| News digest January 2006 |
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| Industry
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HPCN industry |
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| AMD and IBM unveil new, highter performance, more power efficient 65nm process technologies at gathering of industry's top R&D firms |
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In papers presented at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in Washington, D.C., IBM and AMD have detailed their progress in bringing new, advanced semiconductor process technologies and materials to the 65 nanometer (nm) technology generation.
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| M/C Evaluations Workshop - Challenges of Multi-core Chips |
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About 250 people attended the 16th machine evaluation workshop at EPSRC Daresbury Laboratories, UK. This excellent Workshop, in its sixteenth year, is 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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| International Supercomputer Conference 2006 issues Call for Papers for June meeting in Dresden, Germany |
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ISC2006, the International Supercomputer Conference which will be held June 27-30, 2006, has issued a call for papers in two HPC areas, with the selected authors to be awarded the ISC Award sponsored by Hewlett-Packard and Intel. The deadline for submissions is Monday, February 20, 2006.
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| International review of research using high performance computing in the United Kingdom |
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EPSRC uses international reviews to benchmark the strength of UK research activity against world competitors and to highlight any gaps or missed opportunities. Panels of internationally leading researchers visit a number of UK research groups and access a wide pool of experts and supporting data to help them reach their conclusions.
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| eBay and Sun expand global collaborative alliance highlighting support for Sun's Dual Core x64 server strategy |
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eBay.com is bolstering its search environment with hundreds of Sun's new AMD Opteron processor-based Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers and Sun StorEdge systems, for better performance and energy-efficiency. The move comes in time for the peak holiday on-line purchase season on eBay. The core infrastructure provided by Sun connects a community of 168 million registered users worldwide, allowing them to trade more than $1359 worth of goods every second.
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| Intel and BMW enter comprehensive partnership |
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Intel Corporation and the BMW Group have signed a comprehensive partnership that includes technology, co-marketing and Intel's sponsorship of the BMW Sauber F1 team. As part of this agreement, Intel technology will be deployed throughout the BMW Group and its worldwide dealer network, and Intel will become "Official Corporate Partner" of the BMW Sauber F1 team. BMW purchased the Sauber team in June 2005.
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| HP owns no. 1 rank in worldwide total disk storage systems revenue for 14th consecutive quarter |
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IDC has released market data showing that HP maintained the no. 1 position in worldwide total disk storage factory revenue for the 14th consecutive quarter, with 23.5 percent market share and revenue growth of 14.4 percent year over year in the third quarter of 2005.
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| Japan's Institute of Fluid Science, Tohoku University to install new system architected around SGI's Linux OS-based supercomputer |
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To aid in conducting next-generation research to protect the global environment and contribute toward the improved safety and welfare of mankind, Silicon Graphics and SGI Japan Ltd. recently installed at the Institute of Fluid Science, Tohoku University a state-of-the-art supercomputing system. The new system was built upon SGI server, visualization and storage technology to enable researchers to achieve more accurate results and shorter time to solution.
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| Sun Microsystems introduces Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers |
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Sun Microsystems has made available the Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers featuring patented CoolThreads technology, the industry's first eight core, 32-thread processor that packs the performance of a rack of servers onto a single chip. Based on the 9.6 GHz UltraSPARC T1 processor, code named Niagara, the new server family has achieved eight world-record benchmarks.
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| IBM announces new software strategy for GPFS file system |
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IBM has introduced a new software strategy in supercomputing, allowing customers to leverage its file system across mixed-vendor systems, dramatically simplifying the management of vast stores of data created through high performance computing. Linux Networx is the first hardware vendor under the strategy to license IBM’s General Parallel File System (GPFS) to help enable its customers to manage seamless data pools in mixed vendor supercomputing environments.
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| IU Bloomington and Purdue universities join efforts to strengthen the state's economic development |
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Indiana University (IU) and Purdue University in the state of Indiana, USA, have jointly designed a new pilot grant programme called Collaboration in Life Sciences and Informatics Research (CLSIR) to advance life sciences and informatics research and development in Indiana. Informatics is an evolving field that examines the impact of information technology and develops new uses for it in areas such as life sciences. IU recently launched a new Ph.D. programme in informatics - the first of its kind in the nation.
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| Sun shift to free and open source software |
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Sun Microsystems is making the Java Enterprise System, Sun N1 Management software and Sun developer tools available at no cost for both development and deployment and is integrating all of this software along with the Solaris OS into the Solaris Enterprise System.
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| Sun's UltraSPARC IV+ processor-based Sun Fire servers continue to beat IBM Power5 systems on performance, price/performance |
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Sun Microsystems Inc. has achieved a world record-breaking data warehousing performance TPC-H SF10000 benchmark result with the Sun Fire E25K UltraSPARC IV+ system and the Oracle Database 10g Release 2. Sun also performed a world record-breaking performance SPECjbb2005 benchmark result with the Sun Fire E6900 UltraSPARC IV+ system which eclipsed newly announced SPECjbb2005 result from IBM based on comparably priced Power5 system. Sun achieved a SPECjbb2005 result of 248,075 business operations per second (bops), which beats the performance of the newly announced POWER5 IBM eServer p5 570 16-way SPECjbb2005 result of 244,361 bops.
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| Oracle, Symantec and BEA lead unprecedented ISV support for Sun's Eco-responsible Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 systems |
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More than 40 Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), including Oracle, Symantec and BEA, are supporting Sun's high-performance, energy efficient Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers, powered by the massively threaded UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology and the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS). This is one of the largest number of ISVs ever to endorse a Sun server at launch.
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| Infineon delivers high-performance GDDR3 memory for ATI's next-generation mobility Radeon X1600 graphics processor |
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Infineon Technologies AG's 512Mbit GDDR3 (Graphic Double-Data-Rate 3) graphics DRAM were selected by ATI Technologies for use with its Mobility Radeon X1600 graphics processor targeting notebook PCs. The Mobility Radeon X1600 is ATI´s innovative new mobile graphics processor designed to deliver stunning visuals and lightening-fast graphics for the performance thin notebook segment, answering the trend for increased mobility and life-like visuals in a high-performance design.
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| HP expands storage partner programme to help customers better manage information |
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HP has expanded its storage partner programme to provide customers with advanced solutions that capture, manage and deliver information throughout its lifecycle. The enhanced Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Partner Programme helps partners expand market reach and offers increased access to HP's worldwide sales and marketing organisation.
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| Xyratex and Digi-Data partner with Storage Elements to deliver shared storage utility |
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Storage Elements will sell its Digitiliti products - a powerful combination of hardware, software and access technologies - to provide high-availability storage services to clients ranging from the enterprise to small and medium business levels.
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| SBE announces two iSCSI design wins; PyX iSCSI software selected for integration into SAS and SATA storage servers |
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Two networking and storage equipment providers, Open Source Storage (OSS) and Yang Ming International (YMI) Corporation, have chosen to license and integrate SBE's PyX iSCSI target software into their next generation storage devices.
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| HP positioned as "leader" in storage assessment report |
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HP has been positioned in the "Leaders" quadrant in the Gartner Inc. "Magic Quadrant for Combined Storage Resource Management and SAN Management Software" report for 2005. This year's report marks the first time Gartner has designated "Leaders" in the combined SRM/SAN (storage area network) management software space. According to Gartner, vendors listed in the Leaders' quadrant are performing well today, have a clear vision of market direction and are actively building competencies to sustain their leadership position in the market.
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| Sun Microsystems launches OpenSPARC project |
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Sun Microsystems has launched the OpenSPARC project to open source its new UltraSPARC T1 processor design point. With more than 3.4 million registered licenses of the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) and 10,000 registered OpenSolaris community members, Sun is building on a long history of sharing source code and creating communities and is the first to create this new 64-bit, 32-thread rich SPARC/Solaris community to spur innovation for massively-threaded systems and "system on a chip" design. The programme will be available in the first quarter of 2006.
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| Sun and Synopsys collaborate to certify VCS verification solution for the Solaris 10 OS on x64 platforms |
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Sun Microsystems and Synopsys Inc., an expert in semiconductor design software, have signed an agreement to certify Synopsys' VCS comprehensive RTL verification solution, a key component of the Discovery Verification Platform, for the Sun Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) for both Sun UltraSPARC and AMD Opteron processor-based Sun Fire servers.
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| Fluent 6.3 beta release shows CFD performance enhancements with the new Intel C++ Compiler 9.0 for Linux |
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The recently released beta version of Fluent's flow simulation software, Fluent 6.3, includes significant performance improvements on the Linux operating system (OS), stemming from the adoption of Intel C++ Compiler 9.0 for Linux. Using the Intel C++ Compiler, Fluent 6.3 beta has been compared to nine typical CFD examples and shows performance improvements ranging from a few percent up to as much as 50%.
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| Dot Hill announces OEM agreement with Alliance Systems |
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Dot Hill has signed a strategic OEM agreement with Alliance Systems Ltd., a provider of communications computing infrastructure solutions, to provide complete, integrated NEBS-compliant communications solutions with attached storage.
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| Industry
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The Grid |
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| European and American supercomputing infrastructures linked through a common wide-area global file system |
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DEISA, the European supercomputing Grid infrastructure, and TeraGrid, the US supercomputing cyberinfrastructure, have been linked, for the purposes of a technology demonstration, by a common, scalable, wide-area global file system spanning two continents.
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| Grids to aid breast cancer diagnosis and research |
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The millions of mammography exams performed each year in Europe save thousands of women's lives, but if the data from all breast cancer screening procedures was made available to clinicians and researchers across the continent they could save many more. That is the vision that has driven MammoGrid. The IST programme-funded MammoGrid project ended in August and has since begun studying the commercial possibilities for its distributed computing environment that employs existing Grid technologies for the creation of a Europe-wide database of mammogram data. By using Grid computing, the system allows hospitals, health care workers and researchers to share data and resources. It supports effective co-working, such as obtaining second opinions that reduce the risk of misdiagnosis, and opens the door to powerful statistical analysis of the incidence and forms of breast cancer to assist future research.
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| BIG GRID the Dutch e-Science Grid gets funded with about 20 million euro |
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The Dutch National Science Foundation has proposed to the Dutch Governement to fund 5 large Science infrastructures. A total of 100 million euro is available. One of the projects is BIG Grid that is designed to support Dutch eScience. How much money the project will exactly get still has to be decided. The project proposal is a collaborative effort of NCF, NBIC and NIKHEF.
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| Computing power breaks new boundaries in understanding stem cells |
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Dr. Gary Wills and Dr. Yee-Wai Sim at the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton are working on the Collaborative Orthopaedic Research Environment (CORE) project, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), to develop Virtual Research Environments (VRE) for orthopaedic surgeons.
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| M-grid distributes scientific computing all over Finland |
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The Material Sciences national computing infrastructure M-grid consisting of 10 Linux clusters is one of the first production Grids in the world. The theoretical total capacity of 2.5 Tflop/s makes M-grid the most powerful system in Finland. The capacity will increase further when the extension of CSC's Sepeli cluster will open to users. M-grid is also part of Nordugrid, which consists of over 50 clusters mainly from Nordic countries.
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| Web-based system will speed drug discoveries |
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The process of developing new disease-fighting drugs will be accelerated because of research now under way at the Indiana University School of Informatics and the IU Community Grids Lab. The School has received a grant from Microsoft Smart Clients for eScience to develop a prototype of a Web service and intelligent agent-based system for the potential deployment in the pharmaceutical industry. It is expected the development of such tools will enable scientists to more quickly amass the information they need in their decision-making about which chemical compounds are most likely to be safe, effective drugs.
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| i3Archive brings On-Demand to the challenges of digital medical imaging disaster recovery |
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i3Archive Inc. has extended the capabilities of its Grid-based medical imaging architecture known as the National Digital Medical Archive (NDMA) to service the needs of business continuity and disaster recovery for picture archive and communications systems (PACS). The April 2005 HIPAA security updates requiring that all health care entities have a disaster recovery plan in effect, requiring a copy of all medical data be secure, retrievable and maintained in a second location, such that if the primary copy of the data is destroyed or made unavailable, the disaster recovery copy would be available, have led to questions as to how these mandated requirements would be fulfilled.
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| GGF16 issues Call for Participation |
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GGF16's event theme is "Production Grids: The Path to Global Interoperability" . This Global Gridforum Conference will be held in Athens, Greece, February 13-16, 2006. The conference is hosted by GRNET and the programme also features updates from several EU-based Grid projects, including EGEE, Open Science Grid, HELLASGRID, APGrid, Teragrid, DEISA, Nordugrid, and other regional Grid activities.
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| US Congress passes bill to spend $5 million for supercomputer Grid in northwest Indiana |
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Purdue University and the University of Notre Dame are partnering to create a , high-performance computer Grid - to be operational in January - that is expected to put northwest Indiana on the supercomputing map. Congress has appropriated $6.5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy for the project in the past two years, including $5 million approved in late November. The effort was led by Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-Ind., who represents the 1st Congressional District in northwest Indiana.
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| Understanding Grid semantics for virtual collaboration |
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An EU project hopes to realise the ultimate potential of Grid computing by creating a network that is intelligently aware of its components and of the domain it addresses, enabling quick and easy virtual collaboration. If successful, the InteliGrid project will deliver on the long promised but never realised potential of networks, which people and companies can plug into, use its resources, and find and share information based on its meaning.
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| DataSynapse and Sophis deliver high performance front-to-back office trading solution |
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DataSynapse, the fastest-growing provider of adaptive Grid infrastructure solutions, and Sophis, a provider of cross-asset, front-to-back-office solutions, have entered into a collaboration agreement to deliver an advanced Grid computing offering to Sophis' customer base.
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| US National Science Foundation awards $13.3 million for Globus Toolkit development |
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The National Science Foundation (NSF) has made a five-year, $13.3 million award to sustain and enhance the Globus Toolkit, the software that underpins a rapidly increasing number of large information-intensive science projects in the United States and abroad. Globus founders Ian Foster of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory and Carl Kesselman of the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute (USC/ISI) will lead the project.
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| Early experiences with utility models indicate strong demand for enterprise 'agility' through Grid architectures |
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The 451 Group has found that early adopters' use of utility computing points to an ongoing and growing change in the technology market. Grid computing is being used as a means to achieve a number of ends, utility computing being one of them. Most IT vendors and users see Grids and the attributes that give Grid computing its meaning - virtualization, resource reallocation, automation and self-management - as providing a technology underpinning for new kinds of IT procurement, delivery and usage models - the most evident of which are service-oriented architectures and utility models. These findings appear in a report released by The 451 Group, a New York-based technology industry analyst company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation.
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| HP opens its data centres to the public via utility computing services |
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HP has unveiled utility computing services that enable multiple customers to access HP's dedicated, publicly available computing resources at variable prices. By using HP Flexible Computing Services, companies can quickly acquire additional IT resources as needed. The cost-per-unit pricing is ideal for customers with compute-intensive jobs that can outstrip the capacity found even in very well-equipped IT environments.
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| Sun Grants Princeton University 100,000 CPU Hours on the Sun Grid |
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Princeton University is a recipient of the Sun Grid Education Grant for 100,000 hours of central processing units (CPUs) on the Sun Grid Compute Utility. To date, Princeton, a leading research institution and undergraduate college, has used nearly 11,000 CPU hours on the Sun Grid Compute Utility.
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| Paremus announces adoption of OSGi for superior enterprise system agility and resilience |
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Paremus has adopted the OSGi Service Platform as a core component for its distributed service oriented platform, Infiniflow - the Enterprise Service Fabric. Paremus' Infiniflow Enterprise Service Fabric (ESF) is a distributed application server offering enterprise-class transaction management, messaging and data caching. Designed to support a wide range of applications operating concurrently and transparently on a large-scale Grid computing infrastructure, Infiniflow's autonomic capabilities deliver the dynamic resilience, scalability and agility required to meet the demanding service levels for business-critical applications.
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| TeraGrid management team announces new Deputy Director |
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The Grid Infrastructure Group (GIG), the management team that co-ordinates the TeraGrid initiative at the University of Chicago, has appointed Dane Skow as Deputy Director. In this position, Dane Skow will drive strategy and lead project management efforts for the overall initiative as well as play a key role in broadening TeraGrid partnerships in the international science Grid community.
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| Sun adds two Sun Grid storage services |
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Sun Microsystems in partnership with InTechnology Plc, an expert in data management headquartered in the United Kingdom (U.K), has unveiled two new services for the upcoming Sun Grid Storage Utility: Sun Grid Remote Backup and Restore Service (RBR) and Sun Grid Remote File Vault (RFV) for U.K.-based customers. Sun Grid RBR provides secure, centralized, and remote data back-up, offered through usage-based monthly billing. The complementary service, Sun Grid RFV, runs on the Solaris 10 Operating System and enables long-term remote archiving without a formal back-up process.
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| Accelrys to co-ordinate UK Government-sponsored materials design project |
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Accelrys will coordinate a GBP 1.8m project to deliver an innovative computational service that aims to speed research and development for organisations developing or applying novel materials. The UK Department of Trade and Industry's Under-Secretary of State for Science and Innovation, Lord Sainsbury, has announced funding of GBP 930,000 ( in support of the project, which has been named 'the Materials Grid'. The balance of the funding and the technical and scientific resources will be provided by the project partners: Accelrys Ltd., IBM, the University of Cambridge, CCLRC - Daresbury Laboratory and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt. Accelrys Ltd. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Accelrys Inc.
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| Azul Systems and GigaSpaces set new application performance standards for service-oriented architectures |
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Azul Systems, the pioneer of the industry's first network attached processing solution designed to unbound compute resources for service-oriented applications such as those based on the Java platform, and GigaSpaces Technologies, a provider of innovative Grid-based solutions for data-intensive, business-critical applications have issued test results showing phenomenal enterprise application performance with a 60 percent reduction in hardware costs using Azul Compute Appliances with the GigaSpaces Enterprise Application Grid (EAG).
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| IBM and Universities launch Latin American Grid Computing initiative |
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IBM is teaming with Florida International University, University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez, University of Miami, Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Monterrey Tech to invest in the Latin American Grid initiative.
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| TXU and Current Communications to create the USA's first multipurpose Smart Grid, marriag of electricity and computing Grid |
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TXU Electric Delivery, the nation's sixth largest electric transmission and distribution company and a subsidiary of TXU Corp., and Current Communications Group, LLC, a provider of broadband over power line (BPL) solutions, have signed an agreement to transform TXU Electric Delivery's power distribution network into the nation's first broadband-enabled Smart Grid. It is the first time a computing Grid is build on top of an electricity Power Grid.
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| Callidus extends TrueComp software to new health care client |
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Callidus Software Inc., specialized in Enterprise Incentive Management (EIM), has successfully implemented its TrueComp EIM solution for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida (BCBSF).
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| Oracle Database 10g Release 2 secures world record TPC-H benchmark result with Sun Fire E25K server in 10TB category |
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Oracle has performed a new world record TPC-H 10 Terabyte (TB) benchmark for Oracle Database 10g Release 2. With this achievement, Oracle now holds world records for the three largest scale factors in database performance, showcasing the company's superior data warehousing capabilities. In all, Oracle holds four of the five TPC-H performance records: TPC-H 300 Gigabyte; TPC-H One TB; TPC-H Three TB; and TPC-H 10 TB.
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| Codefarm launches next generation financial optimization software for CDO structuring |
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Financial optimization specialist Codefarm has released a next generation interface for its Galapagos product suite which is changing the way global investment banks structure complex financial products. With its simple structuring language, the new Galapagos Terminal enables CDO structurers in investment banks to specify trades more rapidly and precisely than ever before.
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| Oracle certifies PeopleSoft applications with Oracle Fusion Middleware |
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Oracle has certified Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise applications with Oracle Fusion Middleware 10g Release 2.
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