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November 1998
Primeur is a monthly Virtual Magazine on High Performance Computing and Networking in Europe. It is produced by an editorial team
composed of professionals in publishing and HPCN. You can put the editorial team to work as well. Read about our services
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Media and visualisation
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France
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Germany
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The Netherlands
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United Kingdom
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| CADSI signs simulation contract with Daimler-Benz
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Daimler-Benz has signed a
contract with CADSI
(Computer Aided Design Software Inc.) to implement DADS, CATDADS, and
PolyFEM within the vehicle division. This contract covers all
Daimler-Benz divisions requiring mechanical system simulation software
for full vehicle simulation.
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| Globus metacomputing environment offers framework for telemedicine
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A joint team of researchers from the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of the Argonne National Laboratory and from the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute is developing a basic software infrastructure for high performance computing which integrates all sorts of geographically distributed computational and information resources.
The scientists, involved in the project, refer to this framework of interlinked virtual supercomputers as the Globus metacomputing toolkit.
Large-scale testbeds are deployed to evaluate the performance and functionality of the various tools and to figure out how to construct applications that can exploit the distributed resources available on a computational grid.
In this regard, the researchers have discovered how the modular Globus toolkit components are able to provide the indispensable low level mechanisms for the specific requirements and higher level services in a telemedical environment.
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| 'Space weather' computers at NASA break through 100 Gflops
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At the HPCC Earth and Space Sciences Project at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland supercomputer programmes which model "space weather," plate tectonics and low-gravity fluid dynamics were among those that recently broke a 100 Gflop/s performance milestone
These programs -- one of which exceeded the milestone by more than a factor of two -- were run on a 1,024-processor Cray T3E-1200E configuration.
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| US Open site scored 382 million hits in two weeks
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The 1998 US Open Web site for the United States Tennis Association (USTA) running on an IBM SP, recorded a massive 382 million hits and 242 million page views during the two week tournament. The peak was on September 8 with 4.7 million hits. The record traffic totals on the US Open Web site surpassed the marks set only months ago by the official sites of the French Open and Wimbledon, also powered an IBM SP.
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| U.S. Oceanographic Office buys 16 processor Cray SV1
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The U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) has ordered a 16-processor Cray SV1 to help it more accurately model the world's oceans. NAVOCEANO uses the supercomputer in itswork for the U.S. Department of Defense. NAVOCEANO creates navigational charts and provide specialized information, including submarine tracking and global land and sea atmospheric mapping.
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| Groupe Bull and IBM continue with PowerPC Unix systems
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Groupe Bull and IBM
have extended their agreement to include development of PowerPC based Unix systems and the AIX operating system.
The new agreement builds on existing agreements between the companies that go back six years. Bull and IBM engineers will develop systems using PowerPC chips and continue joint work on the AIX operating system.
Bull and IBM teams developed symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) function on AIX to speed workload processing.
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| Michelin to buy CATIA 5 for tire design
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Michelin, Dassault Systemes and IBM have signed a strategic agreement in which Michelin opts for CATIA version 5 for designing, simulating and manufacturing its tires.The agreement covers the progressive installation of several hundred CATIA Version 5 stations on Windows NT platforms to be used on all Michelin's product ranges. The three partners are also working to set up CAX (CAD/CAM/CAE) for the group around CATIA following the re-engineering of the design and manufacturing processes for tires and moulds.
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| Debis opens new company in Hungary
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The German company debis Systemhaus has expanded its Hungarian
operations by creating a new company called "debis IT Services
Unisoftware." It is a merger between the Hungarian IT firm
"Unisoftware" and the Budapest branch of "EDVg - debis
Systemhaus." The new company will employ about 60 people in
Budapest and plans to sale 1200 million Hungarian Forint (DM 10
million, US$ 6 million) in 1998. Debis will specialize in software for
telecommunications, the public sector and for the travel and
transportation industry.
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| Hewlett-Packard disclosed its PA-RISC and IA-64 Roadmap
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At Systems, a fair at Munich, Nick Earle, Vice President and Group Marketing Manager Enterprise Systems Group, and Clifford Loeb, European Technology Strategy Manager Enterprise Systems Group, from Hewlett Packard presented the latest PA-RISC roadmap for the coming years and some new high-end systems. The reason: the delay of the IA-64 processor Merced. Especially the high-end machines of the V-Class will get more PA-processors per box. They also discussed the transition to the IA-64 architecture.
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| Tim Berners-Lee - receives German technology prize for Web work
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The yearly DM 400,000 prize from the Eduard-Rhein-Foundation,
was shared this year by Professor Jakob Ziv from Technion in Israel, for his works on data coding and compression, and Tim Berners-Lee, for creating the WWW and furthering developments within W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium). Berners-Lee is often described as the father of the World-Wide-Web, a concept which he developed at Cern in Switzerland. He is now director of W3C. Primeur recorded his statements on Web-technology and the activities of W3C at the award ceremony in Germany.
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| Logica gets large outsourcing contract from Shell
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Shell UK Exploration and Production
(Shell Expro), operator in the UK sector of the North Sea on
behalf of Shell, Esso and other co-venturers, has awarded a major
computer support contract to Logica. The five-year agreement, awarded as a result of a tendering exercise, is
worth more than GBP 15 million. It covers application maintenance and
support for all Shell Expro activities, both offshore and onshore.
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| Dutch eggheads prepare attack on RSA ecryption code
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Researchers from the Dutch Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), have found the prime factors of a 186 digit number. It took them 1,5 months on 90 computers, including a C90 supercomputer. Next "target" is the RSA-algorithm, used in secure transactions. Although it only has 155 digits, it is more difficult to crack, because the numbers are not as nicely chosen as the recently solved one.
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| UK shows scepticism
during EU-Framework 5 show
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An Information day to promote and explain the content of the European Union's Framework 5, in the area of information society technologies (IST), was held in London UK, 23rd October. Organised by the Institute of European Trade and Technology (IETT), this seminar attracted over 560 people from industry and research institutions, although 80 of them never made it due to floods in the north of the country.
They were presented with a showcase exhibition of previous Framework projects, and listened to Professor George
Metakides, of
EU-DGIII, promote potential opportunities in the IST programme worth 3.3BEcu over the next 4 years.
There were also dissenting voices from the floor during question time, however.
A common impression is that European initiatives only attract a small section of companies who were historically locked in and know how to work the system. These companies are perceived as being on a "gravy train" and may or may not be the most suitable for delivering the new information technology products for the "Citizen".
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| Amdahl to launch Millennium 800 series
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Amdahl Corporation developed the Millennium 800 series, the newest extension of the Millennium family of System/390 compatible CMOS processors. The new 800 Series' capacity is 1075 MIPS.
One of the first customers is British Airways.
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| Eurotunnel coordinates train traffic with FORE
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Eurotunnel, the company operating the high-speed shuttle train linking France and the United Kingdom via the Channel Tunnel, have bought ATM high-speed networking
products and technology from FORE System. Eurotunnel's ATM supports administrative and voice applications, including its call center, control tower and traffic-control systems. The company also conducts videoconferencing over the network, reducing the need for staff to travel between company offices in Folkestone and Calais.
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| Special issue on Esprit projects
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The news magazines Primeur and VMW, prepare an update on all HPCN or medical Esprit projects in special issues that will be published in conjunction with the large IST event (the former Esprit/Telematics conference) in Vienna late November/early December of this year.
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| APEX
CD shows
benefits of HPC in CFD
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APEX, a European project aimed at showing the benefits of HPC in computational fluid dynamics has released an interactive multi-media presentation, which introduces CFD and
HPC, shows results from two typical applications (a chemical reactor and a power station boiler) and guides the viewer through the investment decision process.
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| China hooks into HPCN business with Europeans
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The EU-China HPCN industrial initiative launched two years ago and managed by the European Research Consortium for Informatics and
Mathematics (ERCIM) met in Beijing, 12-13 October to discuss practical ways on how China industries can benefit from European HPCN knowhow. The workshop was successful with several European companies tentatively agreeing contracts; one by the UK company ISL to sell their integral solutions package for datamining, and another by the Italian/UK company, Quadrics Supercomputers World, which is expected to set up collaboration with the Chinese company which produces the Dawning parallel machines. The EU-China HPCN
initiative is sponsored and funded by the European Commission, the Chinese government and private companies from Europe and China. Most European participants at this workshop were from SMEs.
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| Parallel computing enhances health care analysis
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Three University Hospitals and a software technology provider are partnering with the Entice Technology Transfer Nodes (TTN) co-ordinator in a project, called CAMRA, for the improvement of Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Analysis.
The hospital end-users aim to optimize cardiac diagnosis through the combination of high performance computing with low cost analysis of magnetic resonance (MR) images.
The project team is using multi-processor PC-compatible systems, that run under Windows NT, to turn Mayo Clinic's
ANALYZE software into an enhanced analysis programme.
For this purpose, the computer specialists are parallelizing existing serial algorithms, which will eventually allow the physician to shift from qualitative to quantitative image interpretation.
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| Scanning Thermal Microscopy goes one step further
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In June 1998, a project was set up by the British Technology Transfer Node (TTN) Entice to explore the potential offered by a new imaging modality, consisting of Tomographic Analysis with Scanning Microscopy (TASM).
This revolutionary approach allows researchers to image below the surface of materials to show their three-dimensional microstructure.
The basic technique originates from medical imaging practices, referred to as Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT).
EIT images represent the changes in electrical conductivity occurring between various types of tissue.
The new Scanning Thermal Microscopy (SThM) method goes one step further, since TASM images display the 3D spatial distribution of thermal conductivity. TASM enables industrial chemists to reveal material characteristics which are of vital importance for the modelling of polymer-based systems.
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| Computational Fluid Dynamics simulate blood flow in the heart
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A freshly launched project, funded by the European Commission, will integrate the use of relatively inexpensive High Performance Computing and Networking (HPCN) techniques, such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), in the research for the exact functioning of the human cardiovascular system.
The partners plan to build a simulator to study the impact of various cardiac prostheses, like stents, grafts, heart pumps or artificial valves, on the interaction with the blood flow.
The bloodsim tool may be adopted in a later stage by the regulatory authorities to issue strict directives in the validation procedure of prostheses before they enter the commercial market.
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| Distributed processing solves design engineering
model
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MARC Analysis Research Corporation and SUN Microsystems have used
distributed processing to solve highly complex finite element analysis
problems on four networked Sun Ultra 60 workstations and a four
processor Sun HPC 450 server. The software application used was the MARC K7.3
nonlinear analysis system. The design and engineering problems,
supplied by aircraft engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney MAR, were
real industrial models taken from design engineering process. The
models ranged in complexity from 4,000 to 336,000 elements, with 27,000
to 1.3 million degrees of freedom.
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| New numerical computation libarary available
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Nag has released a new C library, Mark 5, which features a variety of new
facilities and improvements in areas of numerical computation. Mark 5 has
fifty-one new user-callable functions, in areas of optimization, operations research, statistics and
linear algebra. In addition to the new facilities, fifteen existing functions have been
revised to make the NAG C Library Mark 5 thread safe.
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| NAG
releases Fortran SMP Library
for Intel/NT SMP machines
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NAG has released the high performance Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) Library for Intel/NT Workstations. The library of numerical and statistical software routines is aimed at customers with computational problems large enough to make efficient use of the increased processing power and scalability of multiple processor computers.
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| Virtual neurosurgery reduces unexpected complications
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In the last 25 years, neurosurgery has been subject to a profound evolution.
The impact of advanced technologies has completely changed the aspect of this medical discipline.
During the seventies, the introduction of micro-surgical techniques gave way to the adoption of standards based on the practice of neurosurgery.
In the successive years, this ruling philosophy has led to a radical development of miniaturization in surgical approaches.
At the end of the nineties we are witnessing the consolidation of minimal invasive neurosurgery.
Dr. Enric Ferrer Rodriguez, head of neurosurgery in the University Hospital of Barcelona, has summarised the issue very clearly in the Catalonian supercomputer magazine Teraflop
: more surgical efficiency with less risks and less trauma for the patient.
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| Ultra-fast electronic submission of new drug applications
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Three firms have come together to help the Pfizer pharmaceutical company develop a cost-effective solution for the conversion of documents to electronic formats.
The so-called DocCon application will be used for the internal review of new drug applications as well as for their submission to the US government's Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
To this purpose, Platform Computing has delivered the LSF Suite analysis and workload management software to harness the power of Compaq's Windows NT based workstations' cluster, whereas Infodata Systems has provided vast expertise in organizing the workflow for both electronic document creation and management.
The DocCon solution will allow Pfizer to process 60.000 pages in 24 hours.
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| Saudi Aramco implements largest ERP project to date
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Oil producer Saudi Aramco has awarded Sun Microsystems and Abdulla Fouad Co., one of Sun's Middle Eastern distributors and service providers, a multi-year contract to supply the hardware infrastructure, operations management and support services necessary for the implementation of one of the largest SAPR/3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects to date. When the Enterprise10000 server (Starfire) is installed, approximately 20,000 people will use the sytem.
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| Romanian bank of development choses Fujitsu's Unix servers
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The Romanian Bank for Development (RBD) has chosen Unix Servers and PCs from Fujitsu Computers to run a new integrated real-time, banking system. The system is based on ICL's iBank retail banking software package. It will enable RBD to automate its deposit, loan and mortgage accounts, control cheque handling procedures and manage customers' accounts. On completion of the pilot project, the system will be rolled out to the bank's 180 branches.
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| Veritas to install next generation 'seismic' NEC
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Veritas DGC Asia Pacific will
install NEC's next generation SX-5 Series in 1999. An opening ceremony was held at Veritas DGC in Singapore on September 21. On July 29 the company accepted a NEC SX-4/8A, making it the 3rd SX-4 system operating in Veritas DGC's centres. According to Veritas, this recent SX-4 system is the most powerful seismic processing computer in the Asia Pacific region.
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| Nortel
donates US $600,000 to UCA for Internet2 research
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Nortel (Northern Telecom) Bay Networks business has donated US$600,000 to the Communication & Network Services (CNS) organization at the University of California, Berkeley. The donation will facilitate research on next generation Internet2 applications. CNS will integrate Accelar switches into a redundant
backbone the university is testing as part of its involvement with Internet2 and the campus' Millennium Project.
The routing switches will be used to connect high performance Network Of Workstation (NOW) clusters together around campus, and to the Internet2 backbone.
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| Pilot software agrees to resell Thinking Machines' data mining software
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Pilot Software is going to resell Thinking Machines' Darwin Data Mining Solution and wants to integrate Darwin with Its Pilot Decision Support Suite OLAP.This agreement enables Pilot to focus on its core OLAP business, while maintaining data mining capability through Darwin.
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| SAP R/3 on Starfire sets record with 14,400 benchmark users
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Sun has reached a new high of 14,400 users, according to the SAP Standard Application Sales and Distribution (SD) benchmark on
a Starfire system. Sun claims it can scale up the
SD benchmark to 64 CPUs in a single system, while other vendors are constrained to 16 CPUs.The results were achieved using six Sun Enterprise 10000 -Starfire- servers and an Enterprise 3500 server, combined with Sun StorEdge A3000 and A5000 disk subsystems and Oracle8 Server.
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| Hewlett-Packard stays committed to HPC
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At the HiPer conference in Zürich, Bruce Toal, World Wide Marketing Manager Technical Computing,
said
Hewlet-Packard
stays committed to HPC.
The company
has sold more than 1000 high-end systems of the V-Class type and sees an increasing demand for business information as a competitive weapon. Also the Internet, the increasing system complexity and dependence on mission critical applications fuels growth in the high-end.
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| IBM introduces next generation POWER chip
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The new POWER3 chip from IBM shows that the company is determined to provide systems and services, starting with the basic building blocks. The new generation chip can perform 2 billion operations per second. A RS/6000 43P Model 260 graphics workstation is the first machine using this chip. The new chip is built especially for simulation and other demanding programs at aerospace, automobile, and drug manufacturers.
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| New Unix and NT workstations from IBM
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IBM has introduced several workstations, both Unix and NT. The RS/6000 43P Model 260 Unix workstation features the new fast POWER3 processor, and more than twice the graphic performance of its predecessors. The IntelliStation Z Pro NT systems features the 450 MHz Intel Pentium II Xeon processor, with 2D and 3D graphics. IBM also introduced a new workgroup conferencing product to enable real-time collaboration between Unix and NT systems over the internet.
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| Tera Computer attracts new capital injection
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Tera Computer Company
has received $6.0 million through a private sale of shares of common stock and warrants to two institutional investors.
The funds will be used for working capital.
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| Norwegian Scali sells 192 processor supercomputer to Paderborn
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A supercomputer company that sells a 196 processor machine, has installations in 8 countries and plans to grow to 30 employees next year. Must be located somewhere in the north-west part
of the US? No, it is the Norwegian company Scali that received an order from the Paderborn Centre for Parallel Computing
for a 192 processor system in addition to the
96 processor system already installed. The machine will be delivered later this year. The current production
installations of
parallel machines from Scali, all run a Unix operating systems. However, first pilots of NT based systems have
already been rolled out.
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| Compaq reaffirms commitment to new Himalaya solutions
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Compaq has announced a new NonStop
HimalayaSolution Server for its Decision support server (DSS). This
server incorporates fault-tolerant, highly scalable NonStop Himalaya
servers which from Tandem, the NonStop SQL database, and other software needed for
large-scale, business-critical DSS environments such as operational
data stores (ODS).
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| IBM takes supers seriously
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The recent new announcements of IBM,
the Power3 chip, and the new workstations, together with the road
show that
the company is taking
high-performance
computing seriously, but in a different way than more technical oriented companies do.
For
IBM, it is just one of the many market segments that they serve and it has never been the most important one. There were times when users from IBM supercomputers - in the technical computing field -
found this problematic. Supercomputing
was high-profile and the IBM solutions, like the 3090/VF were not leading edge.
Today, everyone has accepted that supercomputing is no longer leading the way. The IBM example shows it may turn out
not all that bad after all.
Because supercomputing is
firmly embedded into the overall plans and strategy of the company you can be sure you can buy a supercomputer from IBM even in the year 2010, although nobody
knows what the hardware and software of a supercomputer will look like by then.
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| Tera, the new
kid on the block
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Tera computer, the new kid on the supercomputer block, has not been out ofhe news since Primeur published the first 2-processor benchmarks in the PrimeurLive! from Mannnheim issue, last June.
What are these guys up to? We asked JIm Rottsolk, president and chief executive officer of Tera. 'We think there's a large market waiting for a breakthrough
in supercomputing. At Tera, we are helping people to bring
technology to the market sooner, gaining achievements in one
day that previously would take a week,'
he told us.
Many people have tried to enter the Cray industry and failed, which
has led to scepticism in the supercomputer user industry.
Rottsolk's strategy to appeal to the consumer is to convince them
through demonstration.
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| Genias adds dynamic Resource and Policy management to Linux
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Recent improvements to the popular operating system Linux and its increasing attraction have encouraged Genias Software to port its dynamic resource management software GRD (Global Dynamic Director) to Linux. With GRD, Linux will be enhanced by important server and cluster features like dynamic workload management, loadbalancing, load distribution, accounting, and calendar management. Already last year, Genias' batch queuing system Codine (Computing in Distributed Networked Environments) has been ported to PC-Linux. For the Alpha platform, Codine is expected early in November.
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| New configuration of MegaStar digital microwave transmittor
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Harris Corporation
has developed a 1:N configuration of its
MegaStar 155 digital microwave radio capable of transmitting 1.2 Gbit/s . This new model offers conversion from asynchronous DS3 to synchronous SONET/SDH or ATM networks by managing different signal interfaces. It also saves time and expense through its built-in self-alignment and performance monitoring capabilities. Harris introduced
MegaStar
in 1995.
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| IBM delivers Netfinity on Windows NT
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IBM has developed three new Netfinity servers. The machines
include advancements drawn from the world of mainframes and
supercomputers to deliver new levels of speed and management performance. The new 7000M10 is the latest Netfinity machine to be
armour-plated with 'big-server' features. Future plan for IBM is to
integrate such technologies as the SP switch supercomputer technology
that is designed to handle thousands of nodes to its Netfinity line
while maintaining compatibility with Intel microprocessors and
Microsoft software, especially Windows NT.
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| Chipset vendors push PC memory bandwidth over 1 Gbit/s
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Three PC chipset vendors: Acer Laboratories (ALi), Silicon Integrated Systems (SiS) and VIA Technologies are currently developing and will soon supply new Socket-7 and Slot-1 PC chipsets that support NEC's Virtual Channel Synchronous DRAM. Used with 133 megahertz
VC-SDRAMs, the new chipsets will allow PC OEMs to ship systems with memory bandwidth of over 1 Gbit per second.
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| Data General first to deliver 99.9% uptime guarantee NT
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Available immediately, Data General delivers 99.9% uptime for Windows NT customers, the equivalent of less than 9 hours of downtime per year.
The uptime guarantee is part of Data generals OMNiiCARE programme. The 99.9 percent uptime guarantee is available to users of Data General's departmental and enterprise AViiON servers. This includes the dual- and quad- processor AV 3650 and AV 3700 servers and the high-end, eight-processor AV 8600 server.
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| Dataram ships gigabyte memory for Sun Microsystems Enterprise Starfire 10000
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Dataram is now shipping up to 64 Gbytes of memory for Sun Microsystems' Enterprise10000 Server. Dataram's DRS702 integrates into the Gigaplane-XB interconnect, the backbone of the Starfire server, to provide the ECC memory. Dataram is offering 30-day free trials to help Starfire customers become comfortable with it.
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| Sequent unveils IA-64 plans as it readies Pentium II Xeon systems
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Sequent Computer Systems will roll out IA-64-based server products, beginning with the Merced processor, alongside new IA-32-based systems, for both the midrange and high-end server markets. Sequent's Merced-based midrange systems
will be scalable from 4 to 16 processors running UNIX or Windows NT. The first
IA-64 generation of Sequent's NUMACenter will offer optimal price/performance
in configurations of 16 processors and greater in a single system running any
combination of UNIX and Windows NT in a dynamically managed environment.
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| IBM introduces high availability service portfolio for RS/6000
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IBM has announced that it is introducing a portfolio of services for RS/6000 servers to help customers improve their system availability, maximize performance and help avoid system outages. The Services are offered in two phases: a full availability assessment of the system and recommendation plan for helping ensure system availability; and a high availability services package customizable to meet the user's systems needs.
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| Upgrades for
HP VISUALIZE workstations boosts performance by 70%
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Hewlett-Packard
Company
introduced PA-8500
processor board upgrades for its
HP
VISUALIZE Model C200 and HP VISUALIZE Model C240 Unix system-based
workstations. Performance is increased by 70%.
The
card is available in January 1999.
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| Cheap CAVES from HP
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A few years ago, immersive environments like the CAVE were scarce and very expensive. They allow design teams to virtually walk through their entire life-size product before the physical prototypes are built. HP now drives the prices for fully immersive environment below the US$ 500.000 mark with its new HP VISUALIZE Center that includes three HP VISUALIZE J2240 workstations configured with VISUALIZE Center, software and integration kit; and a Panoram GVR-120, Immersive Visualization System (6.5 x 2 m
cylindrical screen). Smaller work group editions were also announced.
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| New 17 inch SGI flat panel monitor costs 3,000 bucks
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SGI introduced a high-res digital flat panel monitor: The Silicon Graphics 1600SW flat panel monitor features 17.3-inch 1600x1024 pixel SuperWide format screen. The Silicon Graphics 1600SW flat panel monitor will also be available for current Silicon Graphics O2 workstations as well as future Silicon Graphics workstation products for Windows NT. The monitor will begin shipping for O2 workstations in November 1998
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| Do your own online surgery simulation
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The world of surgery simulators is getting more crowded everyday.
This is very positive news for medical students, trainees and surgeons in the various specialized hospital departments.
The performance of complicated procedures and innovative surgical techniques can be trained extensively without having to involve the patient in the impending risks of experimental try-outs.
At the Manchester Visualisation Centre, situated at the University of Manchester, Dr. Nigel W. John and Dr. Nick Philips, who is active at the Department of Neurosurgery at Leeds General Infirmary, have decided to establish a resource for online surgical training tools.
A first Web-based surgical trainer for simulation of ventricular catheterisation has already been installed.
To run the simulator, the researchers have implemented Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML).
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| Beta version of JAVA3D available for free testing
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Sun Microsystems has made the beta version of its Java 3D
application programming interface (API) available on the SunWebsite
'sun.com/desktop/java3d' for free download and evaluation. The 3D development tool is
based on open standards and, according to Sun, relatively easy to use.
A 3D API is a network-centric, scene graph-based API which enables
programmers utilizing Java to quickly and easily add 3D content to
applets and applications.
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| Over
270 Origin 200's and 140 O2's needed to create 'Antz'
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More than 270 dual-CPU Origin200 servers and 140 O2 workstations were used to create the new film 'Antz'. DreamWorks/ Pacific Data Images (PDI) used the O2 desktop workstation to create the film's visual effects, such as the human-like facial movements and realistic water imagery. Origin 200 servers provided the compute power for the entire film, including the visually complex ant colony and large crowd scenes.
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| Silicon Graphics gets equity investment in Real 3D
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Real 3D and Silicon Graphics formed a strategic relationship which includes a minority equity investment in Real 3D by SGI. Details of the equity investment were not disclosed. Lockheed Martin remains the majority owner of Real 3D while Intel and Silicon Graphics hold minority interests. Real 3D and SGI will establish cooperative marketing, technology and business development arrangements. In a separate agreement, Real 3D and Silicon Graphics have agreed to terminate
all litigation between the two companies and have entered into a royalty-free computer graphics patent cross-license.
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| France Telecom selects ATM for its multiservice network
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France Telecom has chosen the ATM ACE-101 network
termination unit from RAD Data Communications in order to guarantee the
quality of its Multiservice Over ATM (OMA) service. Newbridge France
will handle the installation and maintenance of this equipment.
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| Fore ships new workgroup products
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FORE Systems has introduced the new ForeRunnerLE 25 ATM Workgroup Switch and the new ForeRunnerLE 25 network interface card (NIC). The ForeRunnerLE intelligently and transparently recognizes the type of traffic being sent from each desktop and allocates network bandwidth
accordingly.
This allows network administrators to reserve more bandwidth for critical database server-connections while restricting less time-sensitive traffic like email. The ForeRunnerLE ATM adapter family also supports native ATM applications using the Winsock Application Programming Interface.
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| First demonstration of Gbyte system network technology
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The High Performance Networking Forum (HNF) announced two milestones regarding Gigabyte System Network (GSN) technology. GSN technology, also known as HIPPI-6400, was demonstrated publicly for the first time on October 13 at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. Genroco demonstrated its PCI GSNinterface by linking a Sun SPARC with a Compaq Alpha platform. Silicon Graphics networked a pair of SGI workstations using the technology. A second milestone is the final balloting process for the GSN proposed standards. The draft standard proposes a one Gbyte per second parallel copper interface capable of supporting link distances of up to forty meters.
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