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Primeur Live! is published during major High-Performance
Computing and Networking events in Europe.
This issue of PrimeurLive! is sponsored by
Live from Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar '9818 June 1998
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Applications
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HPCN industry
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| Mannheim Supercomputer event more alive than ever
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Supercomputing events are having a difficult time in Europe: HPCN Europe lost its exhibition, SupEur stopped altogether, scientific conferences are merging. This does not seem to affect the Mannheim Supercomputer event in any way. It is already in its thirteenth edition, and Primeur Live!
traditionally gives you the breaking news live from Mannheim. The almost 200 attendees of the event, about 50% from industry and 50% from research and academia can not only listen to top speakers from US and Europe, but also visit the exhibiton. Novelty is that for the first time the four large supercomputer centres in Germany, who were in stiff competition until now, show off there abilities in demonstrations in a joint booth.
The German Commerzbank was presented the HPC climber of the year 1998
trophy.
They entered the TOP500 this year with 7 machines for a total of 200 Gflop/s performance for
novel supercomputing applications.
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| The new TOP500 supercomputer list - Europe loosing ground again
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At the Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar, the new June 1998 version of the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers was presented. Europe is loosing more and more ground to the USA. Only 114 out of 500 machines are installed here, as opposed to 286 in USA/Canada. Japan went down to 92 systems. Analysis shows further that Americans buy only American supercomputers. Japanese have a relative preference for Japanese machines. Percentage wise, Europeans buy as many Japanese and American supercomputers as holds for the whole world.
The list shows that the USA have effectively banned non-USA supercomputers from their market.
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| ASCI Red still unchallenged
in TOP500
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In the new list of most powerful supercomputers in the world, ASCI red at Sandia Laboratories is still on number one. Hans Meuer, who presented the new June 1998 list at the Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar, estimates the machine is so powerful that it will stay on the TOP500 list until after 2005. The machine
has a benchmark performance of 1.3 Tflop/s. Second in the list is a new SGI/Cray T3E at an American Governement site with almost 0.9 tflop/s. First Europeam machine is at rank 4: a Cray T3E at UK met in Bracknell, England. In the TOP20 there are 6 European centres, housing all Cray T3E systems. At place 19 is the first Japanese machine in Europe: the Fujitsu at the european Centre for Medium Range Weather forcast.
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| New market trends in supercomputing
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Dr. Larry Smarr, director of the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, demonstrated a few remarkable tendencies at the Supercomputer 98 Seminar in Mannheim, which takes place from June 18th till 20th.
He analyzed the TOP500 list of supercomputers of the past five years to come to the conclusion that market driven companies increasingly are conquering higher places on the list.
At the same time, shared memory processors (SMPs) have become more popular at the expense of vector architectures.
The latest innovation however consists in users building their own supercomputer by means of clusters of SMPs and Distributed Shared Memory (DSM).
Will these configurations figure in the next TOP500 lists of supercomputers, given the fact that they display an appalling amount of computational power? |
| Supercomputing and industry: a matter of parallelism, adaptivity and multidisciplinarity
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Professor Dr. Ulrich Trottenberg is director of the Institute for Scientific Computing and Algorithms at GMD Birlinghoven.
During the Supercomputer Seminar in Mannheim, he presented a few projects which showed the the growing synergy between the industrial world and the mostly academic environment of supercomputing.
Initiatives such as EUROPORT, POPINDA, CISPAR and AUTOBENCH illustrate the usefulness of fast algorithms, parallel computing, load balancing and multidisciplinarity for simulation purposes in different industrial applications.
The method of fully integrated algorithm procedures considerably accelerates the production of a virtual prototype.
The industry eagerly welcomes the opportunity to reduce the time needed for the design process. |
| MPI on Windows NT first member of tools suite
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At the Mannheim Supercomputer-Seminar, June 19, Genias announced PaTENT WMPI 4.0 for the development of parallel applications, as the first product of the PaTENT integrated tools suite of Genias' Parallel Tools Environment on NT 4.0, resulting from the EU-funded project WINPAR. PaTENT WMPI 4.0 offers a full implementation of the MPI standard for Microsoft Win32 platforms for NT PCs, SMP servers and DMP parallel computers. Interfaces to Microsoft Visual C++ and Digital Fortran are provided. |
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| Will industry take over the TOP500 eventually?
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Up to now, research centres were housing by far the most supercomputers from the TOP500 fastest machines in the world. In the new TOP500 list presented at the Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar, this position is challenged now by industry. In companies, 178 TOP500 class supercomputers can be found, as oppossed to 180 in research centres. For the first time ever, universities own less than 100 supercomputers: 94. The other categories are classified with 35 and vendors with 13 machines.
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