Covering Scientific & Technical AI | Sunday, June 28, 2026
AWS Takes the High Ground with Space Unit
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has long talked about moving manufacturing and other industrial activities off the earth as a way to preserve our only home. The cloud giant took “one small step” toward a “sustainable commercial space economy” this week with the launch of a dedicated space business unit. Amazon Web Services’ “Aerospace and Satellite ... Full article
Kubernetes-Native DevOps Gains Steam
Application development tool vendors continue to attract investors as enterprise DevOps teams look to automate workflows that will accelerate continuous integration and delivery capabilities for application container and microservices that increasingly extend to cloud deployments. The latest beneficiary is Codefresh, the Kubernetes-native DevOps tools startup that announced a $27 million funding round this week. The ... Full article
Xilinx Keeps Pace in AI Accelerator Race
FPGAs are increasingly used to accelerate AI workloads in datacenters for tasks like machine learning inference. A growing list of FPGA accelerators are challenging datacenter GPU deployments, promising to unburden already overworked CPUs in datacenter servers. Earlier this month, Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) launched its Stratix 10 NX FPGA with an eye toward AI model training ... Full article
CryptoSuper 500 – Keeping Track of the Supercomputers that Mine Money
Cryptocurrencies and the associated blockchain decentralized ledger technologies have grown in importance as a new asset class. They have fueled an emerging crypto economy which has become an important driver of technology development and investment decisions globally. Supercomputers, which do the heavy lifting for AI, science, and engineering, are increasingly also safeguarding digital money. Decentralized ... Full article
Chip Proposals Seek to Revive U.S. Manufacturing
Legislation introduced in the U.S. House and Senate seeks to revive the U.S. semiconductor industry via a roughly $12 billion spending package and tax incentives designed to promote technology innovation across the chip ecosystem. The Senate version of the CHIPS for America Act, as in “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors,” proposes to revive domestic ... Full article
Here’s Why Enterprise AI Is Being Drafted to Fight Stimulus Fraud
Without an enterprise AI approach, prosecutors who see fraud in the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program admit there are too many scams to count, let alone stop. Organized crime is scheming to take a growing cut of the emergency spending in the CARES Act. The rules of stimulus programs are constantly changing, making it hard ... Full article
AI is Key to China Infrastructure Plan, as is AI Talent
China’s latest set of technology goals for the next decade have been assimilated into an initiative launched this spring under the rubric, “new infrastructure.” Collectively, the aspirational blueprint includes 5G wireless and the Internet of Things, big data and AI as well as converged infrastructure aimed at a menu of smart applications ranging from energy ... Full article
ISC 2020: Hoefler’s Virtual Tour of ML Trends in 9 Slides
The ISC20 experience this year via livestreaming and pre-recordings is interesting and perhaps a bit odd. That said presenters’ efforts to condense their comments makes for economic use of your time. Torsten Hoefler’s whirlwind 12-minute tour of ML is a great example. Hoefler, leader of the planned ISC20 Machine Learning Day, does a nice job ... Full article
C3.ai’s COVID-19 Awardees Are an Inflection Point for Pandemic Research
“The probability of something good not coming out of this is zero,” said Tom Siebel, CEO of enterprise AI software provider C3.ai, which has announced the winners of its awards for COVID-19 research through the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute (DTI). The awards – more than two dozen of them – span a wide range of ... Full article
Nebulon, Cloud Storage Startup, Emerges from Stealth
A growing list of cloud storage startups continue to emerge as enterprises struggle to get a handle on big data while seeking to move computing closer to where data resides. The latest entrant is Nebulon Inc., a Bay Area cloud-defined storage startup that emerged from stealth mode this week with an API-based approach designed to ... Full article
HPE Expands GreenLake Push to the Edge
Hewlett Packard Enterprise continues to extend its GreenLake cloud services to the network edge with the addition of faster deployments for distributed environments ranging from application containers and virtual machines to machine learning workloads and other networking deployments aimed at moving computing resources closer to data. Launched in 2017 as a consumption-based, managed service, the ... Full article
Nvidia Unveils AI Supercomputer, Launches A100 PCIe Cards
Nvidia unveiled its Selene AI supercomputer today in tandem with the updated listing of world’s fastest computers. Nvidia also introduced the PCIe form factor of the Ampere-based A100 GPU. Nvidia’s new internal AI supercomputer, Selene, joins the upper echelon of the 55th Top500’s ranks and breaks an energy-efficiency barrier. With 27.5 double-precision Linpack petaflops, Selene ... Full article
Nvidia Goes Deep With Mellanox Datacenter Net Security
When Nvidia announced its acquisition of Mellanox, the GPU leader noted that datacenters would eventually be built like high performance computers. Hence, it’s not surprising the first fruits of Nvidia’s 2019 acquisition of the networking specialist focuses on applying AI to security and predictive maintenance applications in InfiniBand datacenters. The supercomputer datacenter “cyber-AI platform” unveiled ... Full article
How Aligning AI Project Teams Can Ensure AI Success
While AI deployments are picking up steam, challenges to success, both technical and cultural, abound. One of the biggest challenges is the lack of alignment among the three pillars of enterprise AI success: business users who are closest to the data, data engineers charged with keeping the data pipes open, and data scientists who make ... Full article
Intel Launches 3rd Gen Scalable Xeons for 4- and 8-Socket Platforms for AI, Datacenter
Intel today unveiled its third-generation Scalable Xeon processor family (codenamed Cooper Lake) for four- and eight-socket servers, aimed at AI and analytics workloads running in the datacenter. In total, 11 new SKUs were announced with between 16-28 cores, up to 3.1 Ghz base clock (up to 4.3 Ghz with Turbo Boost), and support for up ... Full article
Intel Debuts Stratix 10 NX FPGAs Targeting AI Workloads
Intel today introduced its first AI-optimized FPGA – the Stratix 10 NX – which features expanded AI Tensor blocks (30 multipliers and 30 accumulators), integrated HBM memory, and high bandwidth networking. The new chip continues leveraging Intel’s chiplet architecture and the FPGA portion of the chip is fabbed using Intel’s 14nm technology. Intel reports the ... Full article
Intel Refreshes Optane Persistent Memory, Adds New NAND SSDs
Intel Corp. remains persistent in upgrading its Optane persistent memory series. The chip maker (NASDAQ: INTC) said this week its second generation Optane series is tuned to the latest version of its Xeon Scalable processors (codenamed Cooper Lake), and boosts memory bandwidth by an average of 25 percent. The combination is aimed at four- and eight-socket ... Full article
AWS Plows Snow Family to the Edge
Amazon Web Services added to its Snow family of data migration and edge devices this week with the introduction of a secure edge computing and data transfer device dubbed Snowcone. The 4.5-pound device that includes 8 terabytes of usable storage targets the growing number of edge computing use cases in which space, power and cooling ... Full article
Oracle Extends Cloud Automation to Comms Security
Among the growing number of cloud infrastructure vulnerabilities are the legacy enterprise and contact center communication links that cloud security vendors insist are susceptible to Zero-Day and other network attacks. In its ongoing effort to differentiate its cloud services, Oracle this week introduced a “communications security shield” within its cloud infrastructure that uses AI and ... Full article
DDN Rebrands, Targeting HPC+AI and Enterprise
Long-time HPC storage technology leader DDN unveiled a new strategy today replete with a new logo, refreshed website, and two distinct business units, DDN, serving its traditional HPC plus AI base, and Tintri, serving traditional enterprise and virtualized/cloud environments. The rebranding has been two years in the making during which DDN made key acquisitions and ... Full article