The deadline for early registration for the annual International Supercomputer Conference and Exhibition - ISC2004, to be held in Heidelberg June 22-25, is approaching. Professor Hans Meuer and his team, once again, put together an excellent programme focusing on issues dear to supercomputer practitioners. The conference is in essence a celebration of current HPC achievements. (Chris Lazou)

Cray has received an order for a Cray X1 supercomputer system from Madison Research Corporation for the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC). Financial and other terms were not disclosed. The Cray X1 supercomputer system is scheduled to be installed second-quarter 2004 at SMDC's Simulation Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where it will be used to support SMDC's global missions. Madison Research Corporation is the prime contractor that operates SMDC's Simulation Center. Funding is through the U.S. Department of Defense's High Performance Computing Modernization Programme.

IBM has outlined plans to openly collaborate and build a community of innovation around its Power microprocessor architecture used in a vast range of products from the world's most powerful enterprise systems and supercomputers to games and embedded devices. The move could have major implications for computers and the electronics industry at large.

The US Department of Defense's (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Programme's (HPCMP) sponsored researchers Dr. Jeremy Kepner, Massachusettes Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory; Dr. Stan Ahalt, The Ohio State University (OSU) and Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC); and Dr. John Nehrbass, OSU, have been leading an effort to bring the dominant high-level language of technical computing (MATLAB) into the HPC world.

IBM has introduced new Departmental Supercomputing Solutions, a variety of prepackaged, pretested cluster configurations that deliver easy to manage high-performance compute power at an affordable price. The new IBM Departmental Supercomputing Solutions allow organisations with smaller budgets and staffs the same world class supercomputing technology used by large organisations and prestigious labs.

Specialised design problems can require massive computing efforts. Middleware tools to harness the power of Grid computing have been proven to work in real industrial applications, through the work of IST project Damien. EADS, a major aerospace company and Damien consortium member, used the system in real applications across its sites in Europe.

Livermore Software Technology Corporation (LSTC) formally endorsed of Altair Engineering's PBS Pro workload management and e-Compute Grid Portal software for use with LS-Dyna.

From the 5th April 2004, the UK National Grid Service (NGS) enters its initial production phase which is funded to provide a significant resource for the UK e-Science Community. The four new clusters, supplied and maintained by ClusterVision and hosted by the University of Manchester, CCLRC at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, University of Oxford and the White Rose Grid in Leeds are now available for early adopter users to register. As part of the initial 'core' the NGS also includes access to the resources of the HPCx and CSAR services.

Sun Microsystems and partners for life sciences are delivering the pre-integrated Sun Fire Starter Cluster for Bioinformatics. The Starter Cluster is designed for small labs, hospitals, Clinical Research Organisations and clinics. Because it comes ready to run out of the box, the complete solution is designed to enable the bench scientist to perform bioinformatics analytics without the dependency on an IT staff.

The UK's 'strength' industries of Digital Media, Financial Services, Engineering and Life Sciences must begin to exploit the potential benefits of Grid Computing, or run the risk of missing new market opportunities. This is according to "Unlocking the Grid", the report launched by the Information Age Partnership (IAP) Grid Taskforce, a working group established by the IAP to identify the potential for exploitation of Grid technologies within the UK.

A new IDC study shows that the Grid computing market is on the verge of major expansion. According to a recent forecast, the aggregate Grid computing market is expected to exceed $12 billion in revenue by 2007 across high performance computing (HPC) technical markets and commercial viable enterprises.

IBM has agreed to acquire Candle Corporation, a privately held company based in El Segundo, California. Candle offers a broad set of solutions to help customers develop, deploy and manage their enterprise infrastructure. The company's offerings help optimize data centres and application infrastructure.

The XWall Web Services Firewall, developed by Forum Systems, a provider of trust management and threat protection Web services security solutions, now supports Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Application Server 10g to provide additional security for production Web services and Grid applications against known and unknown SOAP and XML vulnerabilities.

Paradigm, a provider of advanced petroleum geoscience and drilling engineering technology to the oil and gas exploration and production industry, has donated state-of-the-art geoscience information software, valued at Euro 715,000, to Cardiff University's School of Earth, Ocean and Planetary Science in Wales.