VORtech Blog

The top 10 of the November 2024 list of supercomputers is very much a western affair, all coming from the US, Europe and Japan. But in fact, if China’s fastest supercomputers were listed, they would be third and fifth on the list. And the commercial sector is building machines that are even faster than the number one.

Do you recognize this: software that was developed long ago, has been extended and adapted for years, but no longer meets today’s standards? If so, then our lunch lecture on modernizing software on September 24 is for you.

Although there are still plenty of doubts about the real impact of AI, there is one sector where its effect can no longer be denied: software development. VORtech quickly started working with the new AI possibilities. But not without the necessary safeguards because there are indeed risks.

When Hans Voerknecht developed a new way to evaluate accessibility a few years ago, he quickly knew that this would require good software. Although he could program himself, he also realized that his strength lies in devising the calculation method and not in software development. That is why he partnered with VORtech.

Every year, humanity uses some 40% more of the earth’s resources than the earth can sustainably supply in that year. Clearly, this cannot go on forever. Awareness of this is growing and major transitions are starting to take shape. As an expert in developing computational software, VORtech sees an important role for itself in developing the software for computing and simulation that is needed to make these transitions. We are happy to see this already reflected in our client portfolio.

The DUCOMS 2024 event takes place on November 12th at the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht. This is the second edition of this meeting, after a very successful and well-visited event last year.

If runtime is a problem for your application, then the use of a general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) can be a solution. GPGPUs can sometimes speed up computations by an order of magnitude. As an extra advantage they use far less power per computation. But exploiting their computational power is not always easy and only works for applications that meet specific requirements.

VORtech develops computational software, both for and with clients. Much of this software is used to forecast something. From water levels to traffic flows, from the growth of sustainable energy sources to emissions from chemical processes. But not every forecast can be computed. Sometimes, it just takes human intuition. To close the year 2023, we thought it would be interesting to see if humans can collectively make good forecasts for a number of such things. By know, we know the answer to the first question.

VORtech has been growing relatively quickly in recent years. While we have hired an average of one additional employee per year, we have hired five new colleagues in the past year. Read more about our new toppers Martine, Sander, Mat, Hunter and Edo (from left to right in the photo) in our blog.

These days, technology is becoming so complex that many systems are built in a partnership of specialized companies. This has the obvious benefit of using the best possible knowledge and experience, but it also has pitfalls. Here are six rules, illustrated with our experiences in a recent project.