| News digest January 2005 |
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| Industry
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HPCN industry |
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| Fujitsu Siemens Computers and T-Systems conclude international co-operation agreement |
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T-Systems and Fujitsu Siemens Computers have signed a strategic partnership that encompasses a world wide co-operation, primarily for computer workplaces and server infrastructure services. The companies are looking to jointly develop and market new solutions. The agreement extends the existing international hardware resale co-operation and framework contracts.
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| Machine Evaluations Workshop - The challenges of managing change |
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About 250 people attended the 15th Machine Evaluation Workshop at EPSRC Daresbury Laboratories, UK. This excellent Workshop is now established as a leading UK national event dedicated to distributed high performance scientific computing. The principle objective is to encourage close contact between the research communities from the Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, Engineering and Materials Programmes of EPSRC and the major vendors of mid-range computing systems, workstations, servers, software and peripherals. (Chris Lazou)
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| Quadrics has been selected by Bull to provide QsNet for Europe's fastest computer |
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Quadrics has been selected by Bull to provide hardware and software for a supercomputer system that is reported to deliver over 60 Tflop/s. This supercomputer named Tera10 will be installed at the CEA, the French Nuclear Agency. Quadrics will supply its world leading high performance network solution, QsNet together with software that will enable scalability and management of the solution.
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| DOE allocates massive supercomputer resources to drive advances in combustion, astrophysics and protein structure research |
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Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham has awarded 6.5 million hours of supercomputing time to three scientific research projects aimed at increasing our understanding of ways to reduce pollution, to gain greater insight into how stars and solar systems form, and advance our knowledge about how proteins express genetic information.
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| IBM, Sony, SCEI, and Toshiba to unveil next-generation Cell processor |
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Sony, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI), and Toshiba have unveiled some of the key concepts of the highly-anticipated advanced microprocessor, code-named Cell, they are jointly developing for next-generation computing applications, as well as digital consumer electronics.
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| Scali selected as cluster management solution for HP Unified Cluster Portfolio |
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Scali, specialized in high performance clustering solutions, has teamed with HP to deliver Scali Manage and Scali MPI Connect software solutions as a featured offering in HP's Unified Cluster Portfolio.
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| SGI technology to power Germany's National Supercomputing System Center at LRZ |
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After searching the world over for the most powerful computing technology, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW) has selected the latest generation of SGI Altix systems from Silicon Graphics to power Germany's new national supercomputing system. The new system, which eventually will incorporate 3328 dual-core Intel Itanium 2 processors, will be capable of generating 69 trillion calculations per second of performance, effectively boosting the computing capacity at Germany's Leibniz Computing Center (LRZ) 30-fold. LRZ, the BAdw computing centre, also will deploy a 660-terabyte SGI InfiniteStorage solution to accommodate its rapidly growing stockpile of scientific of data.
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| Germany's Research Center Juelich selects Cray XD1 supercomputer for research and system evaluation |
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Germany's Research Center Juelich (FZJ) has selected a Cray XD1 supercomputer for advanced scientific research and to evaluate its potential as a future leadership-class system.
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| Fujitsu Siemens Computers PRIMERGY Blade Server launched for the dynamic Data Centre |
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As part of its efforts to provide infrastructures which fulfil the demanding needs of the dynamic Data Centre, Fujitsu Siemens Computers has launched the next generation of the Xeon dual blade servers, the PRIMERGY BX620 S2 with Extended Memory 64 Technology (EM64T). This announcement further enhances the PRIMERGY Blade Server ecosystem, which consists of appropriate deployment and automation tools, a successful blade server family and the skills necessary to serve the needs of the dynamic data centre.
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| HP extends commitment to Itanium 2-based Integrity server leadership and invests $3 billion over three years |
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HP has invested more than $3 billion over the next three years designed to vault Intel Itanium 2-based HP Integrity servers to the leadership position in the $20 billion market currently served by RISC processors. Building on strong Integrity server sales momentum, this investment will span research and development, server and system software design, partner-led application solutions, and sales and marketing.
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| Intel strengthens investment in Intel Itanium architecture with hiring of HP design team |
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Intel Corporation has reached an agreement with HP to hire HP's Intel Itanium processor design team based in Ft. Collins, Colorado. The deal strengthens Intel's investment in the Itanium architecture and bolsters the development of multi-core processors. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
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| SGI Altix 350 dominates mid-range servers on scientific and engineering benchmark |
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The SGI Altix 350 server has demonstrated record breaking price/performance in recent benchmark tests, revealing the Altix 350 system's ability to outperform competing systems from a host of vendors. The tests were independently conducted by Multipath Corporation, developers of FMS, a library that improves performance and problem solving capabilities of scientific and engineering applications. The SGI Altix system's FMS performance eclipsed that of all other similarly configured systems running the same test, and achieved new heights in price/performance, an increasingly important advantage to customers striving to make the most of their technology budgets.
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| Survey finds 81 percent of U.S. Enterprises plan to invest in 32/64-bit hybrid servers in 2005 |
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According to new survey results, 81 percent of U.S. enterprises intend to invest next year in servers based on the new 32/64-bit hybrid processors for industry standard computing such as the AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon EM64T processors. Respondents ranked server performance as the top criteria for the shift from traditional x86 to the hybrid servers. Corporations also said that network security and business growth will be key priorities in 2005, with 82 percent citing security and 79 percent citing business growth as top drivers of their technology spending.
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| SGI Altix systems at University of Rochester fuel search for inexhaustible energy source |
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Scientists in search of new and inexhaustible sources of energy require some of the most advanced supercomputing resources available. To address those needs, researchers at the University of Rochester's Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) have acquired two powerful new supercomputers from Silicon Graphics.
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| Cray is awarded five-year GSA contract covering products, maintenance and training |
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The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) has awarded Cray Inc. a five-year Federal Supply Service (FSS) contract. The contract, which went into effect on December 13, 2004, makes Cray a trusted GSA vendor and adds Cray supercomputer products, maintenance and training to the FSS schedule. Products initially listed include the Cray XD1, Cray XT3, Cray X1 and Cray X1E systems.
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| High Noon at Leibnizrechenzentrum in Munich |
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Today at 12.00 a.m. the contract for the acquisition of a new German Höchstleistungsrechner (Highest Performance Computer) was signed between the head of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and SGI. The Leibnizrechenzentrum belongs to the Bavarian Academy. In the last stage the supercomputer will have 6656 newest Intel Itanium processors with a peak performance of 69 TeraFlop/s in 2007. The investment sums up to 38 million euro, which is shared between the Federal Government and the State of Bavaria. Bavaria will pay the operational costs. Additionally they signed a contract with SGI for the Bavarian supercomputer.
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| Perspectives of the Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum in Bavaria (HLRB II) |
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After signing the contract, Professor Dr. Heinz-Gerd Hegering, head of the directorate of Leibnizrechenzentrum, Munich, discussed the tasks of the centre, applications, political issues and the support from the State Bavaria. Additionally he mentioned the technical infrastructure of the new building in Garching near Munich. In the old one in the centre of Munich the infrastructure was no longer sufficient. HLRB II supports researchers all over Germany, whose projects have been examined by a scientific Lenkungsausschuss (an expert gremium). He gave an outlook of the European perspective too. Then Robert Übelmesser presented SGI's view.
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| Scali extends cross-platform MPI software to IBM POWER processor-based servers |
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Scali is extending Scali MPI Connect, its message passing interface software, to run on the full range of IBM eServer POWER processor based systems. Scali's interconnect-independent software is currently compatible with IBM's Intel and AMD processor-based cluster nodes and will now expand to include IBM OpenPower, BladeCenter and pSeries Linux-based servers.
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| Solaris 10 and Sun Fire V20z systems help Stanford Linear Accelerator Center researchers soar into record books |
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A team led by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), CalTech and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratories (FNAL), set a new world record aggregate bandwidth peak of 101.13Gbps at Supercomputing 2004, far surpassing last year's record of 23.21Gbps and beating the nearest contender by more than 300 percent. The SCInet Bandwidth Challenge encourages participants to push the envelope in terms of network throughput in high performance computing.
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| Sun and Oracle demonstrate outstanding scalability running Oracle Collaboration Suite on Solaris OS-based Sun systems |
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Sun Microsystems and Oracle demonstrated exceptional performance achieved during a series of scalability tests. Together, the Oracle and Sun solution demonstrates how well Oracle Collaboration Suite running on the Solaris Operating System performs to meet the collaboration needs of large organisations with tens of thousands of users.
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| CentricStor and Time Navigator share focus on Information Lifecycle Management |
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Fujitsu Siemens Computers, a European IT provider and Atempo Inc., specialized in information lifecycle strategies for data protection, have completed testing and certification of Atempo's data protection product Time Navigator with Fujitsu Siemens Computer's CentricStor Virtual Tape Appliance. With this announcement, Fujitsu Siemens Computers takes another step towards delivering the broadest system platform support with its CentricStor storage solution.
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| GUPTA named Fujitsu Siemens Computers alliance partner |
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Gupta Technologies has struck a strategic partnership with Fujitsu Siemens Computers. GUPTA's SQLBase 9.0 for Linux is now available for the Intel-based PRIMERGY servers from Fujitsu Siemens Computers. GUPTA is focused on launching its software portfolio which will include Team Developer 2005 for Linux, GUPTA's RAD tool coming in November 2004, across the PRIMERGY server line.
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| Sun extends multi-platform managed services offerings with SevenSpace acquisition |
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Sun Microsystems has entered into an agreement to acquire SevenSpace, a privately-held company based in Ashburn, Virginia. SevenSpace will broaden Sun's Managed Services offerings to include heterogeneous environments, adding support for Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX and IBM's AIX systems, along with Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Linux.
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| Swedish University boosts research productivity with high-performance computing cluster from Dell, Intel, Scali and Mellanox |
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PDC at Kungl. Tekniska Hogskolan (KTH), the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, has selected Dell, Scali and Mellanox to deliver a high-performance computing cluster (HPCC) based on the new Intel Xeon processor with Extended Memory 64 Technology (EM64T).
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| Data Search Systems completes Intelligence Agency pilot |
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Data Search Systems Incorporated (DSSI) has successfully completed its first paid pilot system for the Federal intelligence market space, where the DSSI technology increased the speed of a text search application by over 20 times compared to that of agency's supercomputer-using commodity hardware. DSSI is now working with that agency to implement a full-scale implementation to replace a massively parallel multi-processor system with a solution costing an order of magnitude less while providing significantly better performance.
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| HP ranks no. 1 in worldwide total disk storage systems for 10th consecutive quarter |
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HP continued its no. 1 position in worldwide total disk storage systems factory revenue for the 10th consecutive quarter, with 23.6 percent market share and revenue growth of 2.4 percent quarter-over-quarter, according to market data released by IDC.
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| HP and VERITAS to accelerate HP-UX 11i virtualization |
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HP and VERITAS Software Corporation have expanded their alliance with the naming of VERITAS' products as HP's preferred file system and volume management solutions for HP-UX 11i environments.
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| Protegrity chosen for data security by major Fortune 500 company |
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Protegrity Corporation, a technology innovator for enterprise-wide database and storage security, has signed a contract with a company in the top 50 of the Fortune 500 to implement Secure.Data, the company's software solution for centralized management and auditing of data security policies and for data encryption.
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| Trigence announces support for Solaris from Sun Microsystems |
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Trigence Corporation, specialized in application virtualization for high application availability and application lifecycle management, has released Trigence AE 2.2 with support for Solaris.
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| Scali appoints Andrew Sutherland as Vice President of Finance and Administration |
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Scali has appointed Andrew Sutherland as Vice President of Finance and Administration to focus on developing an international infrastructure to encourage future revenue growth.
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| Sun reaps rewards of reinvigorated 2004 Channel Partner Programme |
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Sun Microsystems Inc. announced that in fiscal year 2004, which ended June 30, 2004, investments in the iForce Partner Programme resulted in a year-over-year revenue percentage increase generated through its U.S. partner and reseller channels. This amounts to over 50 percent of Sun's U.S. revenue and directly reflects market interest in Sun's new product and services line-up, including its recent introduction of the Solaris 10 Operating System, and commitment to expanding and strengthening its partner programmes.
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| Rogue Wave Software supports Sun's Solaris 10 OS to quickly develop and migrate applications on Solaris 10 |
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Rogue Wave Software, a division of Quovadx and Sun Microsystems have signed an alliance designed to help developers easily migrate legacy applications to Sun's Solaris 10 Operating System (OS). Rogue Wave Software will certify its entire suite of high-performance development tools to the Solaris 10 OS, for both SPARC and AMD Opteron processor-based systems.
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| Industry
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The Grid |
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| European Commission announces an ISTʃall 5 preparatory workshop on Advanced Grid Technologies, Systems and Services |
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The European Commission, DG Information Society, Grid Technologies Unit announces an IST Call 5 Preparatory Workshop on "Advanced Grid Technologies, Systems & Services” which will take place on 31 January – 1 February 2005 in Brussels, Belgium.
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| Aligning the Grid and the Semantic Web requires more than slogans |
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Different communities have their own focus, way of saying things and words for specific topics. From the drawing board it that could be obvious that tow communities should work together because they use the same slogans, while in fact they are looking at complete different topics. The only way to really know whether they have something in common is to bring the communities together and see whether some fruitful cooperation emerges. This is exactly what the European Commission did with a session called "The Semantic Grid: when the Semantic Web meets Grid" at IST2005 in The Hague. About hundred people from two communities, The Grid and Semantic Web met. Dieter Fensel discussed the status and ideas for a Semantic Grid from the Web services perspective; David de Roure did the same from the Grid perspective.
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| Globus founders start company Univa |
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Steve Tuecke, Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman, have formed a company called Univa to commercialize the Globus toolkit of which they were the main designers. Globus is an Open Source project in which a large amount of public money from the USA and Europe were used to develop Grid Middleware. Univa is not the first attempt to commercialize Globus. IBM and Platform, for instance, announced some years ago supported versions of Globus. Not with a great deal of success, that is. The reasons for this due to the research character of Globus, which leads to non-compatible versions and the difficulty to get to a stable version. Whether Univa will be more successful is an open question. The formation of the company could also have a negative effect on Globus which is funded for a large part directly and indirectly by research grants from the US and Europe. There could, especially in Europe grow doubts whether funding Globus is a good idea when the decision makers within Globus have an agenda that is also influenced by the Univa company interests.
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| WS-Reliability ratified as OASIS standard |
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The OASIS international standards consortium has approved WS-Reliability version 1.1 as an OASIS Standard, a status that signifies the highest level of ratification. Developed through an open process, WS-Reliability provides a method to guarantee message delivery over the Internet, enabling companies to conduct reliable business-to-business trading or collaboration using Web services.
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| Japanese IT vendors release royalty-Free software for reliable messaging for Web and Grid Services |
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Fujitsu Limited, Hitachi and NEC Corporation are making available as open source their jointly developed messaging software that implements the Web Services Reliability (WS-Reliability) standard, a messaging specification for web services designed to ensure superior reliability. The software will be available for download free of charge a at the businessgrid website of the Information-Technology Promotion Agency, Japan.
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| LBNL's DataMover reaches milestone with automated transfer of 18,000 files in a single request from Brookhaven to Berkeley Lab |
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Amidst the hype and hoopla at the recent SC2004 conference in Pittsburgh, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Scientific Data Management Research Group demonstrated the robustness of the group's DataMover by putting the application through its workaday paces. In doing so, the group reached a milestone when, with a single request, 17,870 data files were moved seamlessly from Brookhaven National Lab in New York to LBNL, both of which are operated by the U.S. Department of Energy.
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| Avarsys, Dell and UBS join Enterprise Grid Alliance |
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The Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) achieved a major milestone: 25 companies actively participating in and supporting the Alliance's charter. With three new members including Avarsys, Dell and UBS Investment Bank (UBS), the EGA will tap into their Grid expertise to help advance the EGA's goals.
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| NCSA to Lead GridShib Project |
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The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will lead a project to integrate two key software products developed via the National Science Foundation's National Middleware Initiative. NCSA and collaborators at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago will receive $1 million to combine the strengths of Shibboleth, developed by the Internet2 cooperative, with the Globus Toolkit, developed by the Globus Alliance. The project is known as GridShib.
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| Informatica further extends Grid-Computing Capabilities for PowerCenter data integration platform |
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Informatica Corporation announced a partnership with Cassatt Corporation. Now offered as a complement to the Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform, Cassatt's Collage software for automating IT operations for on-demand computing.
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| Transmode builds High Speed Multi-Protocol Network linking the University of Manchester's Super Computing facilities |
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The University of Manchester has chosen Transmode Systems to build a CWDM Backbone between the University and its new Reynolds House Data Centre.
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| Dell, EMC, Intel and Oracle launch Project MegaGrid to develop enterprise Grid computing best practices |
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In an effort to develop a standard approach to building and deploying an enterprise Grid computing infrastructure, Dell Inc., EMC Corporation, Intel Corporation and Oracle have collaborated to jointly form Project MegaGrid. The four companies are combining certain core technologies and technical resources to ease the burden of integration for their customers, and to develop a complete enterprise Grid computing solution.
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| Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g release 2 to deliver leading edge service level management and robust Grid computing support |
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Oracle has launched Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Release 2, highlighting new Grid control capabilities - Oracle Grid Control. This single, integrated solution for provisioning, administering and monitoring applications and systems is ideal for enterprise grid computing environments.
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| Oracle introduces Oracle Database 10g Release 2 |
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Oracle has launched Oracle Database 10g Release 2, the latest update to its award-winning database. The new release will include enhanced availability, manageability, performance and security features, among others, to help customers and partners achieve the highest levels of efficiency from their information technology (IT) investments. Oracle Database 10g Release 2 is scheduled to be generally available in mid-2005.
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