Covering Scientific & Technical AI | Tuesday, June 30, 2026
DARPA, NSF Pursue Machine Learning Chip
A new U.S. research initiative seeks to develop a processor capable of real-time learning while operating with the “efficiency of the human brain.” The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency jointly announced a “Real Time Machine Learning” project on March 15 soliciting industry proposals for “foundational breakthroughs” in hardware required ... Full article
Guidelines for Getting Going with AI and Advanced Analytics
These are exciting times for anyone yearning to drive significant business value from masses of data collected on the cloud. We finally have the processing power, software frameworks and appetite of the masses to conduct most of their daily transactions on the internet. But there are pitfalls to beware of when using AI to extract ... Full article
NASA Simulator Shapes Orion Spacecraft Design
NASA is using flow simulations running on its Pleiades supercomputer to help design the agency’s next manned spacecraft, Orion. Crew safety is paramount, so NASA engineers are using the HPC cluster to simulate and visualize Orion’s launch abort system that would carry the spacecraft away from its booster during a launch pad or ascent abort. ... Full article
Why Nvidia Bought Mellanox: ‘Datacenters Will Be…Like High Performance Computers’
“Future datacenters of all kinds will be built like high performance computers,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during a phone briefing on Monday after Nvidia revealed scooping up the high performance networking company Mellanox for $6.9 billion. If that’s your vision – as it is Nvidia’s – that’s a darn good reason to buy one of ... Full article
CXL Consortium Launches CPU-to-Anything High Speed Interconnect Protocol
Another front has been opened in the long campaign to enable any-to-any connectivity in high performance data center computing. The Compute Express Link (CXL) consortium – with tech heavies Intel, Google, HPE, Dell EMC, Microsoft, Facebook, Cisco, Huawei and Alibaba – has ratified version 1.0 of the CXL specification, an open interconnect CPU-to-device and CPU-to-memory ... Full article
Optimizing Container Spend: 5 Recommendations
As container technology moves into the mainstream, users are concerned about the next step: container optimization. Typically, conversations with customers focus on production environments., but recently they’ve become more focused on how to optimize container spending.   Kubernetes – which seems to be the most popular of container services among our customer base – does allow ... Full article
ML Proponents Confront Reproducibility Claims
Machine learning researchers are pushing back on the recent assertion that the AI framework is a key contributor to a reproducibility crisis in scientific research. Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for computing, environment and life sciences at Argonne National Laboratory, agreed there is a reproducibility problem facing the scientific community, particularly in the biological sciences. ... Full article
Oil and Gas Supercloud Clears Out Knights Landing Inventory: All 38,000 Wafers
The McCloud HPC service being built by Australia’s DownUnder GeoSolutions (DUG) outside Houston is set to become the largest oil and gas cloud in the world this year, providing 250 single-precision petaflops for DUG’s geoscience services business and its expanding HPC-as-a-service client roster. Located on a 20-acre datacenter campus in Katy, Texas, the liquid-cooled infrastructure ... Full article
DARPA Tackles Enterprise Cyber Security
The sheer breath of distributed enterprise networks increasingly running in the cloud are outpacing the ability of the latest commercial security tools needed to identify and counter cyber threats. That reality has prompted the Pentagon’s top research agency to launch an effort aimed at developing automation tools to detect, describe and blunt increasingly sophisticated attacks. ... Full article
Nvidia Wins Mellanox Stakes for $6.9 Billion
The long-rumored acquisition of Mellanox came to fruition this morning with GPU chip maker Nvidia’s announcement that it has purchased the high-performance network interconnect maker for $6.9 billion – outbidding a reported $6 billion offer by Intel in late January. Reports surfaced yesterday on the Israeli technology news site CTec, that Nvidia had entered the ... Full article
AI Fear Factor: White Collar Jobs in Crosshairs, Cash-free Retail Banned, Breaking up the FAANGS
Though in its infancy, AI already is powerful – or potentially powerful – enough to have raised not only public awareness but also anxiety, spurring responses from policy makers, politicians and public intellectuals concerned about those who could be hurt or left behind by oncoming AI omnipresence. For AI-related technology companies, the risk in all ... Full article
Optalysys Switches on Commercial Optical Co-Processor
Optalysys, Ltd., a U.K. company seeking to advance it optical co-processor technology, moved a step closer this week with the unveiling of what it claims is the first commercial optical processor aimed at emerging AI applications. Yorkshire-based Optalysys on Thursday (March 7) announced commercial availability of its FT:X 2000 optical processor, which the company promotes as ... Full article
How Open Software-Defined Storage Unchains the Enterprise
By decoupling storage controller software from hardware, software-defined storage (SDS) has the potential to unleash a number of possibilities, including massive storage scalability to handle massive amounts of data. Companies can also gain greater flexibility as they can upgrade or downgrade storage as necessary--a benefit that can result in significant cost savings especially as storage ... Full article
National AI Debate: Intel Calls for Details, Budgets, in Response to White House Initiative
The Trump Administration’s release last month of the “American AI Initiative,” aimed at prioritizing federal R&D investments in machine intelligence, has stirred major debate in Washington and the technology industry. Intel has jumped into the discussion, issuing a lengthy reaction to the White House order that, in common with other responses,  calls for more details ... Full article
Google Offers Fixed-Price Cloud Storage
  Thomas Kurian, who succeeded Diane Greene last November as chief of Google Cloud, has been outspoken about plans to compete more aggressively in the cutthroat public cloud market. Among his first moves was announcing plans to invest $13 billion in this year in U.S. datacenter expansion. That was followed this week by a new ... Full article
House Resolves to Guide AI Ethics
A resolution introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives seeks to begin developing guidelines for “ethical development” of AI. The co-sponsors of House Resolution 531 unveiled last week noted that software industry groups as well as Facebook and IBM have endorsed the proposal. Unveiled by Reps. Brenda Lawrence, D-Mich., and Ro Khanna, whose district includes parts ... Full article
Malware Goes ‘Polymorphic’
Malware is evolving, appearing in many forms as malicious code infiltrates computing platforms under many guises. Security experts refer to this chameleon-like malware as “polymorphic code,” and one researcher using a cloud-based, machine-learning platform to identify security threats found that the vast majority of malware is polymorphic. In an annual threat assessment. released this week, ... Full article
In Stock Market Return, Dell Delivers Revenue Growth, Operating Loss
In its return to publicly traded markets, Dell Technologies announced a mixed bag of final quarter and fiscal year financial results: fourth quarter (period ending February 1) revenue totaled $23.8 billion, up 9 percent YoY, with earnings of $331 million versus an operating loss of $69 million for the prior fourth quarter. For the fiscal ... Full article
Cloud Giants Launch Kubernetes Hub
The Kubernetes ecosystem continues to expand with the formation of a “operators’ hub” that serves as a public registry for finding Kubernetes-native services. OperatorHub.io was launched this week by Red Hat in collaboration with public cloud leaders Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN), Google Cloud and Microsoft. Originally developed in 2016 by Red Hat’s (NYSE: RHT) CoreOS ... Full article
Google, DeepMind Target Machine Learning at Wind Energy
Wind energy adoption is further along than you might think: Iowa, for example, is expected to generate about half its electrical power from wind within a few years; in total, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, about 90 gigawatts of wind power has been installed nationwide. It’s not just plentiful wind but also wind ... Full article