Covering Scientific & Technical AI | Thursday, July 2, 2026
Where Do We Come From? Ancestry.com’s 19B-Record ‘Big Tree’ Database May Have the Answer
“Where Do We Come From? What Are We?” Not only Paul Gauguin (see picture) but most of humanity has been vexed by these questions since… well, since the dawn of humanity. “If the means were available,” observed science fiction writer Clifford Simak, “we could trace our ancestry – yours and mine – back to the ... Full article
Containers Depart ‘Hype’ Phase in 2016
Application containers made the jump from prototype to production in 2016 as the distributed application technology began to make headway in hyper-scale IT infrastructure. Along with an expanding ecosystem, the sector is characterized by healthy competition that is driving innovation in areas such as container security and management of computing and storage resources, those competitors ... Full article
Avoid These Common Cloud Migration Pitfalls
The vast majority of enterprises lack a mature strategy for at-scale cloud computing – and that can easily translate to inefficient or expensive cloud projects in 2017. According to a recent survey by IDC, only 3 percent of 6,159 executives define their cloud strategies as “optimized,” the highest level of strategic maturity, while nearly half ... Full article
Snell: The ‘Wild West’ of HPC Disaggregation
We caught up with Addison Snell, CEO of HPC industry watcher Intersect360, at SC16 last month, and Snell had his expected, extensive list of insights into trends driving advanced-scale technology in both the commercial and research sectors. Possibly the most significant trend is what Snell calls “technology disaggregation,” the proliferation of alternative processing architectures along ... Full article
Targeting HPC and AI, ARM Acquires Tools Vendor Allinea
Allinea Software, whose cross-platform development and performance analysis tools are used by 80 percent of the world’s top 25 supercomputers, has been acquired by ARM Ltd., which said the move strengthens its HPC offering for both scientific and business computing by extending its portfolio of development tools for the HPC, machine learning and data analytics ... Full article
Cloud-Based Weather Network Launched
Access to huge volumes of weather data—volumes that will likely soar after the November launch of the U.S. GOES-R weather satellite—has been limited to a few users at great expense. Now a university-private sector networking effort will attempt to broaden access to atmospheric and weather data. George Mason University, Fairfax, Va., and Ligado Networks, a ... Full article
Latest OpenStack Release Addresses Complexity
OpenStack developers are addressing complaints about deployment complexity in their latest distributions as they attempt to attract new enterprise customers beyond early adopters. The latest attempt comes from Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT), which this week unveiled the latest version of its OpenStack platform based on the "upstream" Newton release. The latest version of the ... Full article
OpenIO Takes on x86-based Object Storage TCO
OpenIO has announced a new object storage appliance that combines its open source storage software with an ARM-based Marvell chassis that OpenIO said is priced at a fraction of x86-based storage technologies. Aimed at cloud and telco service providers, media companies and large government organizations, the SLS-4U96 costs $0.008/Gb/month for a 96X8TB box, well below ... Full article
Docker Donates Container ‘Plumbing’
Docker Inc. is moving to expand its application container ecosystem by releasing to the open source community its underlying runtime used to execute containers while enlisting leading public cloud providers as partners to extend the reach of distributed applications in enterprise infrastructure. The San Francisco-based company said Wednesday (Dec. 14) it is spinning out the ... Full article
U.S. Needs IoT Strategy, Study Urges
The U.S. requires a national strategy to coordinate private sector efforts to deploy the Internet of Things (IoT) that includes data security and interoperability standards, according to a report released this week by the Center for Data Innovation. “It appears that each federal agency is marching to the beat of its own drum,” noted Daniel ... Full article
AMD Reveals ‘Instinct’ for Machine Intelligence
At the AMD Tech Summit in Sonoma, Calif., last week (Dec. 7-9), CEO Lisa Su unveiled the company’s vision to accelerate machine intelligence over the next five to ten years with an open and heterogeneous computing approach and a new suite of hardware and open-source software offerings. The roots for this strategy can be traced back to ... Full article
Treat Your Databases as Cattle, not Pets
Today, databases have to be treated like pets. Each is special and receives individualized care and attention. At scale, and with the need for greater agility, the issue of maintaining large numbers of pet databases becomes a problem. This raises the question: what if databases could be treated more like cattle – as a herd ... Full article
Container Encryption Targets Security, Downtime
Securing the contents of application containers based on Docker and other platforms has relied heavily on isolating individual containers from one another along with other access control approaches. Now, a data security vendor is proposing an encryption scheme that, for example, extends "data-at-rest" security capabilities to Docker encryption and those access controls. Cyber and data ... Full article
Managing 30B Bid Requests, 1.5B Users per Day in (near) Real Time
At the beating heart of the mobile advertising industry is what Ellen DeGeneres calls “our ADD culture.” It’s predicated on delivering up-to-date content in real time while people are doing, or trying to do, something else: checking a stock quote, reading a news headline, looking at Facebook messages. Mobile ad campaigns be fast, responsive and ... Full article
Google, Red Hat Partner to Extend Kubernetes
The ecosystem for the Kubernetes application container orchestrator continues to expand with support for Windows server and greater upstream collaboration between Kubernetes developer Google and Red Hat. With the latest version of Kubernetes now expected next week, Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) said Thursday (Dec. 8) a "dedicated" version of its OpenShift container platform is available ... Full article
Qualcomm Targets Intel Data Center Dominance with 10nm ARM-based Server Processor
Claiming no less than a reshaping of the future of Intel-dominated datacenter computing, Qualcomm Technologies, the market leader in smartphone chips, announced the forthcoming availability of what it says is the world’s first 10nm processor for servers, based on ARM Holding’s chip designs. The Qualcomm Centriq 2400 series has up to 48-cores, is built on ... Full article
How Retailers Can Fend Off FlokiBot Malware
The holiday shopping season is upon us, and with increased retail activity there is a corresponding increase in security threats. While many are concerned with online shopping, in-store retail sales are just as susceptible to hackers looking to take advantage of holiday shoppers. Many retailers consider point of sale (POS) devices ‘dumb’ terminals and neglect ... Full article
Flaws Found in Security Software, Unlicensed Code
A flurry of industry surveys have flagged open source and unlicensed software as growing security threats. Moreover, a review released by Flexera Software also found that the very security products designed to protect IT infrastructure are themselves riddled with vulnerabilities embedded in open source software. While agreeing that malware is a growing threat, other observers ... Full article
Yahoo! Japan: 50TB/Day Data Transfer in Trans-Pacific Search for Lower Energy Costs
Transferring data from one data center to another in search of lower regional energy costs isn’t a new concept, but Yahoo! Japan is putting the idea into transcontinental effect with a system that transfers 50TB of data a day from Japan to the U.S., where electricity costs a quarter of the rates in Japan. DataDirect ... Full article
The Road Ahead for Dell EMC
Who is Dell EMC and why should you care? Glad you asked, is Jim Ganthier’s quick response. Ganthier is SVP for validated solutions and high performance computing for the new (even bigger) technology giant Dell EMC following the September completion of Dell’s acquisition of EMC, announced last year (the largest in the history of the ... Full article