News on HPCN and the European Commission
December 1997 - February 1998

The Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, EPCC, is co-ordinating a new EU project called DIRECT (Development of an Interdisciplinary Round-Table for Emerging Computer Technologies). This project is part of the concerted action in HPC, and has 14 participating teams from 7 EU countries. They intend to look into strategic developments and technological advances so they can identify future user needs and try to influence the direction of provision. Three areas are specifically targetted, namely, Visualization and Emerging Computing Techniques, Data Storage and Management, and Data Inter-operability.

The objective of the EuroTools Working Group is to increase the use of European HPCN Software, both inside and outside Europe. This Working Group aims at encouraging collaboration between different partners that are involved in the design, development, commercialization, and use of European software tools for High Performance Computing and Networking.

The network of HPCN TTN's will be extended into the year 2000. Originally, the support and demonstration activity network of the EC Esprit programme would end March 1999. However, a number of projects still have to produce the final results. Dissemination for these will be done in the additional year. The 20 TTN's run in total 143 projects. Netapdex, the dissemination umbrella of number of high-speed networking projects acts as the 21st TTN. For the March 1998 call, there is no funding left for additional demonstration projects.

The Esprit project PHASE aims at developing and implementing a distributed PHarmaceutical Applications Server. It's objective, to deliver the power of high-performance computing onto the desks of small and medium sized industrial companies operating in the field of drug target identification and modelling. The main advantage for the users of leased high-performance processing lies in easy access and less prohibitive costs. PHASE provides the server architecture that allows the introduction of job requirement specifications and submission to an automated load-balancing scheme that distributes parallel tasks to the best suited hardware platform. It also offers a unified workflow for the bio-informatics applications GeneQuiz, MaxHom, DRAGON and MSAP all four of which contribute to the analysis of protein sequence and structure.

The C-LAB Research and Development Institute, a cooperative Computing Laboratory operated by Siemens Nixdorf Informationssysteme AG and the University of Paderborn, has developed an innovative workplace for the blind,offering user-friendly access to the Web by means of a Braille display, a series of complex adapting programs, Text to Speech facilities and even a special Braille printer. In collaboration with the newspapergroup WAZ and Bertelsmann Telemedia, C-LAB is presenting the first internet software on line service for the blind called "Cityweb Plus".