and whine from rows and rows of supercomputers at the main data center of the Texas Advanced Computing Center in Austin. The power bill at TACC can reach over a million dollars a year to keep the machines humming. But there's a stranger in town that might change how data centers power their systems. A new kind of advanced computing system called Hikari (Japanese for the word "light") came online at TACC late August 2016. What's new is that Hikari runs on solar power and high voltage direct current, or HVDC. Hikari is a microgrid that supports a supercomputer, a first for the U.S.

Previous shape-shifting materials have needed some external trigger to tell them to transform, like light or heat. Now, a US-based team has encoded a sequence of shape transformations into the very substance of a polymer, with each change occurring at a pre-determined time.The principles could be applied in implants that deliver medicine from within the human body and the technology could also see use in heavy industry. Professor Sergei Sheiko from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and colleagues introduced two types of chemical bond to their polymer: permanent bonds and dynamic (or reversible) bonds. The permanent bonds store the material's final shape, while the dynamic bonds control how quickly it can reach this shape.

The formidable processing power and analytical tools available in public clouds could make industrial IoT more effective and less expensive. But bringing IoT data into the cloud takes more than a network connection. Two companies have moved to help enterprises adapt their IoT data for popular cloud services. OSIsoft introduced its PI Integrator for Microsoft Azure, and Particle announced a custom integration with Google Cloud Platform. While some large enterprises with sensitive IoT data do all their analytics in-house, public clouds offer greater scale and better security than many organizations can achieve on their own, MachNation analyst Dima Tokar said.

The Los Angeles Fire Department, recently challenged by yet another series of late summer wildfires, has successfully tested a new web-based tool developed by University of California San Diego researchers to perform data-driven predictive modeling and analysis of fires that have a high potential for rapid spread. Called Firemap, and developed by the University’s ‘WIFIRE’ collaboration, the new tool enables a ‘what-if’ analysis of fire scenarios ahead of the time as well as real-time fire forecasting.

Verne Global announced that the Earlham Institute (EI) in the UK has selected Verne Global’s data center campus in Iceland to investigate the efficiencies of distributing large-scale genomics and computational biology data analysis. The research institute is renowned for its contribution to the analysis and data-sharing of the highly complex wheat genome that is critical to securing future global food supplies.

For children with speech and language disorders, early-childhood intervention can make a great difference in their later academic and social success. But many such children—one study estimates 60 percent—go undiagnosed until kindergarten or even later. Researchers at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital's Institute of Health Professions hope to change that, with a computer system that can automatically screen young children for speech and language disorders and, potentially, even provide specific diagnoses.

Declining DNA sequencing costs and the rush to do whole genome sequencing (WGS) of large cohort populations – think 5000 subjects now, but many more thousands soon – presents a formidable computational challenge to researchers attempting to make sense of large cohort datasets. No single architecture is best. This month researchers report developing a hybrid approach that combines cloud (AWS), local high performance compute (LHPC) clusters, and supercomputers.

Cities have always been hubs of technological experimentation, shaped by the people who inhabit them and the tools they use. We can still see the marks, both charming and garish, from technologies of years past — from old aqueducts to telephone booths to the damage done by cars. The next wave of real-time technologies that will define the next decade are software (rather than hardware) upgrades to the city that will nonetheless transform the way we work, play and live in our physical environments — our “brick and mortar” cities.

What if your computer or smartphone could tell if you're happy or sad? A new device developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology aims to detect emotions by sending wireless signals that measure heartbeats as the signals bounce off a person's body. Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory say their device is 87 percent accurate in using heartrate and what it's already learned about a person to recognize joy, pleasure, sadness or anger, after the device first measures how each individual's body reacts in various emotional states.

Argonne announced that the Lab is leading a pair of newly funded applications projects for the Exascale Computing Project (ECP). The announcement comes on the heels of news that ECP has funded a total of 15 application development proposals for full funding and seven proposals for seed funding, representing teams from 45 research and academic organizations. The 15 awards being announced total $39.8 million, targeting advanced modeling and simulation solutions to specific challenges supporting key DOE missions in science, clean energy and national security, as well as collaborations such as the Precision Medicine Initiative with the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute.

A team led by researchers at the University of California San Diego has captured in step-by-step atomic detail the surgical editing of DNA strands by CRISPR-Cas9, the innovative gene-splicing technology that in recent years has transformed the field of genetic engineering. Simulations performed by the Comet supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego describe the “striking plasticity” of CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)-Cas9 and how it identifies, merges, and slices its target DNA strand. What’s more, the findings offer for the first hints at a key role played by the leftover non-target DNA strand, whose part in this biological cast of characters previously was unclear.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from North Carolina State University and the University of Florida is launching an initiative that will use a custom-designed video game to boost computational thinking in middle school science classrooms. The goal is not only to improve educational outcomes, but also to foster gender and racial diversity in computer science and other science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Development and testing of the game, as well as its related educational curriculum, is powered by a three-year, $2.49 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

A consortium of European researchers and technology companies recently completed the EU-funded SAVE project, aimed at simplifying the execution data-intensive applications on complex hardware architectures. Funded by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), the project was launched in 2013, under the project name ‘Self-Adaptive Virtualization-Aware High-Performance/Low-Energy Heterogeneous System Architectures’ (SAVE). The project, which was completed at the start of this month, has led to innovations in hardware, software and operating system (OS) components.

Sebastian Thrun, an architect of the push to create robotic cars capable of driving themselves, formed an educational alliance with companies including Mercedes-Benz and Nvidia focused on training engineers who want to develop technologies for self-driving vehicles. Udacity, the online education company started by Thrun in 2012 after he left Google's self-driving car program, is adding the initiative to its offerings in the form of a web-based “nanodegree” program to familiarize engineers with fast-moving developments in the autonomous vehicle space.

Four hundred years ago Galileo pointed a telescope at Jupiter and saw electromagnetic waves (light) being reflected off its moons. This profound observation displaced Earth from its position at the center of the universe to just one planet among many. It also sparked a new golden era of optical astronomy, which continues to this day. In September 2015 the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (aLIGO) detected the gravitational waves emitted by two coalescing black holes. This remarkable discovery opened up a new window on the universe, using gravitational waves rather than electromagnetic waves to peer into the far reaches of the cosmos.

Women are making major gains in enrollment in engineering and computer science at some of the nation’s most prominent colleges and universities, a breakthrough that shows that gender parity is possible in technology fields long dominated by men. More than half of engineering bachelor’s degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology went to women in 2015, federal data shows. The same was true at Dartmouth College this year. The majority of computer science majors at California’s Harvey Mudd College are women. Here at Carnegie Mellon University, women account for nearly half of first-year computer science students — 48 percent, a school record.

Not too long ago, the standard for a secure website was to not offer gaping holes for hackers to exploit or infect visitors with malware. Now even plain-old HTTP itself, that venerable web protocol, is about to be considered insecure. Google has announced that its web browser Chrome will soon take a more aggressive stance on web encryption, marking any site as insecure if it doesn’t use HTTPS, a protocol that encrypts web pages with the encryption schemes SSL or TLS, and putting a red “X” over a padlock in the corner of the address bar. The rollout will begin in January by applying the rule to any site that asks for a password or credit card information.

Already entrenched in the deep learning community for neural net training, Nvidia wants to secure its place as the go-to chipmaker for datacenter inferencing. At the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in Beijing today (Tuesday), Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled the latest additions to the Tesla line, Pascal-based P4 and P40 GPU accelerators, as well as new software all aimed at improving performance for inferencing workloads that undergird applications like voice-activated assistants, spam filters, and recommendation engines.

Dr. Yutaka Ishikawa, project lead for RIKEN AICS, confirms that Japan’s next-generation supercomputer, the Post-K computer, has been delayed by one-to-two years, slipping from its original 2020 target to either 2021 or 2022. The additional time is needed to ensure sufficient processor volume, sources report. With the adjusted schedule, Japan’s exascale horizon has shifted closer to the US goal to stand up a productive exascale computer by no later than 2023.

The DOE is funding a $2.4 million project at Georgia Tech to develop new computer algorithms for solving linear and nonlinear equations that will ultimately help pave the way for the next generation of supercomputers. The research targets a critical need for more advanced algorithms in the transition from petascale to exascale computing, which could unlock a thousand-fold increase in computer performance. Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of at least a billion billion (quintillion) – or one exaflop – floating-point operations per second. Chow and his team plan to replace the current generation of solvers­ – mathematical tools used to determine solutions to particular problems – that are being impeded by “synchronous operations.”