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September 1997
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Applications
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HPCN Industry
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Media and Visualisation
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Germany
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Russia
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Switzerland
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United Kingdom
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the Netherlands
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| McDonnell Douglas Purchases two Encore Infinities for Space Shuttle Program
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McDonnell Douglas has purchased two Encore Infinity R/T computer systems and integration services to perform data acquisition and monitoring for the space shuttle program. The systems and services will be installed at Kennedy Space Centre and are customized to withstand shuttle launches.
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| Unicore will give web-based interface
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The
Germany Ministry of Science has approved funding for
Unicore, a two year project, which will provide transparent access to a number of large German supercomputer centres and to the resources of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting.
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| Starfire Selected as SAP Development Platform
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SAP has selected the SUN Starfire running the Solaris operating environment as a platform for the development and testing of SAP's R/3 ERP solution, including R/3 release 4.0. SAP expects the new Starfire system to reduce overall product development time, cost of system administration and to speed R/3's time-to-market. R/3 Release 4.0 becomes available later this year.
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| Siemens Nixdorf's RM600 Comes Out Top
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According to The latest transaction performance benchmark (TPC-C) Siemens Nixdorf's Unix
servers come out on top when compared with their competitors on the international market. According to Siemens, with 11,503 tpmC (transactions per minute) the RM600 Model E20 in the 8-CPU class is in the first rank of all Unix servers and so outclasses 18 other systems listed in the TPC-C publication.
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| SNI Parallel Business Processing to Pyramid
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Siemens Pyramid and Siemens Nixdorf, further integrated their
open enterprise server systems for online analytical processing (OLAP)
and online transaction processing (OLTP) applications. Siemens
Pyramid will be responsible for all new parallel processing technologies
for the Open Enterprise Computing (OEC) line of business. Pyramid will
also take on global management of all OEC partner relationships with
North America-based companies.
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| Largest German Video Archive
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Siemens Nixdorf and Sat.1 join forces in setting up the first
digital video archive in the German speaking world. The planned storage
capacity is one Petabyte. This is a billion million bytes. The project, for which Siemens
Nixdorf will function as general contractor, includes the supplying of
hardware and operating software, plus the creation of individual
programs.
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| The End of World Wide Waiting
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Sometimes the World Wide Web seems to be the World Wide
Waiting. Scientists at the Heinrich Hertz-Institut (HHI) in Berlin have
been looking into processes wich can help reduce bottlenecks in the backbone without forcing operators to dig and lay new cables. In
experimental situations they now claim to have achieved a data
throughput of 160 Gbit/s. In the present situation transmission
capacities seldom exceed 2.5 Gbit/s, in a few individual cases 10 Gbit/s.
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| Three Large German Supercomputer Centres Upgrades
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In Germany there are three major supercomputer centres with
512 processor T3E's, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft MPI/IPP Garching and HWW Stuttgart. These centres are boosting their T3E computing power.
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| Mechanical Design - back to the future
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Professor Hans-Juergen Zebisch, Head of Steinbeiss-Transfer Centre in Karlsruhe gave a keynote talk in a one-day Hewlett-Packard seminar on Mechanical Design Automation. He presented his view on SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises), and the
challenges for enterprises.
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| Object Orientation in HPCN
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The second Component User's Conference (CUC 97) took place in Munich. It focused on
component-based software techniques in real applications and discussed the topic of re-usability of software components. The conference
saw a range of new developments in the areas of componentware-platforms, CORBA, DCOM, ActiveX, JavaBeans; object technologies and relational databases; and patterns and framework as well as design methods and development tools for components. These could also have an impact on HPCN.
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| NEC, Mitsui and Sumitomo Communicate in Russia
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NEC, Mitsui and Sumitomo officially opened NEC Neva
Communications Systems, a joint-venture company located in St.
Petersburg, to manufacture, market and maintain telecommunications
systems. St. Petersburg invested also in the company.
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| HP Installs High Performance Networking at Commerzbank
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Hewlett-Packard
is installing an IT infrastructure for Commerzbank headquarters in Frankfurt.
The new infrastructure, which includes the latest network technology, services for office automation and multifunctional workstations, is designed to meet the high security requirements of a major bank.
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| Lausanne Workshop on HPC and Telecommunication
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On September 18-19 TelePar'79, the first workshop on High Performance Computing and Telecommunications, will be held in Lausanne.
The field of telecommunications needs High Performance Computing in order to solve the numerous problems encountered when deploying, maintaining or running a telecommunication network.
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| Sun Opens European Benchmark Centre in Geneva
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Sun Microsystems has opened a new international Benchmark Centre in Geneva, Switzerland. The centre is an addition to
existing benchmarking capabilities available in France, Germany and the UK. It will give customers access to large server systems and configurations, with a total disc capacity of more than 5 terabytes.
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| ICL works with Intel on Merced based Systems
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European IT systems and services company ICL is working with
Intel on advanced platforms architecture for Intel's future IA-64
processor family, the first of which is the Merced processor.
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| Adobe Premiere Available for SGI 02
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The Adobe Premiere desktop nonlinear video editing software
application, has been released for SGI O2 workstations. The software
enables video and multimedia professionals to combine video, audio,
animation, still images and graphics for creating QuickTime and Video for
Windows (AVI) digital movies. Adobe Premiere 4.2 has been optimized for
the O2 platform, and includes hardware-accelerated transitions and
filters, as well as special 3D plug-ins.
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| BBC Presents Virtual Studio
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IBC'97 in Amsterdam saw the launch of Truematte and Free-d, two products
designed by the BBC for use in their virtual studio. IBC also sees the
European launch of the Virtual Studio product D-Focus after its
appearance at NAB this year. BBC Virtual Studio will be selling the
application of these unique products for use in BBC studios, as well as
seeking licensing partners and customers.
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| Sequent Servers go Underground
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ICL, who provides IT services to London Underground (LU) has
completed the migration of a wide range of LU's besoke business
critical applications to four new Sequent enterprise servers. The total
cost of the migrations project is over GBP 2 million. The new Sequent servers, a
Symmetry 5000 SE80, two Symmetry 5000 SE40's and a Symmetry 5000 SE30,
take the place of several systems including two large Bul and two
large Pyramid systems.
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| Silicon Graphics Expands in Scotland and Ireland
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Silicon Graphics is expanding it's business operations in Scotland and Ireland, managed from its Falkirk office. Jim Irving has been appointed Branch Manager to develop the current growth in markets such as the offshore oil and gas industry, the academic and public sectors, and manufacturing industry.
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| Baan Acquires Siemens' ALX-COMET Business
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Siemens Nixdorf and Baan expand their sales partnership.
Baan will take over the entire ALX-COMET business field from Siemens Nixdorf, while Siemens Nixdorf will market Baan's standard software products worldwide as a sales partner. In particular Baan products will be offered within Siemens itself. The sales partnership is being set up with a long-term perspective, and the total value of the agreement is reported to be over 10 million Ecu.
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| CWI Calculates Prime Factors of 180 Digit Number
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Once again, Herman te Riele at the CWI set a record with
calculating the factors of a very large number. This time with 180
digits. The factors were found after only twelve days of computation on
85 SGI/Cray computers at CWI. Microsoft will acquire the code to get
acquinted with factoring technologies that have a great impact on
cryptographic techniques.
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| Go Ahead for Dutch Leading Technological Institute
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The Dutch government recently gave the
go ahead
for the establishment of a Leading Technological Institute (LTI) in Telematics. CWI
is one of the partners in this institute, together with the Telematics
Research Centre (TRC) in Enschede, the universities of Twente and
Delft, TNO and a number of companies. In total 4 LTI's will be formed
this year (the others are on Polymers, Food and Metals).
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| Esprit Projects Too Small for Real Impact
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Esprit projects, funded by the European Commission, are small, compared to industrial projects in Europe which are funded completely within one company. Also compared to US funded public HPC projects, Esprit projects with a size of typically a few million ECU are small. Clustering could be a way out, proposed John Murphy from British Aerospace. It could keep the projects themselves small enough to be effective but align them with others so that together they do make a difference.
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| New Vision for HPCN?
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A key challenge for industry is
to develop innovative high-performance technologies and products at affordable costs while meeting demanding safety and environmental requirements. As a consequence, high-tech products and processes are characterized
by an increasingly "scientific content", multidisciplinarity, and complexity. This situation has created the conditions and the need for a new vision of
HPCN.
HPCN, Modeling, and Simulation should be no longer considered as "self contained" disciplines able to replace and displace other methodologies as the experimental one, but as powerful "Knowledge Multipliers and Integrators".
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| Europort-D makes Parallel Industrial Codes Widely Available
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Europort
was
a large cluster of projects
with the goal of moving
a large number of commercial application codes to parallel platforms. It succeeded in doing so for many industrial applications.
In a follow-on project, called Europort-D,
the results are redesigned into demonstrators that can be used to
show
companies what parallel computing could do for them.
Both the Europort and the Europort-D projects were funded by the
European Commission's Esprit Programme.
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| Succesfully Parallelised Chemical Codes Available through Europort-D
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Europort was
a large cluster of projects
with the goal of moving
a large number of commercial application codes to parallel platforms. See the
introduction article elsewhere in this September issue of Primeur Monthly.
Drug development
now goes much faster using the parallel version of the Chromos code.
Same is thru in the polymer process industry,
which now can use a much faster POLYFLOW analysis code.
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| EC Meetings for Thematic Calls in the Esprit 4th Framework Programme
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This autumn the EC organizes information events throughout Europe to further the interest in two topics of the current series of thematic calls for R&D in the Esprit 4th Framework Programme: "IT for Learning and Training in Industry" and "Information Access and Interfaces".
Experts and prospective submitters of proposals in these areas are invited to join the information event in their country.
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| Esprit's R&D Calls Target a Broader Audience
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Anticipating the new integral approach of the Esprit 5th Framework Programme, the 4th Framework Programme closes it's series of thematic calls for the R&D area with two calls that break the usual mould. The two new themes are "IT for Learning and Training in Industry" and "Information Access and Interfaces".
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| Dynamite Explodes Power of Workstations
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Many small businesses have a possible MPP system on the
premises without realising it. Rows and rows of workstations are not
used to their full potential: they are merely active when the desktop
user requires their computing time. A survey at a car designer plant
pointed out that nearly 75% of the time most workstations do not work
at all. Those redundant cycles ought to be put to good use, but how?
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| EUROMED proposes cure for health care security
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The Euromed telemedicine project aims at creating a Virtual Medical World where all medical information is available everywhere were it is needed. However revolutionary the concept of telemedicine may be, both patients and physicians most certainly do not rejoice at the idea of having scattered, highly confidential medical data throughout the World Wide Web open to consultation for every curious eye, indiscreet or not.
How is the EUROMED project dealing with the problem of safely sending its Virtual Medical Worlds information over the Internet? Euromed-ETS should provide the solution.
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| Fourth European PVM - MPI User Group Meeting
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From November 3-5 the fourth PVM-MPI '97 Conference will be held in Krakow, Poland.The Conference is organized jointly by the Academic Computer Centre and the Institute of Computer Science, both in Krakow, and the Committee for Informatics of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The conference is followed by the HP high-performance computing conference.
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| Seamless Computing pulls power to your desk
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A new technique, called seamless computing
should bring to heavy computing users the same thing as the Web brought to heavy information users: they will get their computing cycles from anywhere, without having to do anything special. It is not there yet, but experts, present at a workshop hosted at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecast in the United Kingdom, decided seamless computing is worth a try.
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| Mercury Delivers RACE Multicomputer System to US Air Force
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Mercury Computer Systems,will deliver a RACE multicomputer
system from the Air Force's Rome Laboratory Surveillance and Photonics
Directorate. The signal processing system will be used for Synthetic
Aperture Radar (SAR) and Space-Time Adaptive Processing (STAP) research
and upgrade studies for both the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar
System (JSTARS) and the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS).
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| HPCN `TASC' on Track
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The Dutch `TASC' HPCN project for Environmental Applications
project started one year ago and presented first results earlier this month at an
Amsterdam meeting. The interdisciplinary research consortium TASC,
lead by the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, CWI,
investigates the environmental modelling and computer simulation of the
transport of pollutants in the atmosphere and in surface water.
Accurate 3-D environmental models are developed that describe
emissions, transport in flow fields and reactions of chemical and
biochemical constituents.
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| Sumitomo Chooses RS/6000 for New Chemicals Plant
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Sumitomo Chemical ( SCC ), a major Japanese chemical company, has chosen IBM to provide the
RS/6000 hardware, consulting and integration services for the business management system
which will run SAP R/3 at its Singapore subsidiaries participating in the new
$300 million chemicals complex in Pulau Sakra, Singapore. The plants, which will produce MMA monomer, MMA polymer, acrylic acid and its derivatives, are expected to be ready for operation by the end of July, 1998.
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| Warner-Lambert Outsources Management of SAP R/3 Computing
Environment to HP
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Hewlett-Packard has entered into a multiyear agreement to
manage the SAP R/3 computing environment for Warner-Lambert Company's
European operations. HP will be responsible for implementing and
operating Warner-Lambert's data center and centralized database.
Warner-Lambert is a provider of prescription drugs and consumer
products.
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| COCOLIB Seeks Test Partners
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A test version of COCOLIB, which allows loose coupling of application codes with a uniform interface between them, is now available. COCOLIB does not require changes to application source codes. COCOLIB is being developed as part of the CISPAR Esprit project, and will be used with codes as PERMAS, PAM-Crash and STAR CD.
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| Fujitsu Builds New Processor Technology
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High-end servers from Fujitsu ICL Computers are set to benefit from a further boost in performance following the launch of Intel's Pentium Pro processor with 1 MByte cache.
The company is building the new processor technology into its six-way capable server and will be making the product available following volume shipment of the Intel 1 MByte cache in September.
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| 9.6 Gflop/s Powermouse Available for Benchmarking
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Anyone can now benchmark the Parsytec PowerMouse system with own
applications free of charge on a system provided by Parsytec in joint
co-operation with the Interdisziplinaeres Zentrum fur Wissenschaftliches
Rechnen in Heidelberg
(IWR). The available system consists of 16 nodes with an overall
performance of 9.6 Gflop/s.
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| HPCN Europe '98 in Amsterdam
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From April 21-23, 1998 at the RAI Conference centre
in Amsterdam
`HPCN Europe '98', the International Conference and Exhibition on
High-Performance Computing and Networking, will be held. To get more throughput, HPCN
'98 coincides with a large networking exhibition in Amsterdam. Like
previous years the conference will focus on Advanced Solutions for
Industry, Research and Education based on Workstations, Servers, High
Performance Systems, and Networks. In particular networking solutions
and the integration of WEB technology will get special attention.
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| Hewlet-Packard and Silicon Graphics Agree to Port HP OpenView to IRIX
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Hewlett-Packard and Silicon Graphics agreed to port HP's OpenView Network Node Manager to the Silicon Graphics IRIX operating system. Silicon Graphics will also resell HP OpenView products and services.
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| Viking Memory Upgrade Kits for O2 and Octane
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Viking Components released high-end memory upgrade kits for Silicon Graphics'
Octane and O2 workstations.
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| Helping Mangos' Customer win the Yoghurt War
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Mangos is a large Post Production Company (PPC) in Greece, producing commercials which are broadcasted on national televison. One of its customers, a large yoghurt company, was fighting a media "war" with one of its competitors: each commercial of a competitor was answered to immediately, until they ran out of fuel. The complex commercials, all animated, and computer generated, just could not be produced in time
for the next broadcast. The reason? Lack of computing time to produce the final, rendered version of the commercial. That is what
EROPPA
wants to prevent in the future.
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| Financial Intranet Selects Siemens Pyramid for Multimedia
information delivery system
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Siemens Pyramid will provide hardware, software and other components to New York-based Financial Intranet for its multimedia information delivery system serving the financial community.
Financial Intranet is
to deliver video-on-demand learning services, interactive video teleconferencing, customer lead generation, mutual fund product information and communications services to its members via a secured intranet connection starting early fourth quarter 1997.
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| Digital's RenderTower Reduces Render Compute Time
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At IBC'97 in Amsterdam, Digital Equipment Corporation and its
partners showed a range of 3-D graphics and animation solutions and
tools running on Digital workstations and servers. In collaboration
with Thomson Broadcast Systems, Digital also demonstrated the first
phase of their joint development activities, the integration of NEXTORE
and the AlphaStudio Content Server.
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| RFO and Canal+ plan to use a HP Media Stream
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RFO and Canal+, two European broadcasting companies, have
plans to use an Hewlett-Packard Media Stream. Canal+ Belgium plans to use
its HP Media Stream Broadcast Server system to automate the playout of
both long-format material, including programs and movies, and
short-format material, such as commercials and promos. RFO
(Societe Nationale de Radio Television Francaise d'Outre Mer) plans to
upgrade its current equipment with an advanced, digital-based server
system as part of its scheduled move to a new facility at the end of
the year.
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| SGI forms UK Telecoms and Media Industry Group
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Silicon Graphics launched a UK Telecommunications and Media
Industry Group.The new business unit has been formed to support and accelerate
the convergence of the telecommunications and media industries. Market
development for the new group will be headed by Mark Tickle, and the business
will be headed by board director Mark Hallett.
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| New Cave VR software for Desktop Use
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Cave5D, a new software application, is
available
through the Cave Research Network Users Society.
CAVERNUS is a Web-based users group, launched recently by the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The CAVE is a room-sized virtual reality system used in academia and industry. The ImmersaDesk is its portable, table-sized counterpart. Both are research projects of the Electronic Visualisation Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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| HP and Siemens Join in Platform for Telecom Management
Networks
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Hewlett-Packard and Siemens' Public Communications Networks Groupwill jointly develop a platform for telecom management networks (TMN). The new enhanced TMN product will provide core functionality for the Siemens Optimized Network Management System, which incorporates technology from the HP OpenView telecom DM platform. HP and Siemens plan to market the new platform to network operators worldwide.
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| New AT&T-Unisource Board Members
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AT&T-Unisource Communications Services has appointed
three new members to its Supervisory Board. Mr. Tony Reis, Chief
Operating Officer of Swiss Telecom PTT, was appointed Chairman of the
Board. Mr. Joop Drechsel, Executive Vice President of PTT Telecom
Netherlands, and Mr. Jim Pagos Vice President International Strategy
and Alliances of AT&T, were appointed member of the board.
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