Nvidia has unveiled Grace, an Arm-based data centre CPU designed for giant-scale artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) applications. 

This new processor combines Arm CPU cores with a low-power memory subsystem to help it analyse enormous datasets requiring both ultra-fast compute performance and massive memory.

Nvidia Grace, named after US programming pioneer Grace Hopper, is a highly specialised processor that will target workloads such as training next-generation NLP models that have over 1 trillion parameters, according to the company. 

Furthermore, Nvidia claims that a Grace CPU-based system will deliver 10x faster performance than the current Nvidia DGX-based systems that run on x86 CPUs. Nvidia expects this new processor to service a niche segment of computing.

“Leading-edge AI and data science are pushing today’s computer architecture beyond its limits – processing unthinkable amounts of data,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia.

“Using licensed Arm IP, Nvidia has designed Grace as a CPU specifically for giant-scale AI and HPC. Coupled with the GPU and DPU, Grace gives us the third foundational technology for computing, and the ability to re-architect the data centre to advance AI. Nvidia is now a three-chip company.”

The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) and the US Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory have already announced plans to build Grace-powered supercomputers.

This move could spell trouble for other chipmakers who already have a strong presence in the data centre market like Intel, which is currently dominating with a 90% share, and AMD. By promising a 10x increase in processing performance, it may cause some customers to take note of Grace. This was reflected in the markets where Intel and AMD are both down several percentage points following Nvidia’s announcement.

Nvidia also announced eight Nvidia Ampere architecture GPUs for next-generation laptops, desktops and servers. 

The new Nvidia RTX A5000 and Nvidia RTX A4000 GPUs will help speed AI, graphics and real-time rendering up to 2x faster than previous generations in desktops. In laptops, the new Nvidia RTX A2000, Nvidia RTX A3000, RTX A4000 and RTX A5000 GPUs deliver accelerated performance without compromising mobility. 

For data centres, the new Nvidia A10 GPU provides up to 2.5x the virtual workstation performance of the previous generation while the A16 GPU provides up to 2x user density with lower total cost of ownership and an enhanced virtual desktop infrastructure experience over the previous generation.

In February, it emerged that Nvidia had turned to some of its older graphic cards to meet the demand for GPUs during a global shortage of PC components and chipsets. Nvidia was going to re-release its old chips, such as the GTX 1050 Ti chip, which was meant to have been phased out two years ago, as well as the GeForce RTX 2060.

IBM has unveiled the name of its Managed Infrastructure Services business which is to become a fully-fledged public company by the end of this year.

The company previously referred to the spin-off as simply ‘NewCo’, but it has now been announced that the new infrastructure services company is to be named Kyndryl – a combination of the words ‘kinship’ and ‘tendril’.

The news comes six months after IBM declared that it would be splitting its business into two separate entities, bringing an end to a strategy that saw it attempt to shift towards cloud growth while maintaining a foothold in its legacy business.

Martin Schroeter, who was appointed Kyndryl CEO at the beginning of this year, said that the name “evokes the spirit of true partnership and growth”.

“Customers around the world will come to know Kyndryl as a brand that runs the vital systems at the heart of progress, and an independent company with the best global talent in the industry,” he added.

According to Kyndryl chief marketing officer Maria Bartolome Winans, “creating a name is just the start of our journey as a brand”.

“It will help identify us and support recognition, but the meaning of the name will be built and enhanced over time from our behaviours, aspirations and actions, and what we enable our customers to do. Our vision is to be the leading company that designs, runs and modernises the critical technology infrastructure of the world’s most important businesses and institutions, ultimately powering human progress,” said Winans.

Kyndryl’s headquarters are to be located in New York City, which Schroeter described as “one of the world’s most vibrant and global urban centres”, adding that the decision “underscores [Kyndryl’s] commitment to the economic health of cities”. IBM’s headquarters are to remain nearby, in Armonk, NY.

Despite being a newly-formed company, Kyndryl is uniquely positioned as a well-established business thanks to its ties with IBM, which already holds a global base of 4,600 customers.

The tax-free deal of separating Kyndryl from IBM is expected to be finalised by the end of 2021, with the latter set to focus entirely on its AI capabilities and the hybrid cloud. 

Microsoft is reportedly set to acquire artificial intelligence (AI) speech recognition firm Nuance Communications for an estimated $16 billion (£11.6 billion)

The two companies are currently in “advanced talks”, according to Bloomberg sources, and Nuance could be valued at around $56 per share if current negotiations hold.

Microsoft is yet to comment on the matter but reports suggest that an official announcement will be made sometime this week, possibly late on Monday. 

Nuance is an American AI firm based just outside of Boston that sells audio recognition and transcription tools. The company was founded in 1992, has over 7,000 employees and reported $346 million in fourth-quarter revenues. It’s thought that Microsoft is attempting to expand via acquisitions, with an interest in Nuance’s work in healthcare, customer services and voicemail. 

Microsoft and Nuance already have a professional relationship, collaborating on technologies that allow doctors to capture voice conversations and enter them into electronic medical records. AI and voice software is an area Microsoft has extensive expertise in already, with developer tools to enable transcription and functions to incorporate speech recognition into its products. Both Teams and the Bing search engine have some forms of speech recognition and audio transcription, for example.

The tech giant is seemingly in takeover mode with a $7.5 billion deal for video game maker Zenimax completed last month and wide reports that it recently considered buying social media app TikTok. The firm was also said to be chasing an acquisition of gaming chat app Discord, for around $10 billion. 

Both Discord and TikTok deals were thought to be more about the large volumes of users data that Microsoft would have access to if the acquisitions were successful. If the details around Nuance are correct, it would be Microsoft’s biggest acquisition since buying LinkedIn in 2016. The firm used data from the recruitment site to power other functions on platforms like Outlook and Teams. 

NHS Digital has signed a deal with augmented reality (AR) solutions provider Scandit in an effort to digitise the UK’s Covid testing process.

The Swiss software company will provide the NHS with a data capture service, which will be available for free to any hospital or NHS organisation involved in Covid test tracking, PPE tracking, or patient care, until 30th November 2021.

Specifically, the company will be deploying barcode scanning technology which will make it easier and faster for healthcare workers and volunteers to track and identify the tested samples. Test site staff members will be able to identify patients from a safe distance, avoiding the risk of contagion, by scanning a barcode on a booking form with the help of a smartphone.

After the samples are taken, they will be stored in a vial with a barcode attached to it, allowing staff to quickly scan it in order to ensure the test sample matches the booking ID and minimise mistakes.

The announcement of the deal comes days after the government proposed twice-weekly rapid Covid-testing which would be made available to everyone in England starting 9 April.

Rapid testing has so far been available to those considered to be most at risk, such as persons over 60 and with underlying health conditions, as well as people who are unable to work from home and frontline NHS staff. However, the government is now encouraging everyone to take regular tests, in order to prevent outbreaks as well as return to “a more normal way of life”.

Health secretary Matt Hancock said that, due to one in three Covid carriers being asymptomatic, “regular rapid testing is going to be fundamental in helping us quickly spot positive cases and squash any outbreaks”.

“The vaccine programme has been a shot in the arm for the whole country, but reclaiming our lost freedoms and getting back to normal hinges on us all getting tested regularly,” he added.

Due to the more regular Covid testing pitched by the government, the NHS is facing a significant increase in workload over the coming weeks. The process is to be facilitated with the help of Scandit-supplied technology, at no extra cost.

Commenting on the deal, Scandit CEO Samuel Mueller said that the Swiss software company’s tech “ensures that tests can be tracked quickly and easily”.

“It also integrates easily with smartphones, meaning that the NHS has been able to scale the number of testing sites and make it easy to deploy home-testing effectively. There is no acceptable margin of error. Our clinical-quality barcode scanning technology delivers a highly accurate read rate whether the scan is happening through a car window at a drive-in mobile test site or by someone who is self-testing at home,” he added.

Mueller said that Scandit has been “helping NHS Digital digitise their nationwide testing process since the start of the pandemic”.

“We have taken steps to support the NHS at every step of the way to integrate our technology into the complex NHS IT infrastructure seamlessly. We look forward to continuing this partnership and helping the NHS make it possible to deliver quick Covid-19 tests for every UK resident that needs it,” Mueller added.

The scraped data of over 500 million LinkedIn profiles has been put up for sale on a popular hacker forum.

The post’s author has leaked two million records already as proof of the existence of the much larger data trove, as reported by Cybernews.

The data, which is spread across four files, is said to include full names, email addresses, phone numbers, and information related to their place of work.

So far, no precise figure has been set for the data, although the user has said that interested parties should expect to pay a four-digit sum, likely in bitcoin.

While it has been confirmed that the data was scraped from LinkedIn, it’s unclear whether this is a new data breach or if the data has been taken from previous LinkedIn breaches.

A LinkedIn spokesperson told IT Pro: “While we’re still investigating this issue, the posted dataset appears to include publicly viewable information that was scraped from LinkedIn combined with data aggregated from other websites or companies. 

“Scraping our members’ data from LinkedIn violates our terms of service and we are constantly working to protect our members and their data.”

The full leaked files contain information including LinkedIn IDs, full names, email addresses, phone numbers, genders, links to LinkedIn profiles, and professional titles.

Although there was no evidence of sensitive information like credit card details or legal documents in the sample posted to the forum, the leaked information can still be used for phishing or social engineering attacks.

Earlier this month, it emerged that a hacking group was targeting LinkedIn users with fake job offers to infect them with malware that allowed them to take control of a victim’s computer. The Golden Chicken hacking group spread the malware through spear-phishing victims with a malicious .ZIP file that would provide remote access to their device.

The personal data of 533 million Facebook users was also found on a hacking forum this month and was available to download for free. The records, which represent around a fifth of the company’s entire user base, contained full names, birth dates, and the status of a user’s relationship.

The UK government has awarded contracts to 25 tech firms as part of a deal to design and implement software services across the public sector, estimated to be worth up to £1.5 billion.

The framework, established by the Crown Commercial Service (CCS), a procurement body that works for the Cabinet Office, has ordered the creation of software services that will be eventually used by central government departments and other public sector bodies, such as local authorities and UK emergency services.

A handful of major software and services vendors are part of the framework deal, including Deloitte, Hitachi, Fujitsu, HCL, and Accenture, alongside some smaller SMEs.

The government wants the services to cover strategy, architecture, design, software selection, impact assessment, implementation, integration services, data migration, change management, training, onboarding and business process automation.

The deal has been valued at £1.5 billion, however, and the CCS has said it “cannot guarantee any business through the framework agreement”, which will be open for 30 months with an option to extend for a further 18 if needed.

It comes during a period of digital transformation for central and local government, with plans to move from on-premise and cloud-hosted systems to software as a service-based applications. It also follows reports that surfaced in February of a growing divide within the Conservative Party over contracts given to Amazon Web Services. Around £75 million worth of contracts were said to have been awarded to the tech giant last year, almost double the amount the next biggest cloud provider received. This has allegedly caused concerns within the government that it is too dependent on one service.

A full list of the companies associated with the deal can be found here.

Microsoft has revealed that it’s been experimenting with a “two-phase immersion cooling technology” to prevent its data centre servers from overheating and causing outages across its cloud-based communications platforms such as Microsoft Teams.

At a Microsoft data centre on the bank of the Columbia River in Washington state, engineers are submerging servers in a steel holding tank filled with boiling liquid.

Unlike water, which is seen as precarious to electronic equipment, the liquid used by Microsoft engineers is harmless to the server hardware as it’s designed to cool its processors by carrying away the heat as it boils.

The liquid has been engineered to boil at 50 degrees Celsius, which is 50 degrees cooler than the boiling point of water. The lower temperature has been specifically chosen in order to carry away the heat while allowing Microsoft’s servers to operate at full power without the risk of failure due to overheating.

According to Microsoft’s data centre advanced development group VP Christian Belady, “air cooling is not enough”. 

“That’s what’s driving us to immersion cooling, where we can directly boil off the surfaces of the chip,” he said.

Husam Alissa, a principal hardware engineer on Microsoft’s team for data centre advanced development, said that the tech giant is “the first cloud provider that is running two-phase immersion cooling in a production environment,” which is the next step in Microsoft’s long-term plan to keep up with the increasing demand for cloud computing.

The demand has been fuelled by the rise of remote working, which depends largely on the reliability of collaboration tools such as Teams or communication tools such as Exchange.

In fact, according to Marcus Fontoura, chief architect of Azure compute, two-phase liquid immersion cooling enables increased flexibility for the efficient management of cloud resources, allowing them to manage sudden spikes in data centre compute demand to the servers in the liquid-cooled tanks. The servers run at elevated power without risk of overheating due to  “overclocking”.

“For instance, we know that with Teams when you get to 1 o’clock or 2 o’clock, there is a huge spike because people are joining meetings at the same time,” Fontoura said. “Immersion cooling gives us more flexibility to deal with these burst-y workloads.”

Using specially-designed liquid to cool the servers is not only cheaper than air cooling but also more sustainable than using water, allowing Microsoft to meet its commitment to replenish more water than it consumes by 2030.

Nokia has announced a new deployment of its cloud-based convergent charging system on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The announcement is an expansion of an existing partnership between the two firms that aims to accelerate the migration of high-frequency charging applications to the public cloud for communications service providers (CSPs).

A convergent charging system is a telecommunications innovation that enables the ‘convergence’ of payment methods. This has emerged due launch of new multimedia services and the increasing prevalence of multi-play service offerings on mobile networks.

The idea is to extract more benefits with cloud-based 5G applications with CSPs tapping into new revenue streams from 5G-enabled technologies, such as IoT.

Nokia claims its Converged Charging (NCC) provides “true” continuous availability as its supports high frequency, low latency demands for an “always-on” charging system that a 5G economy would need. It offers CSPs the chance to run workloads on AWS and develop new ways to monetise projects as a part of their journey to the public cloud.

“The technological barriers of deploying charging systems on the public cloud, such as network latency, are decreasing rapidly due to faster-dedicated connections and far edge CNF deployments; while the advantages, such as having the ability to grow capacity for one-off short-range events, are increasing,” said Udi Israel, Nokia’s head of digital business product line, cloud and network services.

According to global consultation and research firm, Analysys Mason, SaaS and public cloud will make inroads into the market for monetisation platforms by growing more than six times its size by 2025.

Nokia suggests its NCC’s architecture can support CSPs at every step of their public cloud journey, from the deployment of greenfield sub-brands as a first step towards hosting testing environments to full production workloads of the main brand on the public cloud.

“As the world becomes increasingly cloud-centric, it’s important that our customers can leverage cloud-native solutions to unleash the potential benefits of the cloud and 5G,” said Fabio Cerone, EMEA telco managing director at AWS.

Google has won a major copyright case after the US Supreme Court ruled in its favour over Oracle’s claim that the use of its software code in the Android OS violated copyright law.

In the 6-2 decision, justices decided to overturn a lower US court’s ruling that Google’s inclusion of Oracle’s software code in its operating system did not constitute fair use under US copyright law.

Justice Breyer, writing the opinion of the court for the justices that ruled on it, stated that allowing enforcement of Oracle’s copyright would “risk harm to the public”. 

“Given the costs and difficulties of producing alternative APIs with similar appeal to programmers, allowing enforcement here would make of the Sun Java API’s declaring code a lock limiting the future creativity of new programs. Oracle alone would hold the key. The result could well prove highly profitable to Oracle (or other firms holding a copyright in computer interfaces),” he wrote.

Breyer added that the “lock” would interfere with, not further, copyright’s basic creativity objectives.

The court found that Google’s copying of the Sun Java API was “a fair use of that material as a matter of law”. The Supreme Court reversed the Federal Circuit’s “contrary judgement” and the case has been remanded for further proceedings “in conformity with this opinion”.

Kent Walker, Google’s SVP of Global Affairs, told IT Pro that the ruling is a victory for consumers, interoperability, and computer science. 

“The decision gives legal certainty to the next generation of developers whose new products and services will benefit consumers. We are very grateful for the support from a wide range of organizations, from the National Consumers League to the American Library Association, as well as from established  companies, start-ups, and the country’s leading software engineers and copyright scholars,” he said.

Dorian Daley, executive vice president and general counsel at Oracle, said in a statement that Google’s platform just got bigger and its market power greater, which has elevated the barriers to entry and the ability to compete lower.

“They stole Java and spent a decade litigating as only a monopolist can. This behaviour is exactly why regulatory authorities around the world and in the United States are examining Google’s business practices,” Daley stated.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, also has plans in the coming weeks to stop using Oracle’s financial software and instead use software from SAP, according to CNBC. The company’s core financial systems are reportedly scheduled to move to SAP in May, but for now, there is no other indication the company is moving other systems off Oracle.

Commenting on the court’s decision, Hannu Valtonen, chief product officer at Aiven, called it a “victory for the entire software industry”.

“If Oracle had won, Google’s usage of the Java API in developing the Android operating system would be considered copyright infringement,” said Valtonen. “A change to the fair use of APIs would’ve severely slowed down the current pace of software innovation and created more cutthroat competition between tech giants who could potentially block the use of an API without payment. 

“For startups like ours, the fair and open usage of certain technologies promotes successful innovation for everyone, and Google’s win is certainly a positive result for end-users.”

Oracle’s copyright battle with Google has been ongoing for 11 years and in 2018 it was seeking around $8.8 billion in damages following the ruling in its favour.

In 2019, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the copyright lawsuit between the two tech giants as Google petitioned the court in January asking it to overturn “a devastating one-two punch at the software industry”.

Microsoft has finally called time on its Cortana mobile app, with users in the US no longer able to access reminders and lists created in it as of today.

The company originally revealed plans to retire the app in November 2019 and it ceased to operate in the UK and other non-US territories on 31 January 2020.

US users were initially given a reprieve, but in July last year Microsoft announced it would retire all third-party support of the AI tool after 31 March 2021.

This isn’t the end of Cortana, at least not for now. According to Microsoft, the virtual assistant, which was launched in 2014, will continue “its evolution as a productivity assistant”.

The move was fueled by the product proving to be less successful among consumers compared to rivals such as Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa. At the same time, Microsoft also acknowledged the popularity of competitors’ tools by allowing them to become more accessible on Windows 10. Since September 2019, users have been able to open their laptops as well as Amazon Echo devices by calling out ‘Alexa’, while Cortana had been moved into a separate app in the Microsoft store and away from the built-in search experience in the operating system.

Sunsetting the Cortana mobile app is in line with Microsoft’s ambitions to transform Cortana into an enterprise-focused tool. In 2019, CEO Satya Nadella said that Microsoft envisions Cortana as an assistant to Office 365, which is also primarily a desktop-focused product, rather than a mobile one.

Last year, Microsoft announced the decision to improve Cortana’s integration with Office 365 by allowing users to manage their calendars and email using voice commands. The tech giant also combined Cortana functionalities with Microsoft Teams, making it possible to join meetings, make a call, share files with colleagues, and even send chat messages using the virtual assistant.