Concurrent Computer Corporation has delivered the first of multiple iHawk systems to Major Projects Victoria for the Australian Synchrotron Project (ASP). iHawk, powered by Concurrent's RedHawk real-time Linux, was selected for its highly deterministic response and high performance capabilities to respond to ASP's data acquisition and I/O control (IOC) system requirements. These high performance and distributed IOCs will provide the foundation control system for the synchrotron light beam storage ring.

Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors will be available as an option on Cray XD1 supercomputers in July 2005, and on Cray XT3 supercomputers later in 2005. AMD's cutting-edge 32- and 64-bit dual-core technology fits two processor cores on a single die, giving users of these Cray systems double the processing capacity in the same amount of space with minimal increases in power consumption and heat levels.

The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Linton F. Brooks announced that a supercomputer developed through the Advanced Simulation and Computing programme for NNSA's Stockpile Stewardship efforts has performed 135.3 trillion floating point operations per second (teraFLOP/s) on the industry standard LINPACK benchmark, making it the fastest supercomputer in the world. By performing computations at these rates, BlueGene/L helps maintain the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile without nuclear testing.

The Met Office has begun to produce weather forecasts from its newest and fastest supercomputer at its Exeter headquarters. The NEC SX-8 system doubles the computing power of each of the two existing 120-processor NEC SX-6 systems, operational since April 2003. NEC was named as the supplier of Met Office supercomputers in June 2002, following an EU tender worth £27.5 million.

The U.S. Department of Energy's new state-of-the art research supercomputer has completed a two-year acceptance process by the agency's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). The product of an intensive collaboration between HP and PNNL, the 11.8-teraflop, Linux-based supercomputer was designed specifically for computational biology and chemistry research, and is one of the fastest in the world for those applications.

IBM has been selected by Volvo Car Corporation to build a powerful supercomputer to perform critical automobile crash simulations. IBM will provide both hardware and services to help increase the "design-for-safety" approach.

Aston University, in the heart of England's industrial midlands, has selected the new Cray XD1 supercomputer to advance scientific and engineering research across a broad spectrum of disciplines. The system is one of the largest ordered by a European customer since the Cray XD1 supercomputer began shipping to Europe in November 2004.

The US ational Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), in collaboration with the University of Colorado, has acquired an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer to simulate ocean, weather, and climate phenomena that impact agricultural output, heating oil prices and global warming.

PathScale has optimized its EKOPath Compiler Suite and InfiniPath low-latency interconnect to provide enhanced support for the new Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has implemented IBRIX Fusion, an enterprise-class, fully-integrated parallel file system solution, on its 256-node Radium mini-cluster which supports the Palomar-Quest (PQ) project. Since deploying IBRIX Fusion, NCSA has seen a marked improvement in overall storage infrastructure utilization. The flexibility and purely software-based nature of IBRIX Fusion has allowed NCSA to deploy commodity hardware components resulting in significant reduction in capital expenditures. Previously, the Radium cluster had no local storage, with the exception of internal drives for temporary space. Following the deployment of IBRIX Fusion, applications were able to share a large data store across the entire cluster with good performance.

A hallmark of the International Supercomputer Conference series is the high caliber of keynote speakers and the 20th anniversary conference will feature one of the strongest line-ups of speakers yet. Here is an overview of the three keynote addresses and presenters: Horst Simon, Mark Seager and Wolfgang Gentzsch.

University of California scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory working with a researcher from Chonnam National University in South Korea have found that magnetic fluctuations appear to be responsible for superconductivity in a compound called plutonium-cobalt-pentagallium (PuCoGa5). The discovery of this "unconventional superconductivity" may lead scientists to a whole new class of superconducting materials and toward the goal of eventually synthesizing "room-temperature" superconductors.

HP has introduced two new HP ProLiant servers. Using the latest 64-bit Intel Xeon processor MP, the systems can boost enterprise application performance by up to 40 percent. The new servers - the HP ProLiant DL580 G3 and the HP ProLiant ML570 G3 - build on the company's lead in the x86 multiprocessor (MP) server market.

Sun Microsystems has distributed more than one million registered licenses for the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) since January 31, when the software became available on Sun's Web site. Sun also announced that the Solaris 10 OS has set fourteen world-record benchmarks in this same timeframe and demonstrated application performance improvements greater than 50 times that of previous versions of Solaris.

EMC Corporation, specialized in information storage and management, will offer CentricStor from Fujitsu Siemens Computers throughout Europe as part of the EMC Select programme. EMC will target CentricStor at mainframe customers who will be able purchase the technology-leading Virtual Tape Appliance directly from EMC sales representatives and distribution partners beginning in May. The agreement gives customers with large data centres the ability to conveniently acquire best-in-class technology to more effectively and efficiently back-up their data to tape.

NEC Corporation and Sun Microsystems have signed an agreement to expand the strategic alliance between the two firms. This expanded alliance plans to create new system solutions, incorporating technology and products from both companies that are scheduled to be made available in Japan and globally.

Pirelli Labs, the excellence research and development centre of Italy's Pirelli & C. S.p.A., will use SGI server and storage technologies as tools for its advanced activities in the field of photonics, sending communications on particles of light. One of the world's leading makers of tires and advanced solutions for telecommunications, Pirelli will drive its leading-edge design and analysis efforts with a milestone system: the 1500th SGI Altix server sold worldwide.

Oracle was cited as a leader among the select companies that Forrester invited to participate in its March 30, 2005, Forrester Wave: Application Server Platforms, Q1 2005. The new report, written by Forrester Vice President John Rymer, assesses the state of the application server platform market and evaluates how the vendors stack up against each other. Oracle was one of only two companies that received leader status, delivering a leading industry application server platform for building and deploying composite applications.

Fujitsu Siemens Computers has unveiled the new PRIMEQUEST server line based on the Intel Itanium 2 processor. The PRIMEQUEST server line combines data centre class fault immunity and high system scalability for industry standard environments running Linux and Windows Server 2003 for Itanium-based systems. This makes it an ideal choice for organisations wishing to realize the economic benefits and flexibility of industry standard solutions without compromising their business continuity. The new line is being launched globally today through Fujitsu Limited in the Asia/Pacific region as well as Fujitsu Computer Systems in North America and Fujitsu Siemens Computers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) consulting and software firm CD-adapco has purchased a six-chassis (72-processor) Cray XD1 supercomputer to meet the increasing computational demands of a broad range of CFD problems. Running its own STAR-CD and STAR-CCM+ CFD simulation codes, CD-adapco provides computer-aided engineering (CAE) solutions for the design and manufacture of products in the automotive, aerospace, biomedical, building, environmental, chemical process, marine, oil and gas, power generation and turbomachinery industries.