TECH TRENDS: Energy & digital transformation | COVID’s effect on IT | High-performance computing

The energy industry gears up for digital transformation

Aging power grids with large, centralized fossil fuel power stations are increasingly subject to concerns about environmental damage, reliability, integration of renewable energy resources, and other issues. Because of this, we’re now moving into a digital transformation of the energy industry. The new $20 million AES Corp. smart operations center in Dayton—the first of its kind in the U.S.—will act as the nerve center for an increasingly digitized electric distribution grid.

AES Ohio is expected to start installing “smart meters” in area homes before the end of the year, a step in the company’s $267 million transformation of the area’s electric grid, embracing digital technology that is expected to allow two-way communication between the utility and its 527,000 customers. 

IT transformation in the time of COVID

There is no question that COVID-19 upended our lives in the last year and a half. The pandemic sped up some aspects of health IT: for example, facilities invested in healthcare tech solutions that managed risk and regulations or streamlined the clinical value chain. But COVID also slowed things in other ways, with projects having to be put on hold. In this article, Angela Yochem, executive vice-president and chief transformation and digital officer at Novant Health in Charlotte, North Carolina, talks about digital transformation in a world changed by COVID and suggests ways to jumpstart new projects.

Are you ready for some HPC?

As technologies like IoT, AI, and 3-D imaging evolve, the size and amount of data that organizations have to work with is growing exponentially. High-performance computing (HPC) is being increasingly used to process that data, whether it’s to detect credit card fraud, track real-time stock trends, provide more accurate patient diagnoses, and so on. The high performance computing market is expected to witness a CAGR of 9.44% over the forecast period from 2021 – 2026.

The University of Tennessee-Knoxville has created a new Intel oneAPI Center of Excellence to provide solutions in HPC and visualization using oneAPI. The two projects the center will focus on are: porting the open-source HPC Ginkgo library to oneAPI for cross-architecture support, and expanding its Intel Graphics and Visualization Institute of XeLLENCE to enable high-end visualization as a service through oneAPI.