Cable ISP Virgin MediaUK has today announced that they?ve completed the rollout of their 500Mbps+capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP)based DOCSIS/ RFoG broadband and phone network to cover 4,000 extra homes in the Gortonarea of Manchester.

As it stands today Virgin has built a network thatcovers 714,000 premises across the metropolitan region and 94,000 of those havebeen added since 2015 as part of their national Project Lightning networkexpansion, which aims to add an additional 3-4 million premises to their UKcoverage (so far they?ve completed over 1.7 million).

Other than Gorton, Virgin has also been busyworking around the Hurst, Hyde, Littleborough, Bury, Cowlishaw and Didsburyareas of Manchester.

Angeliki Stogia, City Councillor for DigitalInfrastructure, said:

?It cannot be underestimated howimportant connectivity is today as we rely more and more on digital technologyin our everyday life, education and work. So it?s fantastic to see the role outof ultra-fast broadband across the Gorton community, which will have anundeniable benefit for residents and businesses alike.?

Vodafone has announced that their new 5Gnetwork, which promises average mobile broadband speeds of 150-200 Mbps and peaks upto 1Gbps, has now started rolling out into Birkenhead, Bolton, Gatwick,Lancaster, Newbury, Plymouth,Stoke-on-Trent and Wolverhampton after initiallyonly going live in a few major cities.

The live deployment started earlier this month on 3rd July 2019 (here)in the busiest parts of Cardiff, Birmingham, Bristol,Liverpool, London,Manchester and Glasgow (the Isles of Scilly were also on the list). After today’supdate their network is now live in parts of 15 UK towns and cities.

On top of that the operatorsaid they were also widening their 5G roaming footprint today by adding 20towns and cities across Germany to the 35 places already on their 5G Europeanroaming network, which will go live sometime this summer. Once ready both UKconsumers and business customers will be able to roam over 5G in parts ofGermany, Italy and Spain at no additional cost.

NickJeffery, Vodafone UK CEO, said:

?Vodafone’s global presencemeans we can provide our consumer and business customers with 5G in moredestinations than any other UK provider. Combined with our new unlimited dataplans, we are offering customers the best roaming experience ever. They won’thave to hunt for Wi-Fi or rely on often expensive and slow hotel connections;they can use their 5G smartphones to enjoy faster roaming.”

Vodafone added that ?customers can also use[our] newunlimited data plans with 5G roaming,” which they said meansyou won’t be left ?worrying about running out of dataor running up a large bill” (this is also available on their4G network across 77 destinations).However they neglect to mention that roamingdata itself is not in fact ?unlimited“and thesmall print on their website states: ?Roamingdata on all unlimited data plans is capped at 25GB per month in inclusiveroaming & ?6/dayroaming destinations.”

Top 5 Supercomputers from TOP 500 list all sporting petaflops in abundance

By Abigail Opiah

The TOP 500 project has released a list of500 supercomputers, but this time, all 500 systems deliver a petaflop or moreon the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, with the entry level to thelist now at 1.022 petaflops.

The benchmark the project decided on was Linpack, which means that systemsare ranked only by their ability to solve a set of linear equations, A x = b,using a dense random matrix A.

The top of the list remains largely unchanged, according to TOP500, but hasseen the addition of two new entries in the top 10, one of which was anexisting system that was upgraded with additional capacity.

Here is the top 5!

Summit and Sierra

Two IBM-built supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, installed at the Departmentof Energy?s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and Lawrence LivermoreNational Laboratory in California, respectively, retain the first two positionson the list.

Both derive their computational power from Power 9 CPUs and NVIDIA V100GPUs. The Summit system slightly improved its HPL result from six months ago,delivering 148.6 petaflops, while the number two Sierra system remainsunchanged at 94.6 petaflops.

The Sunway TaihuLight

The Sunway TaihuLight, a system developed by China?s National ResearchCentre of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and installedat the National SupercomputingCentre in Wuxi, China, holds the number three position with 93.0petaflops. It?s powered by more than 10 million SW26010 processor cores.

Tianhe-2A

At number four is the Tianhe-2A (Milky Way-2A) supercomputer, developed byChina?s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and deployed at theNational Supercomputer Centre in Guangzhou, China.

It used a combination of Intel Xeon and Matrix-2000 processors to achieve anHPL result of 61.4 petaflops.

Frontera

Frontera, the only new supercomputer in the top 10, attained its number fiveranking by delivering 23.5 petaflops on HPL.

The Dell C6420 system, powered by Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processors, isinstalled at the Texas Advanced Computing Centre of the University of Texas.

Others on the list included, Piz Daint, Trinity, a Cray XC40 system operatedby Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories improves itsperformance to 20.2 petaflops, and the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI)which is installed in Japan at the National Institute of Advanced IndustrialScience and Technology (AIST).

China claims the most TOP500 systems, with 219, followed by the UnitedStates, with 116. Japan is in third place with 29 systems, followed by France,with 19, the United Kingdom, with 18, and Germany with 14.

Researchers develop wireless transceiver ?quadruple the speed of 5G”

The last few months have seen several telecommunications companies ramping up their 5G efforts, with Vodafone switching on its 5G network in some parts of the UK earlier this month.

However,electrical engineers at the University of California have developed wireless transceiver that could operate at ?quadruple the speed of 5G”.

5G offers speeds of operate within the range of 28 to 38 gigahertz, twenty times faster than 4G. However, a team at the Nano scale Communication Integrated Circuits Labs has gone one step further with the development of a end-to-end transmitter-receiver.

The wireless transceiver is a 4.4-millimeter-square silicon chip that boasts radio frequencies of 100 gigahertz thanks to its unique digital-analogue architecture. This brings it into the realm of 6G, which is expected to eventually work at 100 gigahertz and above.

?We call our chip ‘beyond 5G’ because the combined speed and data rate that we can achieve is two orders of magnitude higher than the capability of the new wireless standard,” explained senior author Payam Heydari, NCIC Labs director and UCI professor of electrical engineering & computer science.

?In addition, operating in a higher frequency means that you and I and everyone else can be given a bigger chunk of the bandwidth offered by carriers.”

Wirelesstransceiver targets performance of fibre optics

Researchers in this field have long wanted to develop wireless systems that can offer the same performance and speeds of fibre optic networks, which would have significant implications for the telecommunications industry.

However, they have faced hurdles due to physical limitations in digital processing. NCIC Labs developed a chip architecture that relaxes digital processing requirements by modulating the digital parts in the analogue and radio-frequency domains.

Heydari said that as well as enabling the transmission of signals in the range of 100 gigahertz, the transceiver’s layout means that it uses considerably less energy than current systems at a reduced overall cost.

Transmitters and receivers able to handle high-frequency data communications could also enable emerging wireless technologies such as the internet of things and autonomous vehicles.

Co-author Huan Wang, a UCI doctoral student in electrical engineering & computer science and an NCIC Labs member said:
?Our innovation eliminates the need for miles of fiber-optic cables in data centers, so data farm operators can do ultra-fast wireless transfer and save considerable money on hardware, cooling and power.”