Author Archives: George Leopold

George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).

Puppet Pulls Strings on Expansion Plans, Makeover

April 7th, 2016 Comments Off

IT automation specialist Puppet Labs is expanding its operations, launching the latest version of its flagship platform and shortening its name: Puppet Labs is now known simply as Puppet. The privately held company this week announced the name change, ...

DevOps Tool Targets Continuous Delivery of Apps

April 4th, 2016 Comments Off

Attacking what it calls "islands of automation" that are thwarting efforts toward continuous delivery of business applications, an IT and DevOps specialist is rolling out a framework to automate the release of business applications. Automic Software Inc., Bellevue, Wash., ...

AMD GPU Helps Map Universe

April 1st, 2016 (1)

Canadian researchers scanning the universe to develop the most detailed map of our three dimensions ever observed are using AMD's GPU accelerator to crunch the celestial data. Based on internal benchmark testing, the chipmaker (NASDAQ:AMD) bills its FirePro S9300 ...

IBM’s Latest Cloud Deal is Salesforce Partner

March 31st, 2016 Comments Off

Another week, another IBM acquisition: This time, a cloud consulting and implementation services specialist called Bluewolf Group. IBM (NYSE: IBM) said Thursday (March 31) the acquisition would help extend its analytics, cloud consulting and "experience design" capabilities. Bluewolf is ...

Partners Combine Ceph Storage, Flash

March 30th, 2016 Comments Off

An open source option will be combined with flash storage as part of an alliance unveiled this week in a bid to make scale-out storage easier and cheaper. Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT) and SanDisk Corp. (NASDAQ: SNDK) said ...

IBM Launches Mainframe Platform for Spark

March 29th, 2016 Comments Off

IBM is expanding its embrace of Apache Spark with the release of a mainframe platform that would allow the emerging open-source analytics framework to run natively on the company's mainframe operating system. IBM (NYSE: IBM) said Tuesday (March 29) ...

Hospital Ransomware Attacks Spark IT Security Debate

March 25th, 2016 (2)

A series of ransomware attacks directed at U.S. hospitals is highlighting the vulnerability of private health records as hackers prey on healthcare facilities with the ability to pay. The latest example surfaced this week at Methodist Hospital in Henderson, ...

HPE, Microsoft Back Mesosphere’s Datacenter OS

March 24th, 2016 Comments Off

Mesosphere, the datacenter operating system startup working at the nexus of hyper-scale application development and cloud-based delivery of micro-services, announced a $73.5 million "strategic" investment round led by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and joined by new investor Microsoft Corp. San ...

Intel, Facebook Accelerate Datacenters With FPGAs

March 23rd, 2016 Comments Off

Intel Corp.'s plan to combine its next Xeon processor with a batch of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) along with ongoing collaboration with Facebook aims to accelerate a growing array of datacenter workloads, the partners said. Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) ...

Mellanox Readies First 200 Gb/s Silicon Photonics Devices

March 22nd, 2016 Comments Off

Mellanox Technologies will announce an “important milestone” on the road to high data rate 200Gb/s InfiniBand and Ethernet networks during the Optical Fiber Conference this week in Anaheim, Calif. The company will demonstrate 50 Gb/s silicon photonics optical modulators ...