| Primeur Monthly - issue September 2003 |
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| Atlantic |
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| INCITE Programme to allocate major Department of Energy Office of Science computing resources to key scientific projects |
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Proposals are now being accepted for a new US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science programme to support innovative, large-scale computational science projects, according to the Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. The programme, entitled Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE), will award a total of 4.5 million supercomputer processor hours and 100 trillion bytes of data storage space at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center at DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The NERSC Center in the US is the Office of Science's flagship facility for unclassified supercomputing.
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| I-SPAN 2004 issues Call for Papers |
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The 7th International Symposium on Parallel Architectures, Algorithms, and Networks will be held May 10-12, 2004 in Hong Kong. The event is organised by the Department of Computer Science & Information Systems of the University of Hong Kong and the Department of Computing of the Polytechnic University of Hong Kong. Deadline for paper submission is December 1, 2003.
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| Workshop on Grid and Cooperative Computing issues Call for Papers |
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The Second International Workshop on Grid and Cooperative Computing will be held December 7- 10, 2003, in Shanghai, China. Deadline for paper submission is September 15, 2003.
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| SC2003 seeking innovative visualisations for opening video |
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In what has become an SC conference tradition, an innovative video serves as a prelude to the opening session of the technical programme. Creators of the opening video for SC2003 are now seeking computer simulations and models. The deadline for submissions is Friday, September 5.
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| Workshop on Modelling, Analysis and Simulation of Mobile Systems calls for participation |
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The Sixth ACM International Workshop on Modelling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile Systems will be organised on September 19, 2003 in San Diego, California, USA. The event will be held at the Westin Horton Plaza Hotel in conjunction with ACM/IEEE MobiCom 2003 and is sponsored by ACM SIGMOBILE.
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| Charm++ 2003 Workshop issues Call for Papers |
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The 2nd Annual Workshop on Charm++ and its Applications 2003 is hosted by the Parallel Programming Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and will be held October 20th-22nd, 2003. Deadline for paper submission is September 15, 2003.
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| Second Workshop on Application Specific Processors issues Call for Papers |
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The 2nd Workshop on Application Specific Processors (WASP'03) will be held in conjunction with the 36th International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO-36) in San Diego, California, December 2, 2003. Deadline for paper abstract submission is September 26, 2003.
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| Industry
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HPCN industry |
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| New 1000-processor metacluster due at the University of Utah |
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Construction of a $2 million supercomputer will begin in September at the University of Utah, where researchers will use the powerful machine to tackle complex problems in biomedical research. After a bidding process, the centre recently chose Angstrom Microsystems of Boston to provide the components and assemble the "metacluster" supercomputer, which will include 1000 AMD Opteron processors. Each AMD Opteron is a 1.4-gigahertz processor with at least one Gbyte of memory. The Opteron processors in the supercomputer together will have more than on Tbyte of memory.
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| Tarari delivers 20-times algorithmic acceleration for selected high-performance comouting applications |
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Th new Tarari High Performance Content Processor for high performance computing (HPC) can be used to offload compute-intensive algorithms from servers, cluster nodes, and embedded processors, enabling VARs, ISVs and OEMs to increase the available cycles in new and existing clustered computing applications as well as individual servers and processors.
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| Fujitsu Siemens Computers launches new rack-optimised PRIMERGY RX800 and RX200 servers |
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Fujitsu Siemens Computers has launched two new PRIMERGY rack server models. The high-end PRIMERGY RX800 server consists of 8 (16) processors in 4 (8) height units designed to meet the demanding requirements of a modern IT infrastructure. The PRIMERGY RX200 server is outfitted with two processors in a single height unit and is targeted at ASP and ISPs who need a front-end and application platforms. The entry-level prices for the models now available are 3,300 euro for the RX200 and 36,900 euro for the RX800 in Germany.
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| Registration open for SC2003 Conference promising to "ignite innovation" |
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Registration opened Friday, August 8, for SC2003, the annual conference of high-performance computing and networking. This year's meeting, with the theme "Igniting Innovation", will convene November 15-21 at the Phoenix Civic Plaza Convention Center.
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| ISR and Cray settle patent lawsuit |
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Isothermal Systems Research (ISR) and Cray have settled the pending lawsuit brought by ISR relating to evaporative spray cooling technology patents and trade secrets. The court has now dismissed the lawsuit. In the settlement, ISR and Cray have each agreed to license certain technology to the other.
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| Cray announces record financial results |
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Cray Inc. has reported record financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2003. Total revenue for the quarter was $61.8 million compared to $38.6 million in the same quarter last year. Net income was $7.9 million, up from $1.2 million. Second quarter results benefited from previously announced revenue of approximately $6 million that was deferred from first quarter 2003.
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| AMD introduces Opteron processor Model 246 |
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AMD has made immediately available the AMD Opteron processor Model 246 designed for servers and workstations. The AMD Opteron processor Model 246, which will power the IBM eServer 325, provides a unified platform for servers and workstations, enabling simultaneous 32- and 64-bit computing. The IBM eServer 325 is planned to power one of the world's largest Linux supercomputers at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST).
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| MySQL and SGI deliver MySQL on the SGI Altix 3000 Supercluster |
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MySQL AB, has signed a strategic alliance with SGI to provide the MySQL database on the SGI Altix 3000 family of servers and superclusters. MySQL AB and SGI are cooperating on engineering optimisation, marketing and sales for the Intel Itanium 2-based Altix 3000 supercluster running MySQL on Linux to power heavy-load, high-performance database applications.
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| Sun completes acquisition of CenterRun |
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Sun has completed the acquisition of CenterRun., a privately-held company based in Redwood City, California. CenterRun provides software that enables customers to rapidly provision, track and update their networked application services across many network devices in an effort to minimise costs and maximise availability and business advantage.
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| HP delivers faster ProLiant blade servers and high-performance networking switches |
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HP is now shipping faster processor upgrades across its line of HP ProLiant blade servers, offering customers increased performance and unparalleled investment protection. The company also introduced the next generation of its GbE2 Interconnect Switch, which delivers high-performance switching capabilities for HP ProLiant BL p-Class infrastructures.
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| Former IBM executive Peter Ungaro joins Cray |
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Cray has appointed Peter Ungaro as vice president, worldwide sales and marketing. Peter Ungaro joined Cray from his position as vice president, worldwide deep computing sales for IBM. In that role, he led global sales of all IBM server and storage products for high performance computing, life sciences, digital media and business intelligence markets.
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| Tarari signs Racor Systems to sell reconfigurable high performance computing content processor |
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Texas-based Racor Systems will be selling the Tarari High Performance Computing Content Processor in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Arkansas.
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| Industry
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Media |
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| TeraBurst Networks and SGI deliver interactive visualisation environments over optical networks |
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SGI has become an authorised reseller of TeraBurst's optical networking products for distributed visualisation applications. This agreement complements existing SGI VAN offerings by adding TeraBurst optical networking products for connectivity between SGI Reality Center facilities.
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| Singapore's Nanyang Technological University unveils new Reality Theater |
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SGI and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore have opened the NTU Reality Theater, Southeast Asia's first virtual reality centre for institutions of higher learning. A joint project between NTU and SGI, the facility will enhance collaborative research in biological and medical science, scientific visualisation, virtual engineering, civil contingency planning, education, and digital media.
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| Discreet and SGI deliver SAN for film mastering and video production |
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SGI joined Discreet's infrastructure sparks partner programme. As part of the agreement, Discreet and SGI are qualifying key elements of the SGI InfiniteStructure solution, including the SGI SAN Server family and SGI CXFS shared file system, to work with Discreet's systems and software product lines.
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| Industry
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The Grid |
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| Inventory of European Grid projects proposes new Grid Road Map |
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The GridStart project has published a final draft of an inventory of the current 20 European Grid projects: "IST Grid Projects Inventory and Roadmap". It povides a detailed analysis of the projects, and their contributions to Grid developments. A detailed Road Map concludes the report. In this special we provide the main conclusions and suggestions of the Grid Road Map.
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| Architecture of the future Grid |
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As part of the "IST Grid Projects Inventory and Roadmap" report, an architecture of the future Grid is sketched. At the abstract level, it consists of four layers: Fabric and network services; OGSA middleware; OGSA compliant toolkits; and application specific portals.
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| Key areas for future Grid development |
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In the previous two articles summarising the Future Grid Road Map from the "IST Grid Projects Inventory and Roadmap" report, the main suggestions and the overall architecture were described. In this article some of the report's Road Maps' main concepts and the future impact are extracted. It also details to what level current European projects address the issues.
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| CESGA and CESCA join their supercomputing resources Globus and MPICH-G2 |
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The Supercomputing Center of Galicia (CESGA) at Santiago de Compostela and the Supercomputing Center of Catalunya (CESCA) at Barcelona have successfully joined the largest machines they manage in order to solve the needs of research groups that require access to large data sets and computing capacity. This Grid will allow users from both centres to approach larger scale problems.
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| On-demand Grid computing is not an economical business model |
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On-demand computing is often used as an example of a business model that can be used for Grid computing. The model is that computing power is offered by companies or centres with idle computing power to companies that need (incidental) computing power. This would be one of the first areas, where Grid computing would have a major impact on business, the argument goes. However, in The IEEE Task Force NewsletterJim Gray published an article "Distributed Computing Economics" in which he explains that due to the network costs, this is not a good model in general. Only for very compute intensive applications, like rendering, it makes sense. In most other cases, a Beowulf cluster, with faster network connections than WANs, is a more inexpensive choice.
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| SUN and UK-Science programme release Transfer-queue over Globus (TOG) version 1.0 |
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TOG software allows to access remote compute resources via existing local Grid Engine installations. The TOG software integrates Grid Engine V5.3 and Globus Toolkit V2.2.4 to provide this access. The TOG software has been built as part of the Edinburgh EPCC Sun Data and Computer Grids project under the umbrella of the UK e-Science programme. TOG develops an industry-strength, fully Globus-enabled compute and data scheduler based around Grid Engine, Globus plus a wide variety of data technologies. It started in February 2002 and will run until January 2004.
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| European funding helps Merseyside Grid research |
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European funding is helping researchers on Merseyside to develop Grid business models. A £2 million Objective One grant to the Advanced Internet and Emergent Systems Institute (AIMES) at the University of Liverpool will help businesses capitalise on cutting-edge Grid research. The institute will use help companies harness spare computer processing power and tap into a virtual supercomputer through the Internet. It will also help them develop new business models, which could have the same impact as e-commerce. More than 40 companies on Merseyside alone are expected to be using software created through the project by 2007.
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| French Data Grid Explorer project approved |
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The French Data Grid Explorer project has been approved for funding with approximately 1 million euro from the ACI Grid programme. Grid systems can store and exchange large amounts of data: in the order of PBytes with an average aggregate throughput in the order of Tbyte/s. Storage and analysis of data at such a large scale is not easy. The Data Grid Explorer project will build an emulation environment to study large scale Grid configurations. The complete Grid Explorer project will cost about 2 million euro and did request from other funding agencies too.
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| e-Toile: French Grid star starts shining |
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The two year major French Grid project e-Toile is nearing completion: it runs until the end of this year. Currently a Grid platform is in place with several hunderd processors at sites accros the country with an aggregrate performance of 0.7 - 1,4 Tflop/s.
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| UNICOREpro released |
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Pallas has rereleased the commercial version of Unicore as UNICOREpro (professional Uniform Interface to Computing Resources) adding support training and consulting services. The package offers a ready-to-run Grid system including client and server software. UNICOREpro makes distributed computing and data resources available in a seamless and secure way through intranets and internet.
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| Access Grid Toolkit 2.1.1 released |
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The Access Grid Toolkit enables rich collaborations including people, data, and grid computing resources. The new Access Grid Toolkit 2.1 includes several improvements, including eaier packaging and installation. meanwhile also version 2.1.1has been released. This is a bug fix release for 2.1, which improves the stability and functionality.
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| SDSC releases version 1.0 of SKIDLkit data mining toolkit |
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The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego has released the initial version of the SKIDLkit data mining toolkit, giving scientific users a user-friendly set of advanced data mining capabilities. In developing SKIDLkit, researchers in the SDSC Knowledge and Information Discovery Lab (SKIDL) focused on end-to-end applications in close collaboration with discipline scientists in Earth systems science, medical science, and monitoring the safety of civil infrastructure such as highway bridges.
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| DataSynapse expands European presence by partnering with PCIB to serve German market |
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DataSynapse and PCIB, a German information technology consulting firm, will deploy and resell DataSynapse solutions in the German market. DataSynapse's GridServer offering, supported by PCIB, is currently being evaluated at a number of premier German financial institutions. DataSynapse and PCIB are committed to additional joint sales, marketing, and technical initiatives to deploy their combined solutions at other German companies.
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| Tenax consultant addresses legal issues at Grid Computing Conference |
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Grid computing experts experienced their own sense of shock and awe when Tenax Inc. consultant, Donna Johnson Edwards, presented at The Open Group Conference in Boston last week, attended by about 150 global Information Technology experts. The Open Group is an international vendor and technology-neutral consortium. The conference focus was Grid Computing and Boundaryless Information Flow achieved through global interoperability in a secure, reliable and timely manner.
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| United Devices and Optive Research to expand drug discovery technology |
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United Devices has partnered with life sciences software company, Optive Research to develop software for computer-assisted drug discovery (CADD) specifically optimized for United Devices' grid computing platform. The partnership will allow pharmaceutical companies to speed lead identification and lead optimization phases of the drug discovery process and will result in the development of novel cheminformatic and molecular design software.
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| New Grid and tools deployed across NPACI partnership |
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The US National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) has deployed the NPACI Grid across the partnership's main resource sites. NPACI Grid is a production, heterogeneous national Grid consisting of interoperable software, scientific applications, and hardware resources located at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in Austin, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The NPACI-Grid will soon be deployed at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena as well.
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| Organon implements TurboWorx’ PowerCloud to accelerate drug discovery |
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Organon International is successfully utilising Turboworx' PowerCloud software platform to efficiently utilise and dynamically allocate computing resources. Leveraging PowerCloud on cross-platform systems at its Newhouse, Scotland facility, the global pharmaceutical expert has been able to rapidly process data and computationally-intensive bioinformatics tasks and achieve superior Linux cluster performance at a total lower cost of ownership.
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| Avaki releases Data Grid 4.0 |
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Avaki released Avaki Data Grid 4.0, software that helps businesses easily provision, access and integrate distributed data from heterogeneous systems in real time within or across organisations.
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| Australian Grid Computing Workshop issues Call for Participation |
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The Second Australian Grid Computing Workshop, AusGrid 2003, will be held October 2, 2003 at Royal Pines Resort, Gold Coast, Australia and is organised by the Australian Grid Forum in conjunction with APAC'03, the APAC Conference and Exhibition on Advanced Computing, Grid Applications and eResearch. Deadline for presentation proposals is August 25, 2003.
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| IBM's Storage Virtualisation Technology will handle one PetaByte of data at CERN |
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In the context of the 70 Terabytes of disk storage at GridKa at Research Centre Karlsruhe, one has to mention that IBM joins the CERN openlab for DataGrid applications. They collaborate to create a massive data-management system built on Grid computing. A detailed article can be found in Primeur on 2 April.
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