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November 1997
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Applications
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HPCN industry
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Media and Visualisation
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Austria
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Belgium
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France
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Germany
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United Kingdom
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| Targeting proteins speeds development of new drugs
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Structural Bioinformatics (SBI) has installed an IBM RS/6000
SP to run powerful computer simulation programs that help speed the
development of new and more effective drugs. This private company,
based in San Diego, is concentrating its calculations on the structure
of human proteins in order to design molecules which positively affect
the proteins, a key starting point for projects focusing on drug
design.
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| CERN, Caltech and HP open scientific datacenter
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The European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and Hewlett-Packard start a joint project to build a model scientific-data-analysis center in Pasadena, California. The center, called the Globally
Interconnected Object Databases (GIOD) project, will test and evaluate the infrastructure needed to make very large simulations and computing resources available to research physicists.
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| Ministry contracts Unisys to prepare for the EU-chair
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Unisys Austria was awarded a $ 5 million order for the
realisation of the project MEDIA (Modernisation of the Electronic
Dataprocessing) with the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a
general contractor. MEDIA was initiated to prepare the Austrian
government for the 1998 EU-chair and connected activities.
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| How to distribute virtual reality
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The University of Antwerp is developing a software platform for building virtual reality applications.
Kris Demuynk explained
his project during the November Euro-VR Mini-Conference in Amsterdam.
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| CNUSC opens new service in bio-sequences
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CNUSC is about to open a new service in bio-sequences comparisons. Based on the LASSAP software package, a parallelized program developed at INRIA-Rocquencourt, this service will take advantage of the SP2/79 processors performance for bio-sequences comparisons.
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| New CADAM applications for the automotive and aerospace industries
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IBM and Dassault Systemes have introduced new products and capabilities for CATIA-CADAM applications that extend the ability to handle large-scale digital mock-up and add new generative capabilities, particularly for the automotive and aerospace industries.
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| Lectra and IBM sign worldwide partnership agreement
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Lectra has signed a worldwide partnership agreement with IBM. The
agreement aims at providing Lectra Systèmes customers with
applications including provision of software and access and use of
network computing (the Internet, Intranets and interconnected LANs)
through IBM's worldwide network.
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| Siemens Nixdorf is ready to ship the Microsoft Cluster Server
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Siemens Nixdorf is ready to supply the "Microsoft Cluster
Server", previously known as Wolfpack. The Microsoft Cluster
Server software module is part of the latest Microsoft Windows NT
Server Enterprise Edition 4.0 and has been tested on Siemens Nixdorf's
Intel-based Primergy 560 and 760 models.
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| Data General supplies Comparex with OpenLine servers
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Comparex Informationssysteme has concluded an OEM agreement with Data General Corporation. Under the agreement, Data General's AViiON Intel based enterprise servers will be resold as part of Comparex's OpenLine product family. The agreement includes the company's new high-end AV 20000 systems which
utilize highly scalable NUMA technology, as well as Data General's AViiON NT
Cluster-in-a-Box based on the AV 3650 and AV 6600 AViiON servers.
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| Rostock Cray extends to Institute of Research of Baltic Sea
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The Computer Centre at the University of Rostock is equipped with a SGI/Cray T3E900 AC40-128
with a total of 44 processors. It ranked 116 in the June and 149 in the present November Top500 list (21.75 GFlop/s Rmax with 40 processors). It serves the institutes in the university and IOW (Inst. fër Ostseeforschung at University Rostock) in Warnemënde. There are special contractual agreements, as 8 of the processors belong to IOW. Other, industrial relevant application areas at the university are shipbuilding, biomechanics, biomedicine and other engineering problems.
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| High-Performance Computing trend in Germany
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At an October meeting in Munich, the Supercomputing Working Group
of ZKI (the German Centres for Communication and Information)
discussed the present status and new trends in High-Performance Computing in Germany. In 1995 the Board of the German Science Council presented a report in which they found that Germany was falling behind the other countries with respect to high performance computing. The council recommended to form two to four German national centers with machines ranking in the first top 20 of the Top 500 list. Four computing centers reported on the progress so far.
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| Conference on High-Performance Computing in Chemistry
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The Research Centre of
Jülich, one of the large
centres in Germany, will organise a conference on "High-Performance Computing in Chemistry", from February 16th to February 18th, 1998.
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| Training on Starfire servers
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The Regional Computer Centre of the University of Cologne, (RRZK) installed its Sun Ultra Enterprise 10000 (Starfire) in the beginning of May. Shortly after this, Sun and the Computer Centre organised a user training. The slides were collected and edited by Tilman Boenniger as a report, also available on video.
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| Hans Meuer acquires a non-TOP500 computer
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The TOP500 pope, Professor Hans Meuer is moving to commercial applications. In February the new Siemens-Nixdorf RM1000 will officially be taken into service at the University of Mannheim. The machine will be subdivided into several systems and be used in education and training in SAP R/3 as well as in Operations Research.
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| Sainsbury's examines loyalty data
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Sainsbury's, one of the top three UK supermarkets, started using NUMA parallel processing systems from Data General to analyse data collected from its customer loyalty card programme. In a 3.7 Million pound deal, Data General supplied
a 32-processor Aviion AV 2000 which it claims is the largest commercially available NUMA server in the world. Sainsbury's already has a 16-processor AV 2000 server. The benefit of implementing a data warehousing application on two servers is guaranteed availability, according to Martin Wright, Sainsbury's IT infrastructure manager.
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| IBM SP World 97 user event
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IBM staged a European event, called SP World 97, on 28-29 October, outside London. This was an IBM event for users with RS/6000 and SP systems.
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| Evaluation Workshop encourages contact
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The 8th Workstation Evaluation Workshop was held at Daresbury Laboratories, UK, on 11-12 November 1997. This workshop, followed the format of previous years and was intended to encourage close contact between the research communities from Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics and Materials and the major vendors of workstations, software and peripherals.The Conference also had an exhibition attached to it with most of the major HPC vendors represented.
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| Madge hosts meeting to evolve draft of HSTR standard
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High Speed Token Ring (HSTR) alliance meeting will be held in
the UK and hosted by Madge Networks. The forum plans to use the meeting
to evolve the first working draft of the HSTR standard, which was
presented to the IEEE 802.5 (Token Ring) committee for peer review and
preliminary approval at the IEEE's regularly scheduled meeting on 10 November.
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| Glasgow school of art partners with SGI to combine art and technology
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Silicon Graphics has supplied the Glasgow School of Art with
high-performance workstations, servers and 3D-graphic computers for its
new centre for creative excellence, the Digital Design Studio. The
Studio will train artists, designers, film-makers and engineers to work
with advanced technologies that have become the 'tools of the trade'
within many industries. The total value of the systems is over half a
million pounds.
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| Data General ships first Intel based 32-processor ccNUMA to
Sainsbury
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Data General has shipped a 32-processor AViiON AV 20000 ccNUMA
server to retailer Sainsbury's. This represents the industry's first
shipment of a 32-processor ccNUMA system based on the Intel
architecture. Sainsbury's is using their two AV 20000 servers for a data
warehousing application based on the Oracle database. This multi
Terabyte data warehouse stores information about Sainsbury's customers
collected at the point of sale through their loyalty card programme.
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| Policy scheduling gives multiple applications on a single Unix server
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The days of a Unix server running one application are
numbered, claims ICL, the IT systems and services company, with the
development of its Policy Scheduling technology for Unix. The Policy
scheduler uses scheduling techniques developed within ICL's OpenVME
operating system. The technology works by assigning system resource by
business need.
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| UK's largest data archive for mobile telecoms
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Logica has won a major GBP 5 million contract from Vodafone, a
mobile telecom company. Logica is going to supply the archive system
"Calls Park" to store information relating to calls made by
Vodafone's three million network users. The Calls Park system from
Logica will provide Vodafone with a complete automated network audit capability which can be used as the basis for reconciling billing
queries, improving customer service, and planning network expansion.
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| Computing time is not a problem
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The Parallel Computing Initiative II
(PCI-II) is an ESPRIT project financed by the European Commission, aimed to promote among the European industries the application of parallel systems and HPC technology in general. The PCI-II program brings together 10 different projects with one objective: to enhance the performance of European industries by using parallel technology.
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| BULL to sell IBM's Raven servers, extending the OEM agreement
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French IT vendor Bull plans to sell IBM Corp's 64-bit RS/6000 Raven symmetrical multiprocessing server technology, something that IBM at one time said the French company would not get access to. Extending their 1992 agreement, Bull will resell the Raven servers as high-end RL Rack Large servers, making it part of its Escala line.
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| NEC and Phillips sign partnership agreement
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NEC and Philips signed a partnership agreement targeting consumer applications with the MIPS architecture microprocessor. In the initial stage of this agreement, NEC will provide its VR 4300 series 64-bit processor core, one of the most advanced MIPS processors, while Philips will work with NEC on chip integration and support technologies.
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| Sun's Ultra Enterprise E10000 a big success
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Helmut Krings, Sun's General Manager in Germany, reported on the success of Sun's flagship server the Ultra Enterprise 10000. At the end of the third quarter of 1997, 194 of these systems were shipped. In Germany 11 orders were placed during the quarter.
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| Virtual Medical Worlds Magazine -
a new service from Primeur
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Together with Euromed and with support from HPCnet, Primeur started a new magazine "Virtual Medical Worlds Magazine". It
is an initiative to keep the public well informed about the latest
computing related telemedicine results. The magazine has been conceived as a news site on the web which will appear on a monthly basis.
It is also available through e-mail.
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| A million credit card transactions in five hours
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PaySys International and Sun Microsystems released results of
internal performance tests demonstrating that VisionPLUS on the Sun
Enterprise Server platform completed in excess of one million credit
card transactions in less than five hours. VisionPLUS is the latest
credit card management software from Paysys.
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| Paradigm makes GeoDepth suite available on HP platforms
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Paradigm Geophysical Corporation will make the Paradigm
Geophysical GeoDepth application suite available to HP computing
customers. This application is used by oil companies worldwide for
imaging complex subsurface geologies. GeoDepth 98 applications will be
made available on HP's technical computing platforms, and GeoDepth
migration applications will be parallelized and performance-tuned for
HP's Exemplar family of scalable servers.
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| Encore dominates aerospace simulation market
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In a recent article printed in Flight Safety Magazine,
a survey of military and civilian programs highlight Encore's domination of these segments.
The 36 years old company is specialized in computer systems for simulation programs and has a majority share of the total simulation market.
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| CAPS successfully scales storm prediction on 1,328 Cray
T3E-900
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Researchers from the Center for Analysis and Prediction of
Storms (CAPS) at the University of Oklahoma recently used a 1,328
processor CRAY T3E-900 supercomputer to achieve record results on tests
they hope will improve both the speed and accuracy of severe weather
forecasting. The system is the largest ever made by Silicon
Graphics/Cray and the world's fastest production-class computer.
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| Concurrent contracted US navy and Lockheed
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Concurrent Computer Corporation received an order for five
real-time PowerMAXION computers as well as integrated hardware and
PowerWorks software for U.S. Navy AEGIS class ships. The purchase order
is for $2million. The company also signed a contract with Lockheed
Martin. Under this worldwide joint marketing agreement for
cooperatively pursuing real-time computing opportunities, the companies
will jointly seek out sales opportunities.
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| Sun signs OEM deal with Softway
to sell Sharell software
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Sun Microsystems and Softway, an Australian software company, have signed an OEM agreement for Sun to offer ShareII software with its Sun Enterprise server product line.
Developed by Softway, ShareII is a resource management tool.
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| Unix and Windows NT integrated for voice applications
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Hewlett-Packard plans to deliver computing platforms for
network-based telecommunications applications using the Microsoft
Windows NT Server operating system. The platforms are to be used for
the development and operation of Signaling System 7 (SS7) and voice
applications on Windows NT Server. These platforms, which will also
include central office configurations, are expected to be available in
1998.
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| NEC appeals against supercomputer dumping case
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NEC
and its U.S. subsidiary HNSX Supercomputers have
appealed to the Court of International Trade against the September 26, 1997 determination
by the International Trade Commission that
imports of Japanese supercomputers
threatened to injure U.S. supercomputer producers.
Samuel W. Adams, vice president of HNSX for Sales and Marketing,
stated that "The ITC found a threat of injury despite the fact that U.S. producers
dominate the market, sales by Japanese firms have
been minimal, and Japanese
supercomputers are in fact excluded from
a significant share of the U.S.
market. This finding is wholly at odds with the evidence presented to the ITC
and with the realities of the supercomputer market."
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| Europe doing well in upper regions TOP500 supercomputer list
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In the November 1997 issue of the TOP500 supercomputer sites, three of
the first ten machines are located in Europe. In fact, the number 9 to
14 all have the same performance. From these 14 machines, 5 are located
in Europe. First machine in the TOP500 is still the ASCI Red machine at
Sandia Labs, USA, second is a Cray Y3E at a classified US site and
third is a Cray T3E at UK Meteorological Office. First Japanes machine
is a Hitachi/Tsukuba machine located at the University of Tsukuba. All
500 machines together represent a computing power of 17 Tflop/s, a
quarter of which is available on the European continent.
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| Netapdex showcased high-speed networking at EITC
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At the large European IT conference and exhibition in Brussels last
week, Netapdex showcased the one year results of a number of high-speed
European networking projects. APAT, EROPPA, CANET, COVAS, RCnet, all
funded by the European Commission's Esprit programme,
experimented with networks ranging from ISDN to high-end ATM.
Applications included co-operative work and distributed processing. It
was the first time that there was a direct ATM connection to the yearly
EITC conference. Netapdex experience shows ATM, Java, and VRML are
still not mature technologies.
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| New EC call on " Concurrent Engineering in
Aeronautics"
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The EC requests proposals on " Concurrent Engineering in
Aeronautics". Also HPCN tasks from the Esprit programme are
involved in this call for proposals. Closing date is February 1998.
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| HLRS Stuttgart joins in trans-atlantic metacomputing
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An international team of computer experts combined the
capacity of machines at three large supercomputer centers that exceeded
three Tflop/s. The meta-computing effort used for the simulations
linked 3 of the top 10 largest supercomputers in the world. Involved
were HLRS, the High-Performance Computing-Center at the University of
Stuttgart, Germany, Sandia National Laboratories, SNL, Albuquerque, NM,
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Pittsburgh, PA. They demonstrated a
trans-Atlantic meta-computing and meta-visualization environment. The
demonstration is a component of this official G7 Information Society
pilot programme.
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| HP and Caltech power-up 256-CPU Exemplar X-class system
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The Hewlett-Packard 256-CPU Exemplar X-Class system with 64 gigabytes
of main memory and 1 terabyte of disk space is up and running at the
California Institute of Technology. According to Caltech it is the
biggest shared-memory cache-coherent system ever put together. The
installation of the 256-CPU Exemplar system at Caltech signals the
completion of phase one in a three-phase collaborative project with
Caltech. This project, initiated a year ago, was announced officially
at Supercomputing '96.
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| OCTANE CADduo allows two users on one system
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The new Sillicon Graphics OCTANE CADduo option enables two
users to work on one OCTANE system at the same time, thereby increasing the functionality and decreasing the total cost per
seat. With two computer-aided design (CAD) seats per OCTANE, system, administration and support costs are also reduced.
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| Enhancements for Cray T90
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Silicon Graphics/Cray Research has enhanced its general-purpose
CRAY T90 vector supercomputers. The computer has larger and faster
memory and faster secondary storage. CRAY T90 systems are used by major corporations, research facilities and government organizations to solve complex simulations.
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| New parallel Compaq servers
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Along with the new clusters Compaq also developed four new Compaq ProLiant servers. Three of them feature
the Highly Parallel System Architecture, a new standards-based design that doubles system performance in memory and PCI (a) I/O bandwidth. In addition, enhanced versions of Compaq SmartStart and Compaq Insight Manager, setup and management tools are available. Likewise a new Compaq Hot Plug Redundant Power Supply for its mainstream server line.
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| Compac developed new ProLiant clusters
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Compaq Computer Corporation revealed new ProLiant Clusters. The ProLiant Cluster Series F will use Fibre Channel technology as the storage connection and either Ethernet or Tandem's ServerNet technology as the server interconnect. Fibre Channel technology provides higher performance and greater configuration flexibility than other storage technologies. Compaq will also release the ProLiant Cluster Series S, which will feature SCSI storage, and the Microsoft Cluster server.
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| Clustering
based on HP high performance servers
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Hewlett-Packard Company has developed HP NetServer clustering applications based on its NetServer LH and LX systems. Each configuration combines two high-performance HP NetServer systems, a
range of scalable components and shared storage options, Microsoft Cluster Server software and a suite of high-availability services.
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| MIPS group expects to ship 70 millionth RISC processor next month
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The MIPS Group of Silicon Graphics expects the MIPS174 architecture is continuing its high growth rate and expects to see the 70 millionth MIPS RISC processor ship sometime next month. MIPS processors are manufactured by
semiconductor partners for a wide variety of markets and applications.
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| Programme on Origin 2000 scales to
128 processors
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The Cray
Origin2000 supercomputer has run a parallel scalable programme on a 128-processor configuration operating in a single system image (SSI) environment at a NCSA. The
high-bandwidth and low latency CrayLink interconnect technology
was combined with the scalable IRIXTM operating environment to achieve this result. According to Cray this is a new scalability record for SMP machines.
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| Pushing SAP's R/3 to the limits
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Sun reported that it's
Enterprise 450 server set a new performance record for a four-processor system on SAP's R/3. According to the company results surpassed the best results posted by any four-way PC- based system running Microsoft Windows NT by more than 60 percent.
Supporting 190 benchmark users with an average dialog response time of 1.44 seconds, the Enterprise 450 system achieved throughput of 59.800 dialog steps per hour with an average CPU utilization of 99 percent - equivalent to 19,900 fully business processed order line items per hour.
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| Sun launches data centre server consolidation programme
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Sun Microsystems has launched a data centre server consolidation programme designed to help customers reduce the complexity and cost of their information technology
infrastructure by physically consolidating their servers and logically consolidating applications.
The new programme helps Sun customers to evaluate their IT environment and identify areas where major benefits can be realized, and provides professional installation and system migration services.
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| Sun claims
Starfire outperforms Origin 2000 and AlphaServer 8400 cluster
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SUN claims that, according to a Linpack benchmark test, the single node Sun Starfire outperforms the 64 CPU (195 Mhz) SGI Origin 2000 and the 64 CPU (440 Mhz) Digital AlphaServer 8400 cluster. The test results show that the single node Sun HPC 10000 server, configured with 64 UltraSPARC II (250 Mhz)
CPUs, 4 Mbyte second-level cache, 16 Gbyte of memory and 63 Gbyte of Sun RSM Array 2000 storage, delivered 26.45 Gflop/s with a matrix size of
19,968 (Nmax) and achieved 82.7% of peak CPU performance.
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| SGI cuts 4-processor system prices to under $1M
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Silicon Graphics and Cray Research price the
immediate available 64-processor CRAY Origin2000 Varsity configuration, specifically tailored for the education market.
Priced below the one-million dollar mark (U.S. List Price), this system simplifies the purchase approval cycles for academic organizations, and will result in many departments now being able to acquire and directly manage dedicated computing resources.
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| IDC predicts steady growth of worldwide server market
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According to an IDC report, the worldwide server market's
steady growth is expected to continue through 1997 and beyond. IDC's
new bulletin, Server Market Review and Forecast, 1995-2001 forecasts
that, assisted by the overall stability of the world's major economies,
server spending will keep pace with the rise of overall IT
hardware spending. Corporations will be spending more and more
toward better servers, driving worldwide end-user server revenues to
$92.9 billion by the year 2001, a compound annual growth rate of 9.1
percent.
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| Software collaboration leads to "self-healing"
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According to Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi and NEC the first
milestone in their joint alliance is reached. Cooperation between the
companies was designed to help drive the development of HP-UX well into
the 21st century. The coming year, joint software collaboration will
focus on introducing "self-healing" elements into the
operating environment through a new "exception
infrastructure". The first components of the exception infrastructure
produced by this joint development are expected to be available in
HP-UX by the end of 1998.
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| New compilers boost MIPS processor performance
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The new MIPSpro 7.2 compilers for the
MIPS microprocessor architecture are enhanced
with a wide range of advanced
software optimization techniques. The new
compilers boost the performance
of software applications running on Silicon
Graphics' MIPS microprocessor-based workstations, servers and
supercomputers for technical, scientific and commercial computing with with up to 25%.
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| VR emerges from its cave
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Carolina Cruz-Neira, better known as the 'cave woman', because she built the first Virtual Reality cave, came straight to the point at the November Euro-VR Mini-Conference in Amsterdam.
She stated that the term Virtual Reality has been severely abused lately. Her prime concern is to lift the VR concept out of the cave into the real world and to see how it can be implemented in a useful manner.
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| Unilever looks at VR as a tool for integrated research
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During the Amsterdam Euro-VR Mini-Conference held in November, Jacob de Vlieg, head of the Biophysics Unit and a staff member of the Biotechnology Group of Unilever Research, evoked the concept of Virtual Reality as a tool for integrated research.
The Unilever biophysics unit is working on computer-based methods to improve communication in extensive multidisciplinary research teams.
Primary goals here are the streamlining of the research process via optimal collaborative approaches and the development of knowledge discovery tools such as virtual reality.
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| Fraunhofer Institute opens new Virtual Engineering Lab
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IDG, the Institut für Graphische Datenverarbeitungopened
a new VirtualEngineering Lab. The centre was developed in collaboration
with Hewlett Packard. Teams of engineers can work together on product
development over the net.The centre usesARCADE (Advanced Realism CAD
Environment) for direct manipulation of 3D-Modes. HP delivers to the
centre PCs, work stations and graphical supercomputers.
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| SGI and facilities provider NOB to develop services and
technology
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The Dutch facility company Nederlands Omroepproduktie Bedrijf
(NOB) and Silicon Graphics have agreed to jointly develop services and technology
for the fast-evolving European broadcast market. The "Memorandum
of Understanding" focuses specifically on three areas of business
development - digital distribution of both linear and interactive
services, digital asset management, and content creation through use of
virtual production technologies.
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| Alien insects threaten human life, thanks to ATM
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Millions of moviegoers sat riveted to their seats as hordes of marauding alien insects threatened the future of the human race. While audiences rooted for the Federal troops as Starship Troopers invaded theaters on November 7 in the USA, the real stars are the bugs. The film features the most elaborate special effects ever created for a movie, including more than 220 shots involving the warrior insects created by Tippett Studio, which utilized
high-performance
ATM network products from FORE.
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| Intergraph offers new version of StudioZ for video production
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Intergraph Computer Systems has developed a rackmount version of
Intergraph's StudioZ for Softimage DS, the first certified
platform for
Softimage's new Softimage DS nonlinear video production system. Using the multiprocessor Intel/Windows NT-based StudioZ for Softimage DS, video production professionals can perform video capture, nonlinear editing, compositing, paint, audio editing and titling on a single rackmount system.
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| ATM system will unify children's hospital
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The York Hill NHS Trust in the U.K. has invested GBP 95,000 in an ATM
backbone system from Digital in order to draw together the children's
and maternity hospitals which share its Glasgow site. The new network
will allow the Trust to support a unified Hospital Information Support
System (HISS) which will allow a patient's records to follow them
around the hospital during their stay. The HISS will link patient
administration, patient records, radiology, pharmacy and the laboratories, and in the near future will hook up virtually all departments.
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