
Free?
There's a 150CHF charge payable when you register.
Looking to find out about the latest cutting-edge research and the best way to utilise HPC gear? Or would you just like to hang out with your HPC homies on the Piazza della Riforma in the brisk night air? Either way, you'll want to be in Lugano, Switzerland, next week because the HPC Advisory Council is coming to town. The HPC …
...including break and lunch services. For three days. You know how bloody expensive it is in Switzerland? So, I'd almost call the fee of 130 CHF free. Almost.
However, since the registration deadline already passed, meaning you can't register anymore, it's almost fair to say that it's free. Almost.
Less than a week after IBM was ordered in an age discrimination lawsuit to produce internal emails in which its former CEO and former SVP of human resources discuss reducing the number of older workers, the IT giant chose to settle the case for an undisclosed sum rather than proceed to trial next month.
The order, issued on June 9, in Schenfeld v. IBM, describes Exhibit 10, which "contains emails that discuss the effort taken by IBM to increase the number of 'millennial' employees."
Plaintiff Eugene Schenfeld, who worked as an IBM research scientist when current CEO Arvind Krishna ran IBM's research group, sued IBM for age discrimination in November, 2018. His claim is one of many that followed a March 2018 report by ProPublica and Mother Jones about a concerted effort to de-age IBM and a 2020 finding by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that IBM executives had directed managers to get rid of older workers to make room for younger ones.
IBM has quietly announced its first-ever cloudy mainframes will go live on June 30.
Big Blue in February disclosed its plans to provide cloud-hosted virtual machines running the z/OS that powers its mainframes. These would be first offered in a closed "experimental" beta under the IBM Wazi as-a-service brand. That announcement promised "on-demand access to z/OS, available as needed for development and test" with general availability expected "in 2H 2022."
The IT giant has now slipped out an advisory that reveals a “planned availability date” of June 30.
Updated ERP vendor Infor is to end development of an on-premises and containerized version of its core product for customers running on IBM iSeries mid-range systems.
Born from a cross-breeding of ERP stalwarts Baan and Lawson, Infor was developing an on-premises containerized version of M3, dubbed CM3, to help ease migration for IBM hardware customers and offer them options other than lifting and shifting to the cloud.
Under the plans, Infor said it would continue to to run the database component on IBM i (Power and I operating system, formerly known as iSeries) while supporting the application component of the product in a Linux or Windows container on Kubernetes.
IBM has won a contract worth £34.2 million (c $41.2 million) as part of a tranche of technology upgrade deals from the UK's National Savings & Investment bank set to be worth hundreds of millions.
The bank, which is an Executive Agency of the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer has awarded Big Blue the contract for "Digital integration and ServiceOps", intended to be its technical and operational center.
According to a contract award notice: "The package supplier will design and deliver the integration platform, and services to implement the required system interfaces, and to undertake operational monitoring, management and maintenance of the system integrations."
The US Department of Energy is looking to vendors that will help build supercomputers up to 10 times faster than the recently inaugurated Frontier exascale system to come on stream between 2025 and 2030, and even more powerful systems than that for the 2030s.
These details were disclosed in a request for information (RFI) issued by the DoE for computing hardware and software vendors, system integrators and others to "assist the DoE national laboratories (labs) to plan, design, commission, and acquire the next generation of supercomputing systems in the 2025 to 2030 time frame."
Vendors have until the end of July to respond.
Predicting the weather is a notoriously tricky enterprise, but that’s never held back America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
After more than two years of development, the agency brought a pair of supercomputers online this week that it says are three times as powerful as the machines they replace, enabling more accurate forecast models.
Developed and maintained by General Dynamics Information Technology under an eight-year contract, the Cactus and Dogwood supers — named after the fauna native to the machines' homes in Phoenix, Arizona, and Manassas, Virginia, respectively — will support larger, higher-resolution models than previously possible.
Lenovo has inked an agreement with Spain's Barcelona Supercomputing Center for research and development work in various areas of supercomputer technology.
The move will see Lenovo invest $7 million over three years into priority sectors in high-performance computing (HPC) for Spain and the EU.
The agreement was signed this week at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-National Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS), and will see Lenovo and the BSC-CNS try to advance the use of supercomputers in precision medicine, the design and development of open-source European chips, and developing more sustainable supercomputers and datacenters.
HCL has given users of versions 9.x and 10.x of its Domino groupware platform two years warning that they'll have to upgrade or live without support.
Domino started life as Lotus Notes before IBM bought the company and milked the groupware platform for decades then offloaded it to India's HCL in 2018. HCL has since released two major upgrades: 2020's version 11 and 2021's version 12.
Now it looks like HCL wants to maximize the ROI on those efforts – a suggestion The Register makes as the company today emailed Domino users warning them that versions 9.x and 10.x won't be sold as of December 1, 2022, and won't receive any support as of June 1, 2024.
Updated In one of the many ongoing age discrimination lawsuits against IBM, Big Blue has been ordered to produce internal emails in which former CEO Ginny Rometty and former SVP of Human Resources Diane Gherson discuss efforts to get rid of older employees.
IBM as recently as February denied any "systemic age discrimination" ever occurred at the mainframe giant, despite the August 31, 2020 finding by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that "top-down messaging from IBM’s highest ranks directing managers to engage in an aggressive approach to significantly reduce the headcount of older workers to make room for Early Professional Hires."
The court's description of these emails between executives further contradicts IBM's assertions and supports claims of age discrimination raised by a 2018 report from ProPublica and Mother Jones, by other sources prior to that, and by numerous lawsuits.
D-Wave Systems has put its next-generation Advantage2 quantum computer into the cloud, or at least some form of it.
This experimental machine will be accessible from D-Wave's Leap online service, we're told. We first learned of the experimental system last year when the biz revealed its Clarity Roadmap, which includes plans for a gate-model quantum system. Advantage2 sports D-Wave's latest topology and qubit design that apparently increases connectivity and aims to deliver greater performance by reducing noise.
"By making the Advantage2 prototype available in the Leap quantum cloud service today, the company is providing an early snapshot for exploration and learning by developers and researchers," D-Wave said in a canned statement.
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