It has been difficult for the supercomputing community to watch the tools they have honed over many years get snatched up by a more commercially-oriented community like AI and popularized. Without tireless work at supercomputing sites around the world much of what AI hinges upon simply wouldn’t work.

A dump truck’s worth of plastic empties into the ocean every minute. Worldwide, humankind produces over 300 million tons of plastic each year, much of which is predicted to last centuries to millennia and pollutes both aquatic and terrestrial environments. PET plastic, short for polyethylene terephthalate, is the fourth most-produced plastic and is used to make things like beverage bottles and carpets, most of which are not being recycled. Some scientists are hoping to change that, using supercomputers to engineer an enzyme that breaks down PET.

Argonne has selected 10 data science and machine learning projects for its Aurora Early Science Program (ESP). Set to be the nation’s first exascale system upon its expected 2021 arrival, Aurora will be capable of performing a quintillion calculations per second. The Aurora ESP, which commenced with 10 simulation-based projects in 2017, is designed to prepare key applications, libraries, and infrastructure for the architecture and scale of the exascale supercomputer.

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, and IEEE Computer Society have announced that Susan Eggers, a professor at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, is the recipient of the 2018 Eckert-Mauchly Award. Eggers was cited for outstanding contributions to simultaneous multithreaded processor architectures and multiprocessor sharing and coherency. The Eckert-Mauchly Award is known as the computer architecture community’s most prestigious award.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the way industrial machinery and related processes work together and report back with information such as position, temperature, pressure, humidity and so on. The worldwide market for the number of these types of sensors that will be deployed is estimated to be in the billions. With so much information being generated many times per second, in some instances, filtering and analytics must be performed where the sensors are located (or close by), rather than in faraway data centers.

I’m at the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, BC, Canada. There are a lot of interesting things going on. However, most are very, very, technical. My interest is in what the OpenStack Foundation (OSF), its members, and the users are doing to provide solutions for applications. As one of my focuses is in machine learning (ML), a presentation Monday afternoon was of particular interest.

In the early days of computing, the goal was to automate and speedup the job being done by human calculators. Early computers were large and complex devices, for the period, and programmers and operators required an intimate knowledge of the workings of these machines to achieve the desired results. Indeed, in works that describe the early days of computing such as Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson, we get an intimate look at and appreciation for the computing skills those early pioneers had – in addition to their domain specific knowledge.

It’s a race to the top. The big chemical companies are making serious investments in the latest generation of high-powered supercomputers. They’re talking about not only employing faster processors with bigger memories, but ‘digitalisation’ strategies that will transform the industry and keep them ahead of competition from start-ups. BASF has created a digitalisation department for its research and development, while Evonik has established a digital division that will serve the whole of the specialty chemicals company.

Thanks to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has probably become the most widely recognized science project on the planet. Now almost 10 years old, the 27-kilometer ring of superconducting magnets is the world’s largest and most capable particle accelerator. As such, it enables physicists to push the envelope of particle physics research.

MIT researchers have built an ingestible sensor equipped with genetically engineered bacteria that can diagnose bleeding in the stomach or other gastrointestinal problems. This "bacteria-on-a-chip" approach combines sensors made from living cells with ultra-low-power electronics that convert the bacterial response into a wireless signal that can be read by a smartphone.

When a professor posted a Twitter thread about how Cornell University improved diversity in its computer-science PhD program, it quickly went viral. “[W]e made a big step in improving diversity of the program. Let me tell you about it,” wrote David Bindel, the PhD admissions chair for Cornell University’s Computer Science department, earlier this month. It’s clearly an issue that other higher ed leaders are interested in hearing about—the tweet has been shared more than 750 times and drew nearly 2,000 likes.

What makes kevlar stop a bullet, at the atomic level? The properties of materials emerge from their molecular or atomic structure, yet many details between the micro and the macro remain a mystery to science. Scientists are actively researching the rational design of targeted supramolecular architectures, with the goal of engineering their structural dynamics and their response to environmental cues.

In an environment of 21st century demand from tech-hungry students, educators are largely stuck with out-of-date or insufficient training to keep up with demand. Particularly in the area of computer science (CS), schools need more qualified teachers. Public-private partnerships are one way to address the nation-wide shortage of computer science-trained educators, and the latest comes in the form of STEMpath, a new graduate-level educator certification program that isn't quite a master's degree.

Based on complex simulations of quantum chromodynamics performed using the K computer, one of the most powerful computers in the world, the HAL QCD Collaboration, made up of scientists from the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-based Science and the RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS) program, together with colleagues from a number of universities, have predicted a new type of "dibaryon"--a particle that contains six quarks instead of the usual three.

Scientists at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are the first to successfully simulate an atomic nucleus using a quantum computer. The results, published in Physical Review Letters, demonstrate the ability of quantum systems to compute nuclear physics problems and serve as a benchmark for future calculations.

A study by MIT researchers has uncovered a new way of telling how well people are learning English: tracking their eyes. That's right. Using data generated by cameras trained on readers' eyes, the research team has found that patterns of eye movement—particularly how long people's eyes rest on certain words—correlate strongly with performance on standardized tests of English as a second language.

You hear the buzzwords everywhere—machine learning, artificial intelligence—revolutionary new approaches to transform the way we interact with products, services, and information, from prescribing drugs to advertising messages. Artificial intelligence, a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers, is already behind many of the technologies we see today, including virtual online assistants and driverless cars. In transportation, the applications extend even further.

New research gives insight into a recent experiment that was able to manipulate an unprecedented number of atoms through a quantum simulator. This new theory could provide another step on the path to creating the elusive quantum computers. An international team of researchers, led by the University of Leeds and in cooperation with the Institute of Science and Technology Austria and the University of Geneva, has provided a theoretical explanation for the particular behaviour of individual atoms that were trapped and manipulated in a recent experiment by Harvard University and MIT.

A new startup called Zapata Computing has launched with the intention of creating and selling software for quantum computers. Representatives of the new company announced to the press that they have already received $5.4 million in seed money from MIT's The Engine venture firm and several others.Most of the news surrounding quantum computer development has been focused on the hardware, but the team at Zapata claims it is time to start getting serious about the software.

The SEHET18 workshop is an ACM SIGHPC Education Chapter coordinated effort aimed at fostering collaborations among the practitioners from traditional and emerging fields to explore strategies to enhance computational, data-enabled and HPC educational needs. Attendees will discuss approaches for developing and deploying HPC training and education, as well as identifying new challenges and opportunities for keeping pace with the rapid pace of technological advances - from collaborative and online learning tools to new HPC platforms.

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard is playing a major role in accelerating genomic analysis and is collaborating with Intel to do so. With the massive growth of genomics data, the collaboration makes use of technology to enable genomics analytics at scale. The latest result is a suite of optimized software, along with reference architectures for turnkey configuration, setup, and deployment to run genomics analysis that includes Broad’s Genomic Analysis Toolkit (GATK).

A Queen's University Belfast student has developed software which can detect insurance fraud quickly. Jiawen Sun, a PhD student in the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technologies (ECIT) at Queen's, has been working for the last three years to create a software system which can efficiently analyse graph-structured data.

A billion operations per second isn't cool. Know what's cool? A million billion operations per second. That's the promise of a new computing technique that uses laser-light pulses to make a prototype of the fundamental unit of computing, called a bit, that could switch between its on and off, or "1" and "0" states, 1 quadrillion times per second. That's about 1 million times faster than the bits in modern computers.

Computer scientists at Columbia Engineering have invented FontCode, a new way to embed hidden information in ordinary text by imperceptibly changing, or perturbing, the shapes of fonts in text. FontCode creates font perturbations, using them to encode a message that can later be decoded to recover the message. The method works with most fonts and, unlike other text and document methods that hide embedded information, works with most document types, even maintaining the hidden information when the document is printed on paper or converted to another file type.

Among the nation’s top tech hubs, Seattle has the fastest growth rate in job openings for computing professionals. That’s according to labor market experts at Indeed Hiring Lab. With so many new jobs to fill, Puget Sound area employers are struggling to find qualified workers. The latest info from the state’s Employment Security Department shows software developers, systems analysts and other tech-driven occupations rank among the most in-demand across the state.