| News digest May 2006 |
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| Industry
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HPCN industry |
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| Sandia-designed supercomputer ranked world's most efficient in two of six categories of HPCC Challenge benchmark |
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In the High Performance Computing Challenge (HPCC) Sandia National Laboratories' Red Storm computer is the best in the world in two of six new categories, and very high in two other important categories. Red Storm had previously been judged 6th fastest in the world on the old but more commonly accepted Linpack test.
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| Galicia to install Europe's highest capacity shared memory supercomputer |
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At an event attended by Spanish national and Galician authorities in the Supercomputing Center of Galicia (Centro de Supercomputación de Galicia - CESGA), CESGA, HP and Intel have signed a collaboration with Xunta de Galicia and the Higher Council of Scientific Research (CSIC) to install the largest memory-shared supercomputer in Europe. The new supercomputer, "Finis Terrae", will be based in the supercomputing centre located in Santiago de Compostela. With it, Spanish and particularly Galician researchers will be able to perform more complex research projects than previously possible, with the new supercomputer providing enough computing and storage capacity to respond to the most ambitious scientific challenges.
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| Liquid Computing wins most promising start-up award |
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Liquid Computing a developer of a new class of scalable server for high performance computing, was named the Most Promising Start-Up at the 11th Annual OCRI Award Gala. Liquid Computing also received the award for Best Financial Deal. The OCRI (Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation) awards recognize the achievements of the region's business, research and academic community.
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| IU to acquire United States' fastest university-owned supercomputer and largest disk-based storage facility |
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Indiana University is acquiring the nation's fastest university-owned supercomputer and largest disk-based research storage facility. This uniquely places IU's cyberinfrastructure capabilities among the very best in the nation and on par with a small number of federally funded agencies and research centres. The new supercomputer from IBM uses the company's newest processors and will be one of the 20 most powerful computers in the world. It will support IU research into new discoveries in the life sciences, astronomy, informatics, computational physics and the humanities. IU will have one of the largest systems connected to global research networks.
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| Parasoft C++Test extends automated unit testing to the embedded systems environment |
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Parasoft Corporation, a provider of Automated Error Prevention solutions for software development, has released Parasoft C++Test 6.7, an automated unit testing and code analysis tool suite designed to help software engineers prevent the occurrence of software errors as they develop. C++Test 6.7 extends the product's powerful ability to find and resolve critical software errors in C/C++ code by providing enhancements that allow automatically generated or user-defined unit test cases to be executed on embedded devices or simulators to test and validate software in embedded systems environments.
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| Maplesoft teams with top French research centres |
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Maplesoft, a provider of high-performance software tools for engineering, science and mathematics, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) and the Computer Science Laboratory of Paris 6 (LIP6) at the Pierre & Marie Curie University (UPMC) have entered a co-operative research project centred around the Solvers for Algebraic Systems and Applications (SALSA) group. As a result, SALSA's research advancements in mathematical solvers will be integrated into Maplesoft's product line, ensuring commercial availability of these breakthroughs.
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| Cray initiatives fuel rapid sales growth in Japan's high-performance computing market |
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one year after the company welcomed a new president of Cray Japan and initiated an aggressive marketing programme in that country, Cray Inc. has made important new inroads into the Japanese high-performance computing (HPC) market. Cray Japan President Mamoru Nakano has overseen the adoption of Cray systems by a number of key academic institutions and industrial companies across Japan.
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| Scali strengthens Board of Directors with Fortune 50 executives |
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Klaus-Dieter Laidig and Richard Seibt have joined Scali's Board of Directors. Both Laidig and Seibt bring extensive leadership experience and have held senior executive and supervisory board positions with organisations such as IBM, Novell, SAP, SUSE and HP.
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| SC06 Technical Programme is now seeking submissions |
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SC06, the premier international conference on high performance computing, networking and storage, is now accepting submissions for the conference Technical Programme. sponsored by ACM and IEEE. Monday, 17 April is the deadline for submitting tech papers, tutorials, workshops, panels, SC Global sessions, and Gordon Bell Prize entries. SC06, under the theme "Powerful Beyond Imagination", will be held November 11-17, 2006, in Tampa, Florida.
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| 2006 International Supercomputer Conference to offer tutorials on Blade Systems, Benchmarking Initiatives and HPC Software Tools |
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Registration opens March 15 for three high-performance computing tutorials being offered in conjunction with the 2006 International Supercomputer Conference to be held June 27-30 in Dresden. The ISC2006 tutorials provide intensive one-day immersions on Tuesday, June 27. The sessions, to be taught in English by internationally known HPC experts, are Blades - Basics, Innovations and Usability for HPC; Focusing and Introducing New Benchmark Initiatives; and Software Tools to Support Programming and Optimization on HPC Systems.
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| Fujitsu Siemens Computers prepares new Services Division for take-off |
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Fujitsu Siemens Computers BV's new Services Division starts operations as planned, strengthening the leading European IT manufacturer's position as a provider of IT infrastructure solutions and product-related services. Customers now benefit from the company's enhanced ability to offer the complete spectrum of services for infrastructure and mobility solutions, its core growth segments. The new Services Division will focus on end-to-end platform solutions. Partners will continue to provide high-volume product services, as in the past.
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| CommVault and Fujitsu Siemens announce certification of CentricStor for CommVault QiNetix software |
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CentricStor has been certified for use with CommVault QiNetix software. Customers who depend on CommVault to manage their business critical data can now take advantage of CentricStor from Fujitsu Siemens Computers to improve the performance, availability and reliability of their tape processing and to consolidate their tape storage. CentricStor, a virtual tape solution, employs disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) technology to offer outstanding information lifecycle management (ILM) functions for data protection in business-critical environments.
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| Fujitsu Siemens Computers PRIMERGY BX630 Blade server achieves world record in the MMB3 benchmark |
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The PRIMERGY BX630 running on AMD Opteron dual socket processors with 2.6 GHz produced a new Microsoft Exchange MAPI Messaging Benchmark (MMB3) world record using Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. Fujitsu Siemens Computers achieved world-class Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 scalability results of 12,008 MMB3-users and surpassed the latest results achieved by Hewlett-Packard on a four-socket system.
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| HP leads high-performance computing market for third consecutive year |
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For the third consecutive year, HP is the revenue leader in the $9 billion high-performance computing (HPC) market. HP took the No. 1 position with more than 31 percent market share, according to 2005 figures released by research firm IDC. Fueled by the success of its Unified Cluster Portfolio, HP produced industry-leading revenues across the HPC market segments of workgroup, departmental and enterprise as well as in overall clustered systems.
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| Sun and SAS announce Business Intelligence Software Support for Solaris 10 on x64 Platforms |
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SAS will port its data integration, business intelligence and analytic intelligence software to the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) running on x64 servers. This new support for Solaris 10 on industry-standard x64 servers brings a lower total cost of ownership to customers running SAS software, along with access to the sophisticated features available only in the Solaris 10 OS.
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| IBM launches open test drive of SOA-tuned DB2 |
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IBM has launched an open test drive of the next-generation DB2 data server - code-named "Viper" - which is designed to help customers manage and access data via an information-centric approach to service oriented architecture (SOA) with unprecedented flexibility, speed and security.
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| Power.org member Rapport achieves breakthrough in power efficiency |
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At the Embedded Systems Conference, Power.org member Rapport Incorporated and IBM previewed a breakthrough energy-efficient processor design, the Kilocore1025, which will feature 1024 eight-bit processing elements together with a PowerPCTM core on a single, low-cost chip. Rapport and IBM are collaborating to utilize the Power Architecture technology, providing high-compute processing at extremely low energy consumption in one of the most energy-efficient processors of its kind.
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| Cluster Resources Inc. celebrates flagship product anniversaries |
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The need for better management led to two of Cluster Resources’ flagship products, Moab and Maui, both of which mark anniversaries in 2006, Moab its 5th and Maui its 10th year of cluster optimization.
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| Locuz extends its Infrastructure Management Services outside India |
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Locuz had established LITOC (Locuz IT Operations Centre); it's NOC & SOC for remotely delivering IT Infrastructure Managed Services over 18 months ago and has been focusing on offering services to its India customers with perhaps few clients outside India. Locuz has now put together a team to service offshore clients and hence have enhanced LITOC capabilities with its Industry focused consultants.
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| HP simplifies management for Linux on blades |
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HP has unveiled a software package that simplifies the management of Linux on blade servers. Based on technology gained last year through HP's acquisition of RLX, the HP Control Tower software offers powerful deployment and monitoring capabilities for HP BladeSystem environments and features an easy-to-use, yet scalable, interface. In addition, HP Control Tower can work in conjunction with HP Systems Insight Manager to provide customers with simplified lifecycle management of blade servers running Linux by using familiar open-source tools.
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| Cray to delay filing of 2005 Form 10-K |
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Cray will delay the filing of its 2005 Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2005, pending the completion of a review of a non-cash item in 2004 of $3.3 million that could result in an adjustment to its 2004 financial statements. The company expects to be able to file the 2005 Form 10-K as soon as the review is completed.
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| IBM launches new system x servers and software targeting large scale x86 virtualization |
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IBM would address unprecedented demand for large scale x86 virtualization technologies with System x scaleable servers featuring its Enterprise X-Architecture technology - X3 - and new software to help clients speed their virtualization efficiencies.
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| Cray files 2005 Form 10-K consistent with preliminary results |
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Cray Inc. has filed its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2005. Cray's 2005 results are consistent with preliminary results announced on March 17, 2006.
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| Industry
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The Grid |
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| NCSA and SDSC add compute systems to TeraGrid |
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As of April 1, users requesting high-performance computing resources from the National Science Foundation have seamless access to all computational resources at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) within the TeraGrid environment. TeraGrid now provides the nation's scientists and engineers with access to NCSA's Tungsten, Radium and Copper systems - in addition to the previously available Mercury and Cobalt - and SDSC's DataStar and Blue Gene systems. Combined with systems in Texas, Indiana, Tennessee, and Pittsburgh, these additions bring the TeraGrid's total computational performance to a peak of 102 trillion calculations per second.
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| On-line storage - will the second wave succeed? |
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On-line storage - also called storage on demand, having your data on a remote system and not your own computer, was one of the promises of the Internet boom. Although some people and small companies (SME's) have used it, it did not really catch on. For large companies and scientific organisations it did. In that area on-demand services, disaster recovery and datagrids are flourishing. Cost was one reason why on-line storage did not make it to the mainstream, complexity of use another. During the last 12 months, however, things have changed. At least a dozen or so start-up companies are addressing on-line storage, with offerings of a few euro or less for a Gbyte or more on-line storage. Older companies - in Internet age that is, try to adapt. The new companies especially target private persons and SME's. Interfaces are well designed and easy to use. Venture capitalists are putting money in these companies. So perhaps this new wave of on-line storage companies will succeed and before long we will have a lot of our storage on-line: back-ups are automatically taken care of, so you do not have to write that back-up disk each week.
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| Grid computing system for telecom carriers |
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Fujitsu Limited and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., in collaboration with France Telecom, have developed a system based on Grid computing that enables telecommunications carriers to optimize use of their IT resources, and have successfully completed testing of the system. In these tests, service loads were automatically allocated among servers located in Paris, Tokyo, and Kawasaki, enabling the overall system to handle loads that would have been beyond the capacity of conventional systems.
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| BBC Climate grid needs a restart |
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The BBC Grid that is used for Climate prediction had to be restarted. The reason was an error in one of the input files for the scientific programme. About 80.000 computers are active in the BBC Voluntaty computer Grid. People donating computing time are asked to participate a litlle longer than May when the experiment was originally planned to produce results.
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| Third International Conference on Grid Services Engineering and Management issues Call for Papers |
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The third GSEM conference will be held in conjunction with the 7th International Conference Net.ObjectDays 2006 (NODE'06) in Erfurt, Germany, 18-21 September, 2006. Deadline for paper submission is April 28, 2006.
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| SETI@home looks for funding |
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About a million computers around the world are voluntary for SETI@home. But now the project is looking for some real money to sustain the project. SETI@home hoping to raise $750,000 for a number of sub-projects and to carry on our daily operations through the coming year.
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| Sun has completed the acquisition of Aduva |
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With the completion of this transaction, Sun now owns Aduva, a provider of heterogeneous knowledge and analysis capabilities and technology for managing software update needs and compliance risk in the enterprise. Aduva's multi-platform services will be available for operation by individual customers behind their own firewalls, or as an automated Sun Grid Utility service.
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| Metascheduling: a free study compiled by field experts, GridwiseTech |
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The vendor-independent company GridwiseTech has just completed a fully unbiased evaluation of Grid metaschedulers currently available on the market. Metascheduling also popularly known as brokering is an important piece in a typical computational Grid. A metascheduler is the vital part responsible for the load balancing work between sites and data centres. Metascheduling is a technology in the Grid that is responsible for managing jobs and application work flow, including submitting, scheduling, executing, monitoring, stopping, and retrieving results of computational jobs
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| Digging deep to unlock the Grid |
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Unlocking the true power of the Grid for data mining is a long-cherished aim of computer scientists and researchers are making important strides to achieve that goal by developing the necessary tools and techniques. The real power of Grid computing lies in sharing resources across a network. These can be CPU cycles, storage, peripherals, network bandwidth, data and software. Ultimately, this will lead to the grand goal envisioned by Grid researchers in which Grid users will be able to seamlessly access and harness geographically-widely distributed computing resources as if they were using a local system.
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| Launch of the Platform Alliance Network to enable virtualization of enterprise IT solutions |
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Platform Computing has launched the Platform Alliance Network, an innovative partnership programme designed to build a broad ecosystem to deliver virtualization solutions for the Datacenter. Platform also announced new partner additions to the network: CSC, Novell, Red Hat, VMware, Wipro, and Dell China.
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| Paremus announces availability of Infiniflow 2.1 |
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Paremus has made available the Infiniflow 2.1 Enterprise Service Fabric (ESF). An integrated, distributed Java application server, Infiniflow offers enterprise applications a unique combination of performance, high availability and unparalleled application agility at a much lower cost and improved flexibility than can be achieved by using conventional enterprise middleware.
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| The Gridbus Project to release GridSim Toolkit 4.0 |
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The Gridbus Project and the Grid Computing and Distributed Systems (GRIDS) Lab at the University of Melbourne, Australia has released the next-version of Grid simulation software, the GridSim Toolkit 4.0.
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| Intel and Red Hat launch global solution acceleration programme |
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Intel Corporation and Red have created a global programme to help customers plan for, acclerate and optimize their deployments of Linux solutions. The programme will be the first of its kind for Linux solutions development and will initially focus on developing and disseminating tools for platform virtualization and Grid computing.
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| UNICORE Summit 2006 introduces Call for Papers |
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The UNICORE Summit 2006 will be held in Dresden, Germany, August 30th - 31th, 2006 in conjunction with Euro-Par 2006 - the European Conference on Parallel Computing 2006, to be held August 29th - September 1st, 2006. Deadline for paper submission is June 11, 2006.
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| Enterprise Grid Alliance identifies data provisioning requirements to accelerate adoption of Enterprise Grid deployments |
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The Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) has unveiled two new technical deliverables that will help users better understand the basic requirements and overcome the common obstacles associated with developing and deploying enterprise Grids. The Enterprise Grid Data and Storage Provisioning report identifies the unique data and storage provisioning needs of commercial enterprise Grids and breaks down the unmet requirements needed to interoperably manage Grid components. It examines whether suitable interfaces into the actual Grid resources exist in applications such as asset discovery and management, data movement and back-up, and policy management. Additionally, the report provides a deeper look into the discovery, commissioning and decommissioning, and capabilities related to Service Level Objectives of asset management.
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| First computational international effort to fight avian flu |
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The Rothberg Institute for Childhood Diseases (TRI), a non-profit research institute devoted to discovering and developing drugs to treat childhood diseases, has released the first avian influenza target to its Drug Design and Optimization Lab (D2OL) distributed computing project. Anyone with a personal computer can contribute to this project simply by downloading a screensaver that works when their computer is idle. The D2OL community is growing rapidly and is currently comprised of nearly 80,000 volunteers and their computers in 93 countries working to identify potential new drugs for treating avian flu and other infectious diseases. By releasing this target the project is creating a platform to rapidly respond to changes in the flu virus.
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| Crosswalk introduces iGrid storage |
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Crosswalk Inc., a provider of high-performance technologies that enable scalable and resilient collaborative computing, has launched the iGrid Intelligent Storage Grid System. iGrid is a vendor agnostic Grid technology that enables any application to access any authorized storage resource, any iGrid node to access any and all file systems, and all users to concurrently access any data they need for collaborative projects.
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| Investment banks are using Grid computing deployments as the connective 'fabric' for shared enterprise IT infrastructure |
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The 451 Group has found that investment banks, the early adopters of Grid computing, are quickly moving beyond compute Grids in their enterprise Grid computing deployments; moreover, these compute Grids are increasingly being positioned as the underlying basis - i.e., the connective 'fabric' - for next-generation distributed computing environments.
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| International speakers confirmed for Fourth Grid Summer School |
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Many Internationally renowned speakers have agreed to contribute to the Fourth GGF International Summer School on Grid Computing in Ischia, Naples in July. The school will enjoy presentations from Professor Dr. Ian Foster presenting a Vision of Grid Middleware, Dr. Brooklin Gore - Industrial Grid applications, Professor Dr. Satoshi Matsuoka - NAREGI Grids, Prof. Dr. Miron Livny - Principles and Architectures of High Throughput Computing, Dr. Vincent Breton - HealthGrids, Gaetano Maron - GridCC: real-time instrumentations Grids, Professor Dr. Malcolm Atkinson, UK, e-Science Envoy - principles, architectures and data, and Dr. Erwin Laure - EGEE production Grids.
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| IBM expands business partner ecosystem for open standards-based Grid and Grow Programme |
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IBM has expanded its broad ecosystem of application support for the company's Grid Computing business, including the IBM Grid and Grow offering it launched in August, 2005. Fifteen new ISVs have achieved IBM's "Ready for Grid" mark, validation that applications interoperate with the company's standards-based, flexible and scalable suite of software and hardware products for Grid Computing. The "Ready for Grid" mark validations are conducted worldwide at IBM Innovation Centers.
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| Digipede joins the BioIT Alliance |
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Digipede Technologies, a provider of distributed computing solutions for the Microsoft Windows platform, is joining the BioIT Alliance, a cross-industry group working together to realize the possibilities of personalized medicine with the Microsoft platform. The BioIT Alliance will enable the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, equipment manufacturing, and software industries to develop best practices for sharing biomedical data, improving collaboration, and effectively managing life sciences knowledge.
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| Oracle and Novell to offer Grid-ready solution for the data centre |
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Novell and Oracle have made available a new Accelerator service designed to help customers streamline the deployment of a Grid-ready infrastructure for the data centre, featuring Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Application Server 10g, and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g for customers running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell.
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| Voltaire Solutions available for integration through Sun customer ready systems programme |
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Sun Microsystems can integrate Voltaire's complete family of switches, routers and host channel adapters into customer-defined solutions and configurations through the Sun Customer Ready Systems (CRS) programme, enabling Sun to provide customers with factory-tested ready-to-deploy interconnect solutions for clustered computing.
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