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Advertisement
Special issue with
an update on results from European R&D
projects
April 1999
Each year hundreds of European R&D projects produce important results. In this special issue, co-published by the magazines Primeur
and VMW,
we give an update from a number of projects in the HPCN and medical sectors
that were supported within the Esprit or Telematics programmes from the European Commission.
This issue is published in
conjunction with the ITIS/ITAB 99
event at HPCN Europe in Amsterdam
Next issue is planned
in November at IST 99 in Helsinki.
When you want your project results in one of those issues, please contact the editors of Primeur
magazine
or Virtual Medical Worlds magazine.
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| SIMMILL team generates pulp fiction flow patterns to solve ketchup-effect
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The modern pulp- and food industries face complex problems in their production process, due to the rheological behaviour of non-Newtonian fluids.
This means that the fluids which are processed, do not behave like running water but have a tendency to obstruct in their flow, like ketchup clogging unto the inside of a bottle.
First comes nothing, still nothing and then suddenly everything.
Stationary flow regions within a pipe, a tank or a vessel severely hamper the pulp transport in a mill, which might lead to production stops.
In order to solve this stop-gap problem, the SIMMILL project has been set up to create a model with a computation programme to study and optimize flow patterns for transport of pulp.
Through the use of parallel High Performance Computing (HPC) and modelling, simulations of non-Newtonian flows can be speeded up.
As a result, the cost and time for development can be reduced up to 40%.
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| VISiT minimizes industrial design cycles by integrating HPCN-enabled simulation with Virtual Reality
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European industries constantly seek ways to enhance the level of productivity and competitiveness.
The use of High Performance Computing and Networking (HPCN) technology allows enterprises to shorten the design cycle by largely reducing the computational time for numerical simulation. However, the effort needed by engineers to evaluate the huge amount of 3D data and to redefine or modify boundary conditions for derived simulations still causes critical bottle necks, which hinder the efficient use of simulation within the first phase of design.
The Esprit funded three-year project VISiT therefore aims to establish a Virtual Intuitive SImulation Testbed, based on Virtual Reality technologies.
This environment will function as an efficient man-machine interface for small teams of engineers and designers in order to interactively evaluate the complex 3D data of simulations and to directly transpose their findings into a successive simulation.
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| TeleInViVo, the building of an economically viable telemedical workstation for 3D ultrasound
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In Europe but especially in other parts of the world, including the third world, the costs for health care delivery to each individual in every imaginable situation have risen to an astronomical level.
The need for affordable diagnostic systems which can be used in difficult-to-reach as well as underserved regions has become urgent.
In response to this demand, nine partners decided to launch TeleInViVo, a two-year project, funded by the European Commission under the Telematics Technologies Programme.
The aim is to develop a transportable, integrated telemedicine workstation, utilising 3D ultrasound, connected with a lightweight, portable ultrasound system for use in rural, isolated, or crisis situation areas.
The workstation includes both computing and telecommunication capabilities, and is able to support a variety of applications ranging from gynaecology and urology, over endocrinology, surgery, orthopaedics to cardiology and abdominal scans.
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| More than 20 million words available at Finnish Center for Scientific Computing
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A digital resource of over 20 million running words of written standard Finnish has been made available for Finnish researchers of language at the Language bank service operated by CSC, the Center for Scientific Computing.This resource bears the name Finnish text bank, version A and has been created in the EC funded project, LE-PAROLE during 1996-1998.
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| Squeezing the most out of your workstation cluster - Dynamite test versions available
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The Dynamite Consortium will make available first test versions of its Dynamic cluster software interface in March/April
to selected software vendors and developers. Dynamite delivers work-load balancing of parallel tasks to work station cluster environments. Unique is its ability to
dynamically
adapt to changing work loads. Dynamite is especially useful for small to moderate sized
workstation clusters with much development work and one big application. When built into the application, the user does not even have to notice it is there.
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| SMEs to benefit from virtual prototyping methodology for multi-body simulation
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Small and medium size enterprises, which are specialized in the design and production of shock absorbers for various types of vehicles, such as cars, motorbikes and mountain bikes, require efficient virtual prototyping software applications to carry out complete parametric studies of complex multi-body systems in one working day.
Only the use of high performance computing and networking (HPCN) can guarantee fast analysis in order to optimize product design. The MYSHANET initiative aims to port the already existing parallel design software tool HIPERCOMBATS on the heterogeneous networks of multipurpose PCs running on Windows platforms.
MYSHANET stands for parallel Multi-BodY simulation for Shock Absorber design on PC NETwork.
This best practice project started on January 16th 1998 to end on June 15th 1999 and is funded by the European Commission under the terms of the Esprit programme.
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| Fan propeller blades gain superior aerodynamic efficiency with computational fluid dynamics
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Producers and designers of fans and propellers are permanently in search of shape optimization for blade design. Both the aerospace sector and the metallurgical, chemical and engineering industries constitute important end users of propellers, fans, compressors and turbines while large volumes of the smallest fan units are required by the electronics industry. All of these customers demand better blade shape design in order to lower the product's weight, decrease the noise and reduce the costs for validation procedures.
In this regard, a prototype software system for aerodynamic shape optimization is being developed in the OPTIBLADE project.
The OPTFLO programme has to demonstrate the suitability of High Performance Computing techniques for parametric optimization using automatic differentiation applied to the design of fan and propeller blades profiles.
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| Remote and Distributed Software Engineering for cost-effective collaboration between the industry and research sector
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Small and medium sized enterprises that are specialized in system and software design and engineering experience an urgent and growing need for an integrated software development environment based on different and highly advanced software engineering tools.
The use of high performance networking (HPN) infrastructure and technology can provide the required quality of service to enhance and accelerate the collaborative engineering of complex software systems in distributed teams.
The major goal of the REDISE project is to demonstrate the substantial advantages of a remote and distributed software engineering approach, based on the HPN principle. Both the software quality and the time to market are improved while significant costs can be saved in travelling time and efforts.
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| Collaborative engineering environment to predict aeroelasticity behaviour of windturbines blades over High Speed Network
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Since January 1998, both departments of Information Processing and Systems (DRIS), and Structure Dynamics and Coupled Systems (DDSS) at the Office National d'Etudes et de Recherches Aérospatiales, work together with CRAIN, a French SME research office, based in La Rochelle and specialized in nautical engineering.
The Esprit funded CAPI project unites the partners in a joint effort to perform aeroelasticity predictions of wind turbines blades behaviour, by using remote access to high performance computing resources in a collaborative engineering environment over a high speed network.
CRAIN will also collaboratively analyse results with another SME partner involved in wind turbine design, which is AERODYN, located in Rendsburg, Germany.
The Germanischer Lloyd in Hamburg will co-operate with CRAIN and AERODYN for certification and approval of the results.
The close relationship between ONERA and DLR, which operates in Germany as ONERA's equivalent, has enabled these contacts. As the sixth CAPI partner, the University of La Rochelle will facilitate experimentation and validation over High Speed Networks.
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| Esprit HPCN 1998 Activity Report available
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In total the EC will spend nearly 275 million euro on HPCN as part of the now closed Fourth Framework R&D programme. A large number of the projects
will, however, continue to run also during this year. This can be deduced from the 1998 Activity report published by the HPCN group of the EC.
Although much attention has been attracted lately by the supporting TTN network, most of the money (80%) has gone into
R&D
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| HPCnet archives available
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The archives of HPCnet contain a wealth of information of which much is still valid. The Primeur news service has now made them available again for the European HPC community, with permission from the olde Network of Exellence and support from
the
EuroTools consortium,
that
brings together HPCN tool providers and users.
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| Have your say on the future of HPC in Europe and win a bottle of malt whisky
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What is the ROLE of HPC Centres in Europe? Which of the SERVICES they provide do their users value most? How do users see their NEEDS changing over the next three to five years? These are important questions, not only for individual HPC centres, but also for the European Commission which funds Researchers' Access to
a range of Large Scale Facilities across Europe. Such questions are being addressed by DIRECT; a European Commission funded Concerted Action in High Performance Computing and Networking.
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| TEN-155 at 5 Framework conference: most circuits have traffic now
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The new Europan TEN-155
network that offers band width to researchers is now on power. Altogether 14 of the 20 TEN-155 circuits are
carrying production traffic. The MECCANO project was the first user of the network. The network traffic between the national research networks increased by 50%, showing everybody was eagerly awaiting the network upgrade.
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