This week Microsoft is releasing a free preview version of its Quantum Development Kit, a suite of software tools and libraries that developers can use to write quantum computing applications.

Episode 203: Addison Snell is joined by Quantum's Laura Shepard speaking about the newly-announced Quantum Xcellis Scale-Out NAS on this sponsored podcast.

Episode 202: Addison Snell and Michael Feldman cover surprising processor coming out of SC17.

Ethernet remains the most popular interconnect on the TOP500 list, but InfiniBand still rules the roost when it comes to true supercomputing performance. We run the numbers and show how InfiniBand still dominates the top supercomputers in the world.

Verne Global, a UK company offering Icelandic-based green datacenter services, has launched a bare metal HPC cloud offering. Known as hpcDIRECT, the service offer customers the ability to rent HPC hardware deployed in Verne Globals datacenter complex located in Keflavik, Iceland. The clusters are equipped with Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Skylake), along with Mellanox InfiniBand and Ethernet networks. Different storage options are available as well. The company says it can support petaflops of compute, and is suitable for typical HPC applications such as computer-aided engineering, genomic sequencing, molecular modeling, and machine learning.

The president of PEZY Computing, Motoaki Saito, was arrested Tuesday for allegedly defrauding the government of 431 million yen ($3.8 million). Daisuke Suzuki, another PEZY employee, was also arrested.

IBM today unveiled its first Power9-based server, the AC922, which the company is promoting as a platform for AI workload acceleration. The new dual-socket server was announced in conjunction with the official launch of the Power9 processor.

Google researchers have produced an enhanced version of AutoML that outperforms human programmers on two industrial-strength neural networks.

Using the Titan supercomputer at the Department of Energys Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), a research team has developed an evolutionary algorithm that they claim can generate custom neural networks that match or exceed the performance of handcrafted artificial intelligence systems.

Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) has installed a 750-node HPC testbed using Raspberry Pi technology.