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Meta announced a network timing protocol for its data centers powering its technologies, Precision Time Protocol. The company claims that PTP protocol can sync time down to nanoseconds.

The two new virtual machines are aimed towards Azure HPC customers, promising cost efficiency as well as higher performance. Dubbed HX and HBv4, the new series' leverage AMD's latest processors.

Amazon has launched Hpc6a instances on AWS. They are designed for high performance computing tasks and come with a 65% performance boost against existing products. This will help keep costs down.

Gigabyte has launched over 40 new server products that use AMD's newly announce EPYC 7003 Series processors. The firm said the CPU excels at high-performance computing a data analytics.

Intel is now one of the 14 companies recognized as having deep domain expertise in providing high-performance compute platforms, solvers, and management solutions via AWS resources to its customers.

Intel has announced the Cooper Lake processor which it described as the future of the Intel Xeon Scalable processor family. Cooper Lake is expected to go on sale from the first half of 2020.

The European Union is planning to launch a €1 billion project to develop an exascale supercomputer by 2023. The EU hopes the machine will be the world's fastest but it faces a challenge from China.

Microsoft said its acquisition of Cycle "will help customers accelerate their movement to the cloud", while Cycle said the Azure team "share our vision of bringing Big Compute to the world".

Version 8 of Bright Cluster Manager has just been released, and features better integration with Azure for High Performance Computing scenarios such as extending capabilities via "cloud bursting".

China wants to start working on an exascale prototype supercomputer this year. Being at least ten times more powerful than today's top performer, the exascale device won't be operational until 2020.