Emerging and future applications rely heavily upon systems consisting of Internet of Things (IoT), edges, data centers, and humans-in-the-loop. Significantly different from warehouse-scale computers that serve independent concurrent user requests, this new class of computer systems directly interacts with the physical world, considering humans an essential part and performing safety-critical and mission-critical operations; their computations have intertwined dependencies between not only adjacent execution loops but also actions or decisions triggered by IoTs, edge, datacenters, or humans-in-the-loop; the systems must first satisfy the accuracy metric in predicting, interpreting, or taking action before meeting the performance goal under different cases.

This article argues we need a paradigm shift to reconstruct the IoTs, edges, data centers, and humans-in-the-loop as a computer rather than a distributed system. We coin a new term, high fusion computers (HFCs), to describe this class of systems. The fusion in the term has two implications: fusing IoTs, edges, data centers, and humans-in-the-loop as a computer, fusing the physical and digital worlds through HFC systems. HFC is a pivotal case of the open-source computer systems initiative. We laid out the challenges, plan, and call for uniting our community’s wisdom and actions to address the HFC challenges. Everything, including the source code, will be publicly available from the project homepage: https://www.computercouncil.org/HFC/ .

Understanding the designs and performance characterizations of hot interconnects on modern data center and high-performance computing (HPC) clusters is a fruitful research topic in recent years. The rapid and continuous growth of high-bandwidth and low-latency communication requirements for various types of data center and HPC applications (such as big data, deep learning, and microservices) has been pushing the envelope of advanced interconnect designs. We believe this is high time to investigate the performance characterizations of representative hot interconnects with different benchmarks. Hence, this paper presents an extensive survey of state-of-the-art hot interconnects on data center and HPC clusters and the associated representative benchmarks to help the community to better understand modern interconnects. In addition, we characterize these interconnects by the related benchmarks under different application scenarios. We provide our perspectives on benchmarking data center interconnects based on our survey, experiments, and results.

Financial service providers find blockchain technology useful to enhance authenticity, security, and risk management. Several institutions are adopting blockchain in trade and finance systems to build smart contracts between participants, improve efficiency and transparency, and open up newer revenue opportunities. Blockchain’s unique recording capabilities make the existing clearing and settlement process redundant. Banks and other financial entities are adopting blockchain-enabled IDs to identify people. Better results come from organisations’ capacity to foresee emerging trends in financial blockchain applications and develop blockchain functionality. The transfer of asset ownership and addressing the maintenance of a precise financial ledger. Measurement, communication, and analysis of financial information are three significant areas to be focussed on by accounting professionals. Blockchain clarifies asset ownership and the existence of obligations for accountants, and it has the potential to improve productivity. This paper identifies and studies relevant articles related to blockchain for finance. This paper focuses on Blockchain technology and its importance for financial services. Further takes up various tools, strategies, and featured services in Blockchain-based financial services. Finally, the paper identifies and evaluates the significant applications of Blockchain technology in financial services. Credit reports significantly impact the financial lives of customers. Recent data breaches demonstrate the superior security of blockchain-based credit reporting over conventional server-based reporting. Blockchain-based systems enable the faster, more cost-effective, and more customised issuance of digital securities. With its adoption, the market for investors can be expanded, costs for issuers can be reduced, and counterparty risk can be reduced due to the ability to customise digital financial instruments to the demands of investors. It uses mutualised standards, protocols, and shared procedures to give network users a single common source of truth. Participants in the business network can now more easily collaborate, manage data, and agree with this technology’s application.

Sponsored and organized by the International Open Benchmark Council (BenchCouncil), the Bench conference encompasses a wide range of topics in benchmarking, measurement, evaluation methods, and tools. Bench’s multi-disciplinary emphasis provides an ideal environment for developers and researchers from the architecture, data management, algorithm, system, network, dataset, and application communities to discuss practical and theoretical work covering workload characterization, benchmarks and tools, evaluation, measurement and optimization, and dataset generation. The Bench conferences have been successfully held for four series from 2018 to 2021 and attracted plenty of paper submissions and participants. Bench 2022 will be held virtually on Nov. 7–9, 2022, and invites manuscripts describing original work in benchmarking, measuring, and optimizing. The conference website is https://www.benchcouncil.org/bench2022/index.html.