Simulations performed by Barcelona Supercomputing Center in collaboration with the Institut de Ciències de la Terra Jaume Almera – CSIC demonstrated that Antarctic volcanoes might pose a higher threat than previously considered. A research focused on the potential impacts of ash dispersal and fallout from Deception Island highlights how ash clouds entrapped in circumpolar upper-level winds have the potential to reach lower latitudes and disrupt Austral hemisphere air traffic. The study has been published today in the Nature group journal, Scientific Reports.

The 9th Irish Supercomputer List was released today. For the first time, Ireland has four computers ranked on the Top500 and Ireland is now ranked number one globally in terms of number of TOP500 supercomputers per capita. The new list features two new world-class supercomputers that boost the Irish High Performance Computing capacity by nearly one third, up from 3.01 to 4.42 Pflop/s. The new entrants, from two undisclosed software and web services companies, feature at spots 423 and 454 on the 50th Top500 Supercomputer List, with Linpack Rmax scores of 635 and 603 TFlop/s respectively.

It’s a well-worn industry talking point that today’s smartphones exponentially outperform the supercomputers that landed Apollo 11 on the moon. Today’s bleeding edges are tomorrow’s table stakes. Nowhere is this truth more evident than in high-performance computing (HPC). Similar advancements are taking place in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI). Data fuels AI, and HPC systems are increasingly the only architectures capable of harnessing the rush of ones and zeros that power these algorithms.

We depend on electricity for nearly everything we do. Flip a switch, and the lights come on. Turn up the thermostat, and the room gets warm. Pre-heat the oven and start preparing the Thanksgiving turkey, or microwave the leftovers. Electricity is essential to our quality of life, our well-being and our energy-dependent economy. Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are working with industry, academia and municipalities to ensure that electrons continue to flow reliably and securely to our homes and businesses.

Researchers have discovered that dense ensembles of quantum spins can be created in diamond with high resolution using an electron microscopes, paving the way for enhanced sensors and resources for quantum technologies.

During a collegiate coding competition in her native India, computer science student Mehul Smriti Raje noticed something striking—she was the only woman in the room. She knew men far outnumbered women in computer science at universities around the world; her program at the Manipal Institute of Technology had only one female student for every five male students. But that experience threw the disparity into even sharper relief. Raje, who recently received the Student of Vision ABIE Award from the Anita Borg Institute for her dedication to support, promote, and inspire young women in tech, knew she had to do something to attract more women to the field.

A new method to predict human mobility—which can be used to chart the potential spread of disease or determine rush hour bottlenecks—has been developed by a team of researchers, including one from Arizona State University.

A universal quantum computer still is a vision. Special quantum systems that promise to solve certain tasks more quickly than a classical computer, however, are already playing an important role in science. To reliably find a certain element in unsorted data, a conventional computer has to run through all search elements successively in the most unfavorable case. A quantum system with an implemented Grover's search algorithm quadratically accelerates search.

There was an interesting story published earlier this week in which NVIDIA’s founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, said: ‘As advanced parallel-instruction architectures for CPU can be barely worked out by designers, GPUs will soon replace CPUs’. There are only so many processing cores you can fit on a single CPU chip. There are optimized applications that take advantage of a number of cores, but typically they are used for sequential serial processing (although Intel is doing an excellent job of adding more and more cores to its CPUs and getting developers to program multicore systems). By contrast, a GPU has massively parallel architecture consisting of many thousands of smaller, more efficient cores designed for handling multiple tasks simultaneously

There has been a lot of talk about taking HPC technologies mainstream, taking them out of realm of research, education and government institutions and making them available to enterprises that are being challenged by the need to manage and process the huge amounts of data being generated through the use of such compute- and storage-intensive workloads such as analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Most underdogs don’t take home the trophy. But that didn’t stop the Sudo Wrestlers from competing as the first all-high school team in the 11th annual Student Cluster Competition, held last week at the SC17 supercomputing show, in Denver. Dozens of undergraduate students in 16 teams from some the world’s most lauded universities joined the high schoolers, all armed with the latest NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU accelerators. Their aim: to create small computing clusters for a non-stop, 48-hour challenge measuring how fast they could complete scientific, high performance computing workloads.

The U.S. and China are leading the race toward productive quantum computing, but it’s early enough that ultimate leadership is still something of an open question. The latest geo-region to throw its hat in the quantum computing ring is Japan. The nation will begin offering public access to a prototype quantum device over the internet for free starting Nov. 27 at https://qnncloud.com.

During the summer, I taught a computer science course for educators at the Krause Center for Innovation at Foothill College. Funded by Google’s CS4HS grant, this was a four-day intensive “crash course” for 60 teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Within that group were science teachers who decided to spend their summer break learning how to incorporate computer science into their classes. This would not only engage their students in science topics, but more importantly, it would bring many of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) practices to life.

Virginia has become the first state to adopt mandatory standards for computer-science education. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the state Board of Education unanimously approved the new standards this week. Board member Anne Holton supported the standards but voiced concerns that the standards might be too ambitious, given that they must now be implemented across the board. While other states have advisory standards, Virginia is the first with mandatory standards. The board's vote follows legislation passed in 2016 requiring that computer-science education be integrated into the state's Standards of Learning.

More than half of England's secondary schools, 54%, did not offer GCSE computer science in 2015-16, a report from the Royal Society has found. It urged the government to increase spending on computer education tenfold over the next five years to ensure youngsters can "unlock the full potential of new technologies". The biggest issue was the lack of skilled teachers, the report found.

Experts project the American workforce will need a million science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduates by 2022. To realize this vision of a diverse workforce, the Congressional Black Caucus held a briefing aimed at highlighting the importance and value of blue collar jobs.

There is no questioning the power of a full head of shiny, buoyant hair. Not in real life, not in commercials, and, it turns out, not in computer-generated (CG) animation. Just as more expensive brands of shampoos provide volume, luster, and flow to a human head of hair, so too does more expensive computational power provide the waggle of a prince’s mane or raise the hackles of an evil yak.

Organizations are turning to artificial intelligence and deep learning in hopes of being able to more quickly make the right business decisions, to remake their business models and become more efficient, and to improve the experience of their customers. The fast-emerging technologies will let enterprises gain more insight into the massive amounts of data they are generating and find the trends that normally would have been hidden from them. And enterprises are quickly moving in that direction.

For the first time, researchers have carried out a large-scale analysis of victims of internet denial-of-service (DoS) attacks worldwide. And what they found is, in a phrase from their study, “an eye-opening statistic”. Spanning two years, from March 2015 to February 2017, the researchers found that about one-third of the IPv4 address space was subject to some kind of DoS attacks, where a perpetrator maliciously disrupts services of a host connected to the internet. IPv4 is the fourth version of an Internet Protocol (IP) address, a numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network.

Experts of the Faculty of Informatics, Mathematics, and Computer Science at the Higher School of Economics have created an automatic system capable of identifying emotions in the sound of a voice. Their report was presented at a major international conference - Neuroinformatics-2017. For a long time, computers have successfully converted speech into text. However, the emotional component, which is important for conveying meaning, has been neglected.

Future quantum computers will be able to solve problems where conventional computers fail today. We are still far away from any large-scale implementation, however, because quantum systems are very sensitive to environmental noise. Although systems can be protected from noise in principle, researchers have been able to build only small prototypes of quantum computers experimentally.

At a summit in Tokyo on Friday, President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump made a statement that minorities and women need to better represented in STEM careers. Unlike any of the rhetoric her father spews, her proclamation was based on truths, especially when it comes to computer science.

Every day, websites you visit and smartphone apps that you use are crunching huge sets of data to find things that resemble each other: products that are similar to your past purchases; songs that are similar to tunes you've liked; faces that are similar to people you've identified in photos. All these tasks are known as similarity searches, and the ability to perform these massive matching games well—and fast—has been an ongoing challenge for computer scientists.

The national priority in education can be summed up in a four-letter acronym: STEM. And that’s understandable. A country’s proficiency in science, technology, engineering and mathematics is vital in generating economic growth, advancing scientific innovation and creating good jobs. The STEM campaign has been underway for years, championed by policymakers across the ideological spectrum, embraced in schools everywhere and by organizations ranging from the YWCA to the Boy Scouts.

Black holes make for a great space mystery. They’re so massive that nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole once it gets close enough. A great mystery for scientists is that there’s evidence of powerful jets of electrons and protons that shoot out of the top and bottom of some black holes. Yet no one knows how these jets form.