IBM has revealed its intentions to commercial its quantum computing technology being developed under its research division. Although the company didnt offer a definitive timeline or even a roadmap for the product set, it set down some markers on what such an endeavor would entail.

Behind the scenes of practically every weather forecast we encounter today are some of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. An armchair analysis of the world's top systems reveals some interesting aspects about the HPC technologies and machinery being used to generate these forecasts.

The largest Internet company on the planet has made GPU computing available in its public cloud. Google announced this week that it has added the NVIDIA Tesla K80 to its cloud offering, with more graphics processor options on the way. The search giant follows Amazon, Microsoft and others into the GPU rental business.

If youve been tracking IBMs newsfeed lately, youll notice the company is expanding its cognitive computing strategy to encompass more and more platforms, not to mention customers. Recent platform upgrades include IBMs BlueMix cloud, private clouds in general, the internet of things (IoT), the z Systems mainframe, and even whiteboards.

Exabyte, a materials discovery cloud specialist, has published a study that compares Linpack performance on four of the largest public cloud providers. Although the studys methodology had some drawbacks, the results suggested that with the right hardware, HPC applications could not only scale well in cloud environments, but could also deliver performance on par with that of conventional supercomputers.

Thanks to a record fourth quarter, Cray posted a modest profit in 2016, representing itsseventh straight year of profitability. The company also recorded itssecond highest annual revenue in its history. Unfortunately though, Crayfinds itself in the midst of a lethargic supercomputingmarket, which has shown few signs of improving.

While US-based firms such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft still dominate the artificial intelligence space, Chinese counterparts like Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba are quickly catching up, and in some cases, surpassing their US competition. As a consequence, China appears to be on a path to reproduce its success in supercomputing in AI.

Leaders of some of the largest technology companies in the world spoke out against the Trump administrations executive order to bar the entry of individuals from seven countries into the US. The order signed last Friday would temporarily prevent citizens from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and Libya from entering the country whether or not they had the requisite documentation.

The introduction of NVIDIAs Volta GPU architecture is being keenly anticipated by the supercomputing community. As we reported last July, when the rumors of an earlier-than-anticipated Volta release were bouncing around the internet, a 2017 launch of the next-generation Tesla GPUs seems all but certain. The latest speculation is that these first Volta parts will be based on a new 12nm FinFET technology recently devised by the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

China is developing a new supercomputer designed to be a prototype of an exascale computer. Although the country is not expected to the field its first exascale machine until 2020, the prototype is scheduled to boot up before the end of this year. Most likely, the system in question is the infamous Tianhe-2A supercomputer.