Covering Scientific & Technical AI | Friday, July 3, 2026
Chef Unifies DevOps Automation
The automation of DevOps continues to expand as does the integration of current capabilities such as security and governance along with new features like data analytics as enterprise users seek to accelerate and scale application deployment. DevOps specialist Chef Software Inc. has moved to consolidate many of these functions onto a single platform that is ... Full article
New Florida Chip R&D Center Targets Sensors
It's been a good month for advanced manufacturing research in the U.S. with an expansion of a government smart manufacturing effort followed this week by a new chip design effort in Florida that will focus on high-speed electronics and photonics for use in a range of sensor platforms. The Belgian nanoelectronics research center Imec announced ... Full article
U.S. Leverages HPC, Analytics For Smart Manufacturing
A smart manufacturing initiative launched last month by the Obama administration would seek to jumpstart an early version of an industrial Internet of Things via networks of smart sensors to be used for advanced manufacturing. The White House announced the $140 million public-private partnership during a manufacturing summit in Washington. Among the participants in the ... Full article
Tech M&As Decline Sharply in First Half
Technology mergers and acquisitions have hit the skids during the first half of this year after booming in 2015, according to a merger tracking firm. London-based Mergermarket said this week the sharp decline in technology, media and telecommunications deals reflected a "rebalancing" in these sectors after six consecutive years of steady growth. The first half ... Full article
‘Brexit’ Currency Swings Hit IT Spending
The British exit, or "Brexit," from the European Union is adding uncertainty to global IT markets as the British pound sinks to new lows. Worldwide IT spending for this year is forecast to be flat, representing an increase over negative growth this time last year, according to a quarterly spending forecast that also considers the ... Full article
NSA Looks to IT Industry to Harden Vulnerable U.S. Nets
U.S. intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency, are increasingly turning to commercial solutions in their efforts to head off the alarming number of cyber attacks that culminated in last year's massive breach at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. With critics complaining that government agencies have done little since the OPM attack to harden ... Full article
Pivotal Adds Ubuntu to Cloud Foundry
The steady shift to cloud native infrastructure continues with a partnership between enterprise software vendor Pivotal and Linux specialist Canonical that will provide secure images from Canonical's Linux distribution Ubuntu on the Pivotal Cloud Foundry. The partners said Wednesday (July 6) they also would continue working to "harden" the Cloud Foundry distribution of the Ubuntu ... Full article
Container Tool, Key-Value Store, Gets an Upgrade
The latest version of a distributed key-value platform used to store data in containers across a cluster of machines and previously integrated with the Kubernetes cluster manager includes API and data model features designed to ease upgrades while supporting a broader range of applications delivered via containers. CoreOS, the San Francisco-based application container specialist, announced ... Full article
Researchers Endorse ‘Quantum-Safe’ Cloud Security
With cyber attacks on IT infrastructure growing more sophisticated and costly by the day, researchers are looking for new ways to stay ahead of hackers by strengthening encryption. Among the emerging tools are quantum random number generators that introduce a higher level of unpredictability that is difficult to reproduce. That in turn makes it harder ... Full article
IBM Joins Blockchain Push
The launch earlier this year of an open transaction initiative designed to develop industry standards for blockchain technology generated much interest and buzz. For example, the financial and technology sectors are flocking to the Linux Foundation effort called the Hyperledger Project aimed at scaling blockchain technology via open standards for distributed ledgers. Proponents argue the ... Full article
Cloud Adopters Balancing Cost Savings, Security
Cloud security vendors are betting that more enterprises are looking to outsource their security operations just as they have turned over management of parts of their IT infrastructure to public cloud suppliers. A new study released this week by a cloud security-as-a-service vendor finds that about half of those surveyed are investing more in security ... Full article
Genomic Sequencing at Children’s Mercy: Saving Time to Save Lives
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, (354 beds, not-for-profit, treating children from birth through the age of 21) operates what it says is ... Full article
IoT, Containers Seen Accelerating Hybrid Cloud Push
The steady, seemingly inexorable, shift to enterprise hybrid cloud infrastructure is being driven by factors ranging from the disaggregation of storage from computing resources in the datacenter to the emergence of new network topologies and constructs such as the Internet of Things (IoT), observers say. The shift to hybrid cloud platforms also is being hastened ... Full article
eBay’s Liquid Cooled Billion-transactions-a-day Data Center
Water transports heat 25 times more efficiently than air, but water and electronics don’t mix – hence the prevalence of air cooling in the data center. It’s controlling water’s cooling capability without destroying servers and shutting down systems that’s bedeviled data center services providers, IT managers and technology vendors for decades. Now, in a proof-of-concept ... Full article
Switch Chip Targets Programmable Networks
Barefoot Networks, the high-flying networking chip startup that recently emerged from stealth mode, unveiled a zippy switch that it asserts is also fully programmable as the startup targets networking bottlenecks in software-defined datacenters. The Palo Alto startup co-founded by chief scientist Nick McKeown, the former Stanford University engineering professor, is claiming multiple networking records along ... Full article
U.S. OKs AWS Cloud For Sensitive Data
Amazon Web Services extended its cloud reach deeper into government IT infrastructure with an announcement this week that it has been certified to handle a larger share of federal workloads. The public cloud giant (NASDAQ: AMZN), which provides secure cloud services for the CIA and defense agencies, said Thursday (June 24) the U.S. region of ... Full article
Intel Launches ‘Knights Landing’ Phi for Machine Learning, HPC
From ISC 2016 in Frankfurt, Germany, Intel Corp. launched the second-generation Xeon Phi product family, code-named Knights Landing, aimed at HPC and machine learning workloads. The company had been shipping “Knights Landing” silicon to early customers for six months and waited to ramp up production before making the product generally available. The window also gave OEMs ... Full article
Datacenter Survey Confirms Steady Cloud Shift
A respected datacenter survey of senior enterprise IT executives finds that half expect the majority of production workloads to reside in the cloud or colocation sites, a process that is expected to accelerate through 2020. According to the annual datacenter industry survey released Wednesday (June 22) by the Uptime Institute, 23 percent of those executives ... Full article
How to Avoid the Container ‘Mushroom Cloud Effect’
As application containers scale in production, some early results are coming in about what can go wrong. Among the potential downsides of a micro-service architecture is what one observer ominously refers to as the "mushroom cloud effect." In a presentation this week at the DockerCon meet up in Seattle, a cloud and virtualization technologist appraised ... Full article
World’s First 1,000-Processor Chip Said to Show Promise Across Multiple Workloads
A blindingly fast microchip, the first to contain 1,000 independent processors and said to show promise for digital signal processing, video processing, encryption and datacenter/cloud workloads, has been announced by a team at the University of California, Davis. The “KiloCore” chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 ... Full article