Covering Scientific & Technical AI | Friday, July 3, 2026
Mesosphere Touts ‘Container 2.0’
In a bid to jumpstart what it calls a "Container 2.0" movement, application container pioneer Mesosphere announced partnerships with big data vendors designed to push distributed application technology to the next level. Mesosphere said Monday (Aug. 1) it is working with a trio of new partners to advance its datacenter operating center approach to container ... Full article
Crowd-sourcing Algorithms to Beat Wall Street
Looking to cash in on your algorithm expertise? Join the crowd. A three-year-old hedge fund investment company, Quantopian, which crowd-sources algorithms to guide its investing, has just received an infusion of $250 million to play with as it continues to scan the crowd for mathematical keys to success. When an algorithm is used by the ... Full article
Study: Corporate-“Shadow” IT Gap Puts Cloud-based Data in Peril
As corporate data – much of it sensitive – flies to the cloud in growing volume, a serious disconnect between corporate and “shadow” IT has developed in recent years, one that has resulted in data security practices often handled in a decentralized, disjointed and non-compliant way, with even simple data security provisions often not put ... Full article
The Third Age of Data and the Unfolding Scale-out World
Welcome to the Third Age of Data, where an estimated 1 trillion sensors are embedded in a nearly limitless landscape of networked sources, from health monitoring devices to municipal water supplies. Data’s first age was a transaction-oriented world of back-office databases and once-a-day batch processing. Its second age was human-centric -- the huge digital trails ... Full article
How GPU-Powered Analytics Improves Mail Delivery for USPS
When the United States Postal Service (USPS) set out to buy a system that would allow it to track the location of employees, vehicles, and individual pieces of mail in real time, an in-memory relational database was its first choice. But when that technology proved too costly and complex, the 241-year-old service looked to graphical ... Full article
New Flash from IBM Targets Unstructured Data Analytics
JBOF (“jay-boff”), or Just A Bunch of Flash, may sound like a pejorative acronym. But when industry analyst Randy Kerns, senior strategist at Evaluator Group, used it in reference to new flash storage technology announced today by IBM, he meant it in a favorable way. The IBM DeepFlash 150 targets large analytics workloads involving high ... Full article
9 Ways Retailers Are Using Big Data and Hadoop
The big data revolution is changing how business gets done in all industries. That includes the massive retail market, which drives $2.6 trillion in business in the U.S. and employs 42 million Americans. The use of advanced analytics and predictive modeling is changing the face of retail, and helping us all get what we want, ... Full article
Session Awareness: Overcoming Standalone Network Functions
Lately, things have felt a bit like the 1990s. A hot new app had just been released and everyone was talking about it – but its reliability and performance left a lot to be desired. The difference is that the Pokemon GO will probably improve relatively quickly. For the early users of massively multiplayer online ... Full article
Cray and Deloitte Join Supercomputing with Security-as-a-Service
When cyber-criminals look at your network, what do they see? Providing the adversary's perspective on computing infrastructures they're intent on attacking is a core concept of a new "cyber reconnaissance" capability that combines the supercomputing of Cray Inc. and the Deloitte Advisory Cyber Risk Services. According to the two companies, the service is capable of ... Full article
Deployment Hurdles Emerge as Containers Go Mainstream
Application container deployment is accelerating as security and persistent storage concerns are addressed and enterprises seek to capitalize on the potential efficiencies, flexibility and long-term savings offered by distributed applications. The latest measure of container deployment released this week by enterprise infrastructure vendor NetEnrich, San Jose, Calif., finds that 70 percent of IT professionals it ... Full article
‘Cloud Shift’ Gains Momentum, Spending Surge Seen
So-called "cloud first" strategies are expected to propel IT spending over the next five years as more enterprises transform themselves into digital businesses, a new forecast predicts. In a cloud spending survey released Thursday (July 21), market watcher Gartner Inc. (NYSE: IT) estimated that the cloud transition underway for several years would influence more than ... Full article
It’s 3 a.m. — Do You Know What Your Cluster’s Doing?
Performance challenges in Hadoop environments are par for the course as organizations attempt to capture the benefits of big data. The growing ecosystem of tools and applications (including new analytics platforms) for Hadoop is becoming increasingly distributed, making the challenges of using Hadoop in production exponentially more complicated. Which begs the question, do you know ... Full article
Datacenter Security Attracts More Investors
Efforts to lock down security in datacenters continue to expand as operators seek to assure enterprise customers they can meet increasingly strict regulatory and other data governance rules even as operations are scaled. That requirement is generating interest among investors as security threats grow. Among the growing number of internal datacenter security specialists is Guardicore, ... Full article
Eyeing IoT Expansion, SoftBank Buys ARM
Chip intellectual property vendor ARM Ltd. is being acquired by Japanese technology conglomerate SoftBank Group in a bid to provide more of the semiconductor technology underlying future networks of connects sensors and smart devices. SoftBank (TYO: 9984) plans to acquire ARM (LSE: ARM, NASDAQ: ARMH), Cambridge, U.K., for about $32.25 billion in an all-cash deal. ... Full article
AccuWeather’s Compute Strategy Takes Forecasting to the Cloud at Scale
Weather and the cloud go together. Take AccuWeather, the State College, PA-based consumer and commercial weather services provider. Demand for weather forecast information from media outlets, from business customers and, most of all, from the public fluctuates widely (though on average it’s increasing by tens of thousands of data requests per day). If a storm ... Full article
Enterprises Embrace Machine Learning
Machine learning technology is poised to move from niche data analytics applications to mainstream enterprise big data campaigns over the next two years, a recent vendor survey suggests. SoftServe, a software and application development specialist based in Austin, Texas, reports that 62 percent of the medium and large organizations it polled in April said they ... Full article
SIEM Gains as Consumer Security Software Fades
Security information and event management (SIEM) software fueled a robust global security software market in 2015 even as sales of consumer security software declined sharply last year, according to the latest accounting by market analyst Gartner Inc. Gartner (NYSE: IT) reported this week that worldwide security software revenue jumped 3.7 percent over the previous year ... Full article
A User Guide For Securing Docker Containers
As important and prevalent Docker containers are today, they still pose a unique security risk for users. Containers simplify the distribution of software and allow greater sharing of resources on a computer system, which is great and well used in today’s IT environments. But adding more applications onto a system also increases the chances for ... Full article
AT&T, IBM Partner on IoT App Development
AT&T (NYSE: T) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) will collaborate on Internet of Things (IoT) development as part of an arrangement that combines IBM's cloud and cognitive computing platform with the carrier's global network. The partners said Wednesday (July 13) the combination would be used to create open-source tools for specific IoT applications. The companies also ... Full article
3D Flash Poised to Tower over the Storage Skyline
Three dimensions are better than two. I’ve read recently that the same forces that drove the amazing skylines of New York City upwards are operating in the opposite direction in hyper-dense London, driving a wave of underground home extensions and making “Swiss cheese” of the city’s most exclusive streets. I see the same forces at ... Full article