SAN FRANCISCO, April 21, 2023 -- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the launch of the TLA+ Foundation to promote the adoption and development of the TLA+ programming language and its community of TLA+ practitioners. Inaugural members include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Oracle and Microsoft. TLA+ is a high-level language for modeling programs and systems, especially concurrent and distributed ones. TLA+ has been successfully used by companies to verify complex software systems, reducing errors and improving reliability. The language helps detect design flaws early in the development process, saving time and resources.

TLA+ and its tools are useful for eliminating fundamental design errors, which are hard to find and expensive to correct in code. The language is based on the idea that the best way to describe things precisely is with simple mathematics. The language was invented decades ago by the pioneering computer scientist Leslie Lamport, now a distinguished scientist with Microsoft Research. After years of Lamport's stewardship and Microsoft's support, TLA+ has found a new home at the Linux Foundation.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced it is accelerating space exploration and increasing self-sufficiency for astronauts by enabling real-time data processing with advanced commercial edge computing in space for the first time. Astronauts and space explorers aboard the International Space Station (ISS) will speed time-to-insight from months to minutes on various experiments in space, from processing medical imaging and DNA sequencing to unlocking key insights from volumes of remote sensors and satellites, using HPE's Spaceborne Computer-2 (SBC-2), an edge computing system.

Spaceborne Computer-2 is scheduled to launch into orbit on the 15th Northrop Grumman Resupply Mission to Space Station (NG-15) on February 20 and will be available for use on the International Space Station for the next 2-3 years. The NG-15 spacecraft has been named "SS. Katherine Johnson" in honor of Katherine Johnson, a famed Black, female NASA mathematician who was critical to the early success of the space program.

Rambus Inc. (NASDAQ: RMBS) today announced it will collaborate with Microsoft researchers in the exploration of future memory requirements for quantum computing. The expertise of Rambus in high-bandwidth, power-efficient memory architectures, combined with Microsoft researchers' knowledge of advanced system and data center design will be applied to drive new technology platforms.

"Existing computer architectures are reaching limits due to the ever increasing demands of real-time data consumption, which is driving the need to explore new high-performance, energy-efficient computer systems," said Gary Bronner, vice president of Rambus Labs. "By working with Microsoft on this project, we can leverage our vast expertise in memory systems to identify new architectural models."

Dr. Jeannette Wing will join Microsoft Research as vice president, head of Microsoft Research International, reporting to Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid. Wing is a leading figure in computer science research, particularly in formal methods, security and privacy. She has held key positions in both academia and government, most recently at Carnegie Mellon University and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

"Jeannette is a leading light in the computer science research community, providing strong leadership both at Carnegie Mellon and at NSF," Rashid said. "I have long been impressed by both her profound commitment to world-class research and her service to the research community, and I look forward to working alongside her. It's a privilege to welcome Jeannette to Microsoft Research."

NVIDIA today announced work with Microsoft to promote NVIDIA Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs) for high performance parallel computing using the Windows HPC Server 2008 operating system.

"The coupling of GPUs and CPUs illustrates the enormous power and opportunity of multicore co-processing," said Dan Reed, corporate vice president of Extreme Computing at Microsoft. "NVIDIA's work with Microsoft and the Windows HPC Server platform, is helping enable scientists and researchers in many fields achieve supercomputer performance on diverse applications."

NVIDIA Research developed several GPU-enabled applications on the Windows HPC Server 2008 platform, such as a ray tracing application that can be used for advanced photo-realistic modeling of automobiles. Related to this, NVIDIA worked with Microsoft Research to install a large Tesla GPU computing cluster and is studying applications that are optimized for the GPU.

IF the world were to ever overflow with lava, Microsoft Research would have the maps for this new world first in the industry. Last April, Danyel Fisher, a Microsoft Researcher at Redmond developed a tool to create a paradox of looking at what we look at on online maps.
"Hotmaps" is the name of this smart tool which uses internal Microsoft statistics to generate a heatmap overlay for Virtual Earth. Areas of interest on the map with the most views are given bright red spots whilst areas without much interest with not many views are given dark spots.
Previously used for only research purposes, now the tool is freely available for the public to see how many people are looking at their house and neighbors.