What processes are involved in the formation of individual stars and stellar clusters in our own galaxy and other galaxies? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are using NASA's most powerful supercomputer, Pleiades, to create unique star-formation simulations to answer this fundamental scientific question. Like something from a video game, the simulations zoom through the entire evolution of young star clusters. A giant cloud of interstellar gas and dust collapses under the forces of gravity. Inside the cloud, turbulent clumps of gas form and then collapse.

Genomic sequencing – that is, rapid sequencing – is instrumental to diagnosing and treating critically ill patients, and managing the high data volumes involved in genomics is essential to the process. Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, MO, operates what it says is the world’s first whole genome sequencing center in a pediatric setting, where physicians, clinical laboratory scientists, molecular geneticists, bioinformaticians and software engineers work to sequence and analyze rare inherited diseases.

Using supercomputing resources provided by the National Science Foundation’s eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) and the Savio computer at UC Berkeley, Alexander “Sasha” Tchekhovskoy and co-researcher Omer Bromberg — formerly a Lyman Spitzer Jr. postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University, and currently at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel — resolved the 40-year puzzle of the astrophysical jet dichotomy. Altogether the simulation effort took about 500 hours on 2,000 computer cores, which, for perspective, would amount to about 1 million hours on a standard laptop.

A man has finished building an enormous computer in the sitting room of his bungalow in Cambridge. James Newman started work on the "Mega processor", which is 33ft wide and 6ft high, in 2012. It does the job of a chip-sized microprocessor and Mr. Newman has spent $53,000 creating it. It contains 40,000 transistors, 10,000 LED lights and it weighs around half a tonne (500kg). So far, he has used it to play the classic video game Tetris. In a video demonstration he admits the game isn't easy to play. Mr. Newman, a digital electronics engineer, started the project because he was learning about transistors and wanted to visualize how a microprocessor worked.

Nine science projects were recently chosen to receive computational time and storage space on the Yellowstone supercomputer in Cheyenne. The most recent recommended allocations total 42.6 million core hours, 270 terabytes of archival storage, and 47,000 hours on data analysis and visualization systems, Shader says. To provide some perspective on what these numbers mean, here are some useful comparisons. In simplest terms, Yellowstone can be thought of as 72,576 personal computers that are cleverly interconnected to perform as one computer. The computational time allocated is equivalent to the use of the entire supercomputer for 24.5 days­, 24 hours a day.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego, in collaboration with the UC San Diego Division of Health Sciences, is preparing to launch the second year of a new mentoring program designed to provide a pathway for high school students to gain access to experts in their field of interest. The first phase of the Mentor Assistance Program (MAP), co-founded by Ange Mason, SDSC’s education program manager, and Kellie Church, assistant professor in the Department of Reproductive Medicine within UC San Diego’s School of Medicine, was recently celebrated at a symposium at SDSC. The event drew almost 300 guests, including school district administrators, principals, and teachers as well as parents and family members of students.

HPCWire reached out to XSEDE16 conference chair Dr. Kelly Gaither to get the inside track on this year’s program, her work in scientific visualization and her commitment to increasing diversity in HPC. Gaither serves as the director of Visualization at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin. Over the past ten years, she has actively participated in conferences related to her field and has given numerous invited talks. During the interview she said, “Attendees can expect a diverse and exciting program that showcases discoveries, innovations, challenges and achievements of people working at the cutting edge of science and technology.”

The University of Melbourne has launched a new high performance computing (HPC) service called Spartan. It combines traditional HPC with a cloud computing component and the university claims that no other university has put a system like this into production. University of Melbourne head of research computer services, Bernard Meade, said the application of HPC and cloud techniques would increase research productivity across a wide range of disciplines. Spartan can grow and evolve according to the demands of researchers, expanding physically or virtually as required.

To improve the bombastic experience, scientists took to supercomputers to concoct the perfect pyrotechnical recipe. Fireworks accompany all types of celebrations, from weddings to sporting events, to political rallies, and holidays. They achieve their expected effect when a launched packet of combustible particles detonates overhead. As the ensuing explosion forces these grains outward — unlike in the vacuum of space where they would travel forever outward — the drag in our atmosphere slows them. It’s this drag that creates the magic of fireworks.

Officials from the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and government representatives today dedicated a new supercomputing facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The $9.8 million modular and sustainable facility provides the Laboratory flexibility to accommodate future advances in computer technology and meet a rapidly growing demand for unclassified high-performance computing (HPC). The facility houses supercomputing systems in support of NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing (link is external) (ASC) program. ASC is an essential and integral part of NNSA's Stockpile Stewardship Program to ensure the safety, security and effectiveness of the nation's nuclear deterrent without additional underground testing.

Picture a software engineer or video game developer. What do you see? Chances are it's not a woman. One reason is that women are still very much in the minority in computer sciences and engineering. Even though there are many efforts underway to encourage girls from a young age to pursue STEM fields, the pipeline of women coming out of college with degrees in engineering and computer science is still very small relative to men. That's also why talented women entering the workforce with degrees in those fields are not likely to have much trouble finding a job. For many, "It's 'Which job will I take?'" said Karen Panetta, a tenured professor of engineering and associate dean of graduate education at Tufts University.

A transistor, conceived of in digital terms, has two states: on and off, which can represent the 1s and 0s of binary arithmetic. But in analog terms, the transistor has an infinite number of states, which could, in principle, represent an infinite range of mathematical values. Digital computing, for all its advantages, leaves most of transistors’ informational capacity on the table. In recent years, analog computers have proven to be much more efficient at simulating biological systems than digital computers. But existing analog computers have to be programmed by hand, a complex process that would be prohibitively time consuming for large-scale simulations.

For more than a decade the company formerly known as Google, latterly rebranded Alphabet to illustrate the full breadth of its A to Z business ambitions, has engineered an annually increasing revenue generating empire which last year pulled in ~$75 billion. And it’s done this mostly by mining user data for ad targeting intel. It’s an abstract idea for starters, and a personal cost that’s far harder to quantify given how unclear it is what Google really does with the data it gathers and processes in its algorithmic black boxes.

Computer science, if installed in all of Iowa's schools, should not replace other classes and instead be a main course, according to a committee with the Governor's STEM Advisory Council. "We believe it is time that computer science is recognized as a core discipline," Mark Gruwell, co-chairman of the computer science committee, told members of the Council. Gruwell told the Register the group does not want computer science class time to supplant math, foreign language or other coursework. If there are concerns about adding another course in an already tight school day, the committee suggested Iowa examine how much time is provided for study halls or free periods.

One could be forgiven for experiencing a bit of hopeful, skepticism in response to U.S. President Barack Obama Administration’s statement in May regarding re-energizing the “War Against Cancer.” The war against cancer is a many-decades old effort with mixed results – great progress in many areas but matched with disappointment in others. Winning the war still seems rather far-off. Precision Medicine is a powerful idea – mostly marshaling insights from varying genomics technologies and research (writ large) to “personalize” and improve the efficacy of therapy for very many illnesses. Much of what has been missing so far are large enough datasets to reflect true population-scale dynamics.

Ransomware - what hackers use to encrypt your computer files and demand money in exchange for freeing those contents - is an exploding global problem with few solutions, but a team of University of Florida researchers says it has developed a way to stop it dead in its tracks. The answer, they say, lies not in keeping it out of a computer but rather in confronting it once it's there and, counterintuitively, actually letting it lock up a few files before clamping down on it.

Here are some of the more outlandish predictions for the jobs people might hold in the future: mind-uploading specialist, personalized microbiome steward or de-extinction zoologist. I, for one, am looking forward to my second career in 2030 as a professional "triber" and crowdfunding specialist. No one can really say for certain what the jobs of the future will be. A former educator with whom I recently met argued that uncertainty about the future job market means that giving students opportunities to learn computer science, while trendy, is essentially pointless. Whatever students learn now will be as out of date as MS-DOS and car phones by the time they can put it to use, he reasoned.

The era of quantum computers is one step closer as a result of research published in the current issue of the journal Science. The research team has devised and demonstrated a new way to pack a lot more quantum computing power into a much smaller space and with much greater control than ever before. The research advance, using a 3-dimensional array of atoms in quantum states called quantum bits -- or qubits -- was made by David S. Weiss, professor of physics at Penn State University, and three students on his lab team.

Why are there not more women in HPC? This was the simple question that led to the formation of the Women in HPC (WHPC) network nearly three years ago. Under the direction of founder Dr. Toni Collis of the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), the organization has been gaining momentum and making a name for itself since its inaugural Women in HPC workshop at SC14. At ISC 2016 in Frankfurt, Germany, WHPC expanded its program to three events: its fourth international Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) workshop; a BOF on women in HPC; and a networking luncheon.

Sandy Hook, Charlie Hebdo, San Bernardino, the Paris Attacks, Brussels, Istanbul. Virtually all of these terrorist attacks and mass shootings occurred in what are known as "soft target" locations: big spaces with multiple entries and exits, lots of people, and relatively little protection. Soft targets like airports often contain more stringent security inside, but those security checkpoints, scanners and pat-downs you endure at the TSA are intended to protect the airplanes and their passengers. The rest of the airport terminal generally does not enjoy the same level of security.

Many things have sought to capture your undivided attention, but that might be the ghost of a goal in today’s reality. We’re less attentive than goldfish; even our best and brightest can’t focus; and we’re more likely than ever to be paying less than full attention in even circumstances where distraction can be deadly. And that genie isn’t going back in the bottle, so responsible product design now has to assume a high and growing average level of user distraction. Already, the products that perform well and generate high engagement from users are designed to cater to the idea that what people are interested in is constant distraction.

University of Washington and Microsoft researchers have broken what they believe is the world record for the amount of digital data successfully stored—and retrieved—in DNA molecules. The team of computer scientists and electrical engineers encoded and decoded a video of the band OK Go (featuring the craziest Rube Goldberg machine ever), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in more than 100 languages, the top 100 books of Project Gutenberg and the Crop Trust's seed database—among other things— all on strands of DNA. Luis Ceze, the UW's Torode Family Career Development Professor of computer science and engineering and one of the project's lead researchers, expands on the latest news-making accomplishment from the UW Molecular Information Systems Lab.

Sometimes lost in the discussion around big data is the fact that big science has long generated huge data sets. “In fact, large-scale simulations that run on leadership-class supercomputers work at such high speeds and resolution that they generate unprecedented amounts of data. The size of these datasets—ranging from a few gigabytes to hundreds of terabytes—makes managing and analyzing the resulting information a challenge in its own right,” notes an article posted on Oak Ridge National Laboratory site. Now, a group at ORNL’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility has developed an updated version of R – programming with big data in R (pbdR) – that is helping OLCF users cut large data sets down to size.

A team of scientists from Oxford University has shown how the natural movement of bacteria could be harnessed to assemble and power microscopic 'windfarms' -- or other human-made micromachines such as smartphone components. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, uses computer simulations to demonstrate that the chaotic swarming effect of dense active matter such as bacteria can be organised to turn cylindrical rotors and provide a steady power source.

Sesame Workshop and IBM announced a collaboration to use IBM Watson’s cognitive computing technology and Sesame’s early childhood expertise to help advance preschool education around the world. As part of a three-year agreement, Sesame Workshop and IBM will collaborate to develop educational platforms and products that will be designed to adapt to the learning preferences and aptitude levels of individual preschoolers. Research shows that a significant extent of brain development occurs in the first five years of a child’s life, making this window critical for learning and development.