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Applications
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HPCN industry
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Media and visualisation
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France
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Germany
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Norway
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Russia
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Spain
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Sweden
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The Netherlands
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| Argonne installs world's largest Onyx visualisation machine
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Argonne National Laboratory has installed the world's
most powerful SGI Onyx2 InfiniteReality
visualization supercomputer. The system, unveiled at
Argonne's Mathematics and Computer Science Division's open house, will be used
for complex scientific visualization and large-scale simulation. The system will power a Pyramid CAVE and Pyramid ImmersaDesk environments.
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| Sandia installs Codine on over 200 processors
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Sandia Laboratories in Livermore will install the job management system CODINE, developed by the German Software company GENIAS, on a heterogenous cluster of over 200 processors. The system includes a 64 processor SGI Origin 2000 running Irix, 33 Pentium and 136 Alpha machines running Linux. CODINE was selected because it runs stable on Linux. Sales was done through the Genias North-Amercia subsidiary in Baltimore.
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| NPACI to Install IBM Teraflops supercomputer in San Diego
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The National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) agreed with IBM to install the first computer dedicated to academic researchers that is capable of Tflop/s performance. The supercomputer, to be installed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), will help researchers tackle demanding, deep computing problems such as determining chemical reaction rates, designing new materials, simulating the nervous system, and understanding the origins of the universe. When complete, the system will have more than 1,000 Power3 processors and be the largest constructed with IBM's next-generation hardware.
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| Silicon Graphics unveils plans for Intel based Teraflop/s ccNUMA System by Year 2000
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Silicon Graphics plans to deliver Tflop/s performance from its ccNUMA architecture by the year 2000 using
both MIPS and Intel
IA-64 microprocessor technologies.
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| US National Weather Service
installs IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer
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The US
National Weather Service will buy an IBM
supercomputer that will significantly improve the agency's forecasting capabilities.
The RS/6000 SP will allow the National Weather Service's National Centers for Environmental Prediction in Camp Springs, MD, to operate more sophisticated models of the atmosphere and oceans to improve national weather, flood and climate forecasting.
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| Lawrence Livermore Laboratories awards ASCI networking subcontract to Abba Technologies
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The Lawrence Livermore Laboratories awarded Abba Technologies a contract for the Department of Energy (DOE) to manage the development of the technology for Gigabyte System Network (GSN) adapters for forthcoming supercomputers. This technology, nicknamed SPIRIT, offers processing at speeds of ten Gbits per second. SPIRIT accelerates the scheduled transfer protocol permitting multiple manufacturers to supply systems capable of 30-100
Tflop/s with GSN networks.
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| Sequoia Capital Invests in Linux Start-up VAResearch
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Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm behind the capitalization of companies including Yahoo!, Tandem and 3COM, has invested in the Linux operating system of VAResearch.The investment by Sequoia and other investors will allow VAR to extend its reach further and allow it to provide a collection of Linux hardware, support and services to expand the system.
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| MAXSTRAT storage for Onera SX-5 supercomputer
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As part of a recent sale of SX-5 Series supercomputers to ONERA, the French aerospace research agency, MAXSTRATsold Gen5 XLE high performance RAID storage servers to NEC.
MAXSTRAT is a supplier of storage systems for the data-intensive computing market. Gen5 XLEs will provide over two Tbytes of disk storage for ONERA's research applications. With the new facility ONERA will make it to French top three of most powerful servers.
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| Platform's LSF at Alcatel German
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Alcatel Telecom's Switching System Division in Stuttgart Germany purchased Platform's LSF Suite
to solve capacity problems and to balance workstation usage With this Suite CPU- intensive applications are evenly distributed among available servers.
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| Siemens` Primergy 870 certified by TCP
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The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) certified Siemens' Primergy server model 870-40
for transaction benchmark TPC-C, with operating system Windows NT 4.0 Enterprise Edition and Microsoft's database SQL Server. The Primergy 870 attained a throughput result of 18,528.97 tpmC at a price/performance ratio of $36.90/tpmC
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| Building the world's biggest Linux-cluster at computer night on television
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In the night of 5-6 December between 11.00 pm and 6.00 am a big computer-event will take place at the German television channel WDR.
User-groups from Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands then try to set a record in building the biggest Linux-cluster of the world and make it to the Guinness book of Records. Goal is to get at least 512 computers together.
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| TotalView 3.8 now also debugs Fortran 90
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Dolphin ToolWorks release version 3.8 of the TotalView Multiprocess Debugger, TotalView also debugs Fortran 90. Beginning of October this year TotalView was released for Compaq Digital Unix IBM AIX (including RS6000 and SP2 systems), SGI IRIX and Sun Solaris and SunOS.
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| U.S. Nova to build system with Russian architecture
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Nova Management, a small California firm, has been readying designs for a Reconfigurable Digital Signal processor. The system was developed from designs provided by The Institute for Control Sciences in Moscow, Russia. According to the American company the Russians are better in building architecture because they lack the microchip knowhow the Americans have. Nova provided new components for computers operating in the range of 1.2 Gflop/s to several Tflop/s.
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| New HP Exemplar V2250 shows good performance
with Gaussian
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The Supercomputing Centre of Catalonia (CESCA) has created its own set of benchmarks, based on several codes run by its users, to evaluate the performance of the
machines available and possible future acquisitions. Some of these benchmarks, are based on Gaussian 94, the quantum chemistry programme most widely used by the scientific community.
After the update of the IBM SP2 and the SGI O2000 computers, and the installation of the new HP V2250 (see Primeur, July issue), CESCA has made public the results obtained. The V2250 runs these benchmarks a 5% faster than the SP2, and a 20% faster than the Origin2000.
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| Mercury gets $600,000 order to provide systems for Spanish navy
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Raytheon Systems Company selected Mercury computersystems to provide stream computing systems forsonar systems on four frigates of the Spanish navy. The order, totals more than $600,000.
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| World's first fully immersive VR-CUBE
installed at PDC in Sweden
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King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden inaugurated the world's first six-sided VR-CUBE located at the Center for Parallel Computers at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The CUBE, built by TAN Projektionstechnolgie in Germany, can project images onto the floor, the ceiling, and the four walls of a room. The system tracks user's position and angle of sight, and the images that are projected onto the six surfaces change correspondingly. PDC will make the CUBE available to academic researchers and commercial enterprises throughout Sweden and can be used for applications, ranging from analysis of glacier flows to rendering of biological data.
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| Ericsson to use LSF for product design
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Ericsson AB of Sweden has signed a contract with
Platform to supply its LSF (Load Sharing Facility) for use with Unix and Windows NT systems at Ericsson sites worldwide. Ericsson,
will use the software to maintain its competitive edge by continually reducing its design cycles for mobile phone and telecommunications products.
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| Bofors Weapon Systems selects Swedish engine server
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Bofors Weapon Systems has selected Engine software from the Swedish company Auxillium. The product was bought to link Bofors Product Data Management (PDM) and Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) systems.
Bofors needed one Engine server and 100 user licenses for the sotware package info*Engine.
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| Two more of European
computer science universities join the CoSy development network
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As part of its strategy of continuously enhancing its CoSy compiler development platform, ACE Associated Compiler Experts bv (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) is part of a research and development network that includes the computer science departments of many of Europe's leading universities. The University of Sussex (UK) and the Technical University of Vienna (Austria) have now joined this R&D network to develop powerful new optimisers and code generators for embedded systems and multimedia processors.
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| Dutch national supercomputer plans approved
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The Dutch National Science Foundation (NWO) has approved plans to start the procedure for the acquisition of a new national research supercomputer in the year 2000. The new millennium machine will be a moderately parallel machine with a performance of 1 Tflop/s. A budget of 10 million Euro is available to be invested in the new system. A smaller amount will allow for a "mid-life kick" in 2003. The acquisition is coordinated by NWO foundation NCF
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| SARA opens Parallelisation Expertise Centre
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SARA opens a Parallelisation Expertise Centre Amsterdam (PECA, in Dutch Parallellisatie Expertise Centrum Amsterdam) on November 1 1998. PECA will help to build and disseminate expertise on parallelisation to enable a large group of potential customers to benefit from parallel
computing. As an introduction, PECA offers a free account on one of SARA's parallel supercomputers, the IBM RS/6000 SP, for a first introduction to parallel computing and to do some experiments.
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| Panorama on Three-Dimensional Telepresence
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On October 6, the Heinrich-Hertz-Institut in Berlin, hosted the presentation of the results of the EU's PANORAMA Project.
PANORAMA AC092 is a European cooperation project for research and development in the field of future telecommunications systems. The aim of this project was to add the third dimension to existing video systems and to present concepts and prototypes for 3D telepresence.
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| ESI and NEC offer crash and safety test simulation on SX supercomputers
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Paris based
ESI
and NEC agreed to offer ESI's flagship products PAM-CRASH and PAM-SAFE on NEC new SX-4 Series computers. The collaboration aims to strengthen the use of high performance computers in automotive, train and aircraft design by combining the computational power of NEC's supercomputers with the
ESI
simulation tools for crash analysis and testing of vehicle occupant safety.
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| PGI is porting compilers and tools to Softway's INTERIX environment for Windows NT
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PGI is porting its suite of high-end parallelizing Fortran, C, and C++ compilers and tools to Softway System's INTERIX environment for Windows NT.
It was recently announced that INTERIX will be the first fully certified Unix environment for Microsoft Windows NT and Windows 2000.
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| NAG adds collaborative work to Iris Explorer
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NAG included collaborative visualisation in IRIS Explorer.
The modules allow the user to work in teams even when they are geographically separated, improving efficiency and pooling ideas by sharing data, map construction and control of modules.
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| The TERRA Earth Model using The Portland Group's
PGF90 on Dedicated High-speed Beowulf Clusters
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The TERRA Earth model was originally developed by John Baumgardner in 1985, and parallelized by Hans-Peter Bunge for RISC workstation clusters in 1993.
Since that time the model has been continuously upgraded and enhanced, and is now widely used by geodynamicists.
A version of this model is a designated high performance target code for the NASA HPCC Earth and Space Sciences Grand Challenge Project, due to its excellent efficiency on parallel machines.
Recently the model demonstrated sustained performance of 100 Gflop/s on the 1024 processor NASA Goddard Cray T3E. Over the past few months, TERRA has been ported to dedicated high-speed Beowulf clusters using the PGF90 Fortran 90 compiler from the Portland Group, Inc.
A Beowulf cluster is a parallel high-performance computing system constructed using off-the-shelf PC hardware in a cluster configuration, typically late-generation Intel Pentium II systems interconnected using fast ethernet.
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| IBM launches Unix alliance
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IBM launched a
Unix operating system initiative with a number of industry partners.
This initiative will create a high-volume platform that will expand business opportunities for ISVs and OEMs. As part of this initiative, a Unix operating system will be developed for Intel's IA-64 using IBM's AIX operating system enterprise capabilities complemented with technology from SCO's UnixWare and Sequent's PTX operating system.
IBM will also transfer AIX technology to SCO's UnixWare and promote the offering in the UNIX on IA-32 market. The result will be a single Unix operating system product line that runs on IA-32, IA-64 and IBM microprocessors, in computers that range from entry-level to large enterprise servers.
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| SGI and MicroStrategy to deliver integrated Data Mining/OLAP
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Silicon Graphics and MicroStrategy Incorporated will jointly develop and market the first integrated visual data mining/on-line analytical processing (OLAP) application. The integration is designed to accelerate time to discovery, or insight, for knowledge workers in data-intensive industries.
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| New ProLiant 800 with 400 MHz Pentium technology
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Compaq developed the ProLiant 6500 server with 400 MHz Pentium II Xeon technology to support 7X24, multi-server applications. The ProLiant 6500 is a foundation for the Compaq Parallel Database Cluster, a 6-node cluster for running Oracle Parallel Server (OPS)-based applications on ProLiant and Windows NT. Users will be able to upgrade the ProLiant 3000 to four Pentium II Xeon processors in early1999.
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| Thinking Machines to ship Darwin release 3.5
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Thinking Machines launched the Darwin 3.5 and the Darwin Software Development Kit.
New features include: faster access to data, wizards that automate data mining, and a new clustering technique. Included now are wizards that automatically find key 'information-containing' variables,
build models, recommend the best model, and visualize results.
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| Compaq and Sandia set record by sorting Tbyte in less than 50 minutes
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Compaq and Sandia U.S. National Laboratories set a world record by sorting one Tbyte of data, a key industry measure of system performance, in less than 50 minutes. The large Windows NT cluster ran the audited Tbyte sort more than three times faster than the previous record held by a proprietary implementation.
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| Over 100 million MIPS processors installed
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MIPS Technologies has been shipping
more than one hundred
million processors
using its
MIPS RISC architecture,
since its founding in 1984.
In 1997, MIPS licensees shipped 48 million units, capturing 49% of
the embedded RISC processor market.
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| HP's third-generation 64-bit PA-8500 processor
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Hewlett-Packard Company
announced availability of its
third-generation 64-bit
440 MHz PA-8500 processor, combining leading
performance, 1.5 Mbyte of on-chip cache and increased scalability for HP's
enterprise-class workstations and servers. The new processor enhances performance of data-intensive applications
for the Internet, data warehousing, transaction processing and
Computer Aided Design, which require concurrent acceleration of
multiple operations.
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| HP PA-RISC road map unveiled
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Hewlett-Packard Company disclosed its roadmap for the
future of its high-performance 64-bit PA-RISC processors. HP 9000 V-Class Enterprise Servers implementing the new
PA-8500, are scheduled for introduction before the end of the
year.
The PA-8600, scheduled for 2000, is estimated at 560 MHz.
In 2001, HP
expects the PA-8700, followed by the PA-8800 and PA-8900.
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| New date for RCI European member management symposium XI
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The 6th
European RCI symposium is now scheduled for
December 3- 4, at the Forte Posthouse Hotel in Bristol. Special presentations are: The Top 500 Report '98 - What it Means for HPCN by Prof. Hans-Werner Meuer, Director of Computing Centre University of Mannheim and
HPC Software Challenges: Java and Windows NT vs. Unix and MPI by Dr. Carl Murphy, RCI Chief Scientist President. Some subjects to be discussed are: a review of current HPC perspectives, worldwide trends in architectures and technologies and trends in accomplishments in the integration of applications.
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| Tera tested four-processor MTA System
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Tera has been testing a four-processor MTA system with a four-board network at its Seattle headquarters.
Results have demonstrated scaling to the full capability of the network. Performance results will be announced at Supercomputing '98, in Orlando. The company signed an agreement with Unisys Corporation to provide circuit packaging and test services
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| IBM introduces it's coolest drive
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IBM launched several new hard drives, including the 10,020 RPM, 9.1 Gbyte Ultrastar 9LZX. This is a low profile version of the 9.1 Gbyte model IBM introduced about a year ago and it operates at lower temperatures. In fact, IBM's 9LZX is the coolest IBM 10,020 RPM drive. The cooler the drive, the less chance there is of overheating. The new 36.4 GB, 7,200 RPM drive holds eight times as much as the average server hard drive. Ultrastar 36XP is designed for Unix and RAID servers and storage subsystems. Ultrastar 36XP can hold a whopping 17 hours of MPEG-2 video.
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| Mercury to ship upgrader RACE++
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Mercury Computer Systems released RACE++, an upgrade path for commercial and military markets, and for third-party vendors manufacturing RACE way-compatible products. This upgrade is part of the company's $100 million multi-year investment in advanced signal processing research and development. Shipments of products based on RACE++ will commence in early 1999.
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| Family Dollar to Install HP 9000 V-Class Enterprise Servers
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Family Dollar, a U.S. discount-store chain, will move its enterprise from its current mainframe environment to an HP 9000 Enterprise Server platform running retail applications from Oracle and
Retek Information Systems. The company will use the platform to understand its customers' merchandising needs and to predict customer demand better. With this data the company can distribute merchandise more efficiently to its more than 3,000 stores in 38 states.
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| SGI reports loss of $44 million
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SGI reported its results for the first quarter of its 1999 fiscal year whixh ended September 30. Revenue was $616 million, compared with $768 million in the same quarter a year ago. The reported net loss, including the gain on the initial public offering of its MIPS Technologies subsidiary, was $44 million, compared with a net loss of $56 million a year ago. Excluding the MIPS gain, the loss would have been $77 million.
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| Sun aquires enterprise software NetDynamics
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Sun Microsystems has completed its acquisition of NetDynamics and has immediately begun to make the NetDynamic application platform central to its enterprise software business. It will serve as the foundation for a line of servers that scale applications from embedded devices to mainframes, and provide integration with legacy systems, databases, and business applications. Effective immediately, Sun will offer a NetDynamics software bundle option with all Sun servers running the Solaris operating environment. Sun also announced that NetDynamics was bought by FedEx, Countrywide Home Loans, GetSmart.com and Telstra.
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| Petrobras acquires SGI RealityCenter
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The oil company Petrobras has acquired a Silicon Graphics RealityCenter visualization facility for its headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. Petrobras is the first company in the oil and gas business to establish a RealityCenter in Latin America. The Petrobras center is an immersive, three- dimensional graphics display environment, that will enable geoscientists to enhance their understanding of oil and gas reservoirs.
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| New President and new Powertools for Red Hat
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Matthew Szulik will join Red Hat Software as President and Chief Operating Officer. Most recently he has been President of Relativity Software. Bob Young will remain as the company's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Red Hat also developed it's Powertools set into three specialized packages:
Linux Powertools, Red Hat Linux Variety Pack and Linux Off-Line.
The new configurations offer a more concise product line, better suited
to individual needs. In conjunction with the products, Red Hat is
expanding its membership program and subscription program with the
RHmember More program.
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| DPT to launch new RAIDstation
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Distributed Processing Technology (DPT) developed it's new RAIDstation7 Ultra2 SCSI Storage
Arrays. Available in the distribution channel in late December, the subsysstem cabinets support 80 MB/s data transfers with up to
seven hot-swap, SCA-2 Ultra2 SCSI hard drives in capacities to18GB and speeds to 10,000 rpm.
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| TSMC to build Tera's MTA microprocessors
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Tera Computer Company has chosen Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to build its Multithreaded Architecture (MTA) microprocessors to be used in future MTA systems. Tera plans to phase in CMOS technology over the next couple of years. Its initial CMOS microprocessor will replace all 24 gallium arsenide ASICs in the current MTA processor implementation.
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| Sun ships new UltraSPARC-II processors and cuts prices on graphics and monitors
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Sun Microsystems is reducing prices on its high-performance graphics and monitor product lines.
The company reduces prices with up to 32 procent on both its entry-level and high-end graphics. Sun also launches the new 400MHz UltraSPARC-II processors for its Enterprise 450 workgroup server. The enhanced system features faster chips and posted record-setting performance
results on the SPECweb96 benchmark, the company claims.
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| Compaq introduces new Alpha family
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Compaq Computer Corporation introduced two new AlphaServer models based on Compaq/DIgital's
64-bit Alpha 21264 (EV6) chip. The new Compaq AlphaServer GS series perform up to 2.5 times the previous generation of AlphaServers. AlphaServer GS series are universal platform systems that support Digital Unix, OpenVMS and Microsoft Windows NT. Using the SPECweb benchmark, the GS140 delivered Web pages at 14263 ops/sec with10 CPUs compared to HP's 9000 system running at 13811 ops/sec with 16 CPUs.
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| NAG to make IRIS Explorer available for Linux
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The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) had begun to make IRIS Explorer, their data visualization package, available on the Linux operating system.
IRIS Explorer is a visual programming system for data visualization that allows users and application developers to create applications for displaying and analyzing data interactively.
IRIS Explorer has been adopted by CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, as a major component of their analysis environment.
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| Time Warner buys Concurrent's MediaHawk Video Server system
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Time Warner Cable selected Concurrent's MediaHawk Video Server system for its
Pegasus video-on-demand (VOD) program. Specific test locations for Concurrent's MediaHawk and its cable backoffice software suite will be disclosed by Time Warner Cable closer to deployment. Initial systems will integrate with Scientific-Atlanta's broadband digital head-end system, featuring the Explorer 2000 digital set-top box.
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| CBS uses Everest 3D realtime graphics for elections
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CBS News has used Everest 3D realtime graphics system from Peak Systems to generate live to air graphics for the elections '98 results show from New York on 3rd November 1998. The show used a number of Everest systems together with a control application that received and organised
results data and combined it with historical information and contenders' names and faces.
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| HAL Computer Systems introduces Fujitsu SPARC 8-way
SMP Servers
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HAL Computer Systems, a Fujitsu subsidiary, developed the Fujitsu GP7000/GP7000F family of SPARC servers for North America. The GP7000 is available now with the GP7000F scheduled to be available in early 1999. The GP7000/GP7000F servers use the Sun Solaris operating system and are compatible with Sun Catalyst applications.
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| Silicon Graphics and Pyramid
to jointly market CAVE systems
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Silicon Graphics and Pyramid have plans to jointlymarket CAVE (Computer Assisted Virtual Environment) systems worldwide. This new relationship supports the Silicon Graphics Virtual Reality
Initiative announced in July1998 and represents a step in creating standards for VR, specifically in immersive projection systems. The initiative will include standards for the portability of and the interoperability between CAVE facilities.
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| DANTE upgrades US connection to 155 Mbit/s
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Within the context of migration to the TEN-155 network, DANTE's US connectivity will also be upgraded to 155 Mbps. It is expected that this new link will be operational by mid-December 1998.
DANTE's 45 Mbps link to the United States performed well in September and October,
although availability dropped from 100% during August to 99.12% in September 1998. The reason for the lower availability were three outages in September caused by faulty cards on the Frankfurt multiplexer.
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| DFN upgrades intercontinental link from 90 to 155 Mbit/s
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DFN, the German Research Network, is upgrading it's intercontinental communications infrastructure between its own research network B-WiN and the US-Internet from 90 Mbit to 155 MBps. DFN thinks users can profit from the increased capacity by the end of this year. In the first half of 1999, DFN intends to upgrade the Internet-link further with 155 Mbps.
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| Chinese cable operator selects Fore to build ATM
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China Guangdong Provincial Cable (CGPC), a Chinese cable operator, has selected FORE Systems' networking equipment to build its asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network backbone.
The equipment will be provided through Global Net Broadband Industry, a China-based systems integrator. The new network will provide CGPC's 400,000 subscribers with new services, including broadcast video, distance learning, high-speed Internet access and voice switching.
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| Fore switches rout over 38 million packets per second
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According to Strategic Networks Consulting, a network consultancy firm Fore's new ESX-4800 switch routed more than 38 million packets per second (Mpps) of 64-byte IP packets under a fully-meshed configuration. Fore's new 4800 multi-Gigabit routing switch was the fastest switch ever tested by the company.
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