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April 2000

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Indiana University acquires SUN Starfire

Sun and Indiana University (IU) start a Center of Excellence at IU that will offer researchers and students new, more powerful resources and opportunities in the areas of high performance computing, networking and storage, data mining and visualization. As part of the Center of Excellence, IU will acquire a 50 Gflop/s peak Sun Enterprise 10000 Starfire supercomputer.

CSP awarded second phase of multi-year contract by Northrop Grumman

CSP announced that Northrop Grumman has awarded the second phase of a multi-year contract for the delivery of its 2000 SERIES MultiComputers. Norden selected CSPI's 2000 SERIES System as the high-performance computational system for its Generic Acoustic Stimulation System (GASS) programme.

Principal Financial Group moves it web server to S/390

The Principal Financial Group in the United States, has chosen to move key portions of its Web services from a UNIX environment to the IBM S/390 enterprise server platform. As a result, Principal says, their Web site now performs two to three times faster.

Forzani choses Data General's AViiON server

The Forzani Group Ltd. has chosen Data General's NUMA solutions as the foundation for an efficient, controlled computing environment in support of the large Canadian sporting good retailer's rapidly growing business. Forzani deployed Data General's AViiON AV 8700 and AV 25000 servers to establish a consolidated computing environment that provides increased processing power, high availability and overall flexibility.

Chinese Internet portal on RS600/SP

Backed by three IBM RS 6000SP parallel supercomputers located in Pudong and Hong Kong, an second generation portal for China has been launched.

MHPCC announces availability of Its new IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer;

The Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC) announced today the availability of its newly acquired IBM RS/6000 SP POWER3 (P3) system. Ranked 72nd on the TOP500 Supercomputing Sites list, this system is the 18th most powerful IBM SP in the world and the 2nd most powerful IBM SP in the U.S Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program. IBM currently owns the number one position on the TOP500 list with 141 systems.

China

Yinhe-III supercomputers widely used in China

Twelve Yinhe supercomputers, including six Yinhe-III, have been sold thus far in China. These computers are frequently used in weather forecasts, nuclear science research, air dynamic experiments, petroleum exploration and seismic data processing.

Finland

New T3E guide from CSC

The Finnish supercomputer centre CSC has published a new edition of their Cray T3E User's Guide on the web, that could be of use to other Cray T3E users too. The guide is available on the Web in PDF format.

France

CEA installs 5 Tflop/s machine next year - by then biggest supercomputer in Europe

The "Direction des applications militaires (DAM)" from the French atomic agency CEA will install next year a 5 Tflop/s peak Compaq/QSW machine with over 2500 processors. To date this is the largest machine planned to be installed in Europe. The new supercomputer, that will be used for numerical simulations of nuclear arms, will be expanded into the 100 Tflop/s performance range in 2009.

Germany

Compaq clusters Alphas in Wuppertal, Germany

Compaq goes back to its "Digital" roots and now approaches successfully the scientific community. In Wuppertal (Germany), at the Bergische University - Highschool, Compaq got a contract to install a 128 node Alpha cluster, consisting of 128 DS10 workstations with a 600 MHz Alpha processor. They are connected with a Myrinet system area network. In the first step 64 processors, 466 MHz, have been powered in November 1999 and are running Linux.

Audi uses VPP5000 for CAE applications

Recently the VPP5000 system at Audi started production. Last year Audi decided to upgrade their existing VPP resource. The new system, a VPP5000 with 4 processors primarily will be used for inner flow simulations which are performed with STAR-CD, a CFD package that is developed and marketed by Computational Dynamics. The VPP5000 will be used for crash simulations as well as for structural analysis as well. Here the underlying application packages are ESI/PAM-CRASH and MSC/NASTRAN. The VPP5000 is the most recent product line of Fujitsu Siemens vector parallel processors.

Supercomputer book expanded

Prof . Schoenauer from the University of Karlsruhe has added a supplement to his book on supercomputering available over the Internet. In the new Version 1.1 new chapters and sections on workstation processors and SMP servers have been added.

NEC discloses usage of the SX vector computer series and its efficiency

NEC is strong in the automotive industry. In Germany for example a NEC SX-5 complex with 12 processors is used by Volkswagen AG. DaimlerChrysler and Porsche access the machines of HWW in Stuttgart, there are two 16 processor SX-5 and additional SX-4s installed. In Europa NEC has sold 58 systems, 16 SX-5, 35 SX-4, 6 SX-3 and one SX1/2. This was revealed by Dr. Christian Lantwin at a press meeting at Volkswagen AG in Wolfsburg, where he presented the role of NEC and the situation in the vectorprocessing arena, the technological changes, some figures of the NEC SX-5, the application areas and compared the machine with RISC processors on the base of real life programs.

Volkswagen (VW) AG uses NEC SX-5 Supercomputers for Crash simulation

Crash simulation at VW is an important task, not only to optimise the car body but also fulfil all the legal rules of the different countries. The prescriptions of a real crash in the States differs from those in Germany. Insurances and automobile clubs and automotive magazines create their own. Thus it saves costs and time. Dr. Bernd Richter, Head of Computational Methods at VW presented their strategy and the trustworthiness of the numerical results.

Quantum Chemistry Winterschool on the Juelich Web

The John von Neumann Institute of Computing (NIC) and ZAM (Central Institute for Applied Mathematics) at Research Center Juelich organised a winterschool on Modern Methods and Algorithms of Quantum Chemistry from 21 to 25 February. Texts and slides are now available on the web.

Greece

Mercury selected for Greek air force airborne radar programme

Real-time digital signal and image processing computer systems vendor Mercury announced that through its distributor, VSYSTEMS AB of Stockholm, Sweden, it has received orders to supply RACE signal processing systems to Ericsson Microwave Systems AB of Molndal, Sweden. This order results from an Ericsson contract for the ERIEYE Airborne Early Warning and Command (AEW&C) radar system to be supplied to the Greek Air Force for installation on a fleet of four EMB-145 jet aircraft.

Italy

Advanced research workshop on HPC technology and applications

A workshop on High-performance Computing will be held in Cetraro (Italy), June 12-15, 2000. The aim of the workshop is to contribute to assess the current and future developments in the HPC architecture and software technologies, and to discuss promising applications of HPC to new problems of science, industry and business.

Spain

Intercampus, one access to 8 universities

Catalonian students have a new and virtual academic offer. Thanks to the Intercampus project, they have access to 16 free choice subjects that will be taught trough Internet by several universities. This project makes possible for the students to study in a university different from those where they are usually registered.

Sweden

Volvo can simulate six full-car crashes each day

Volvo's $100 million investment in automotive safety is now open and in use, helping to develop safer cars and to preserve Volvo's role as a leader in automotive safety. Virtual tests in a new NEC SX-4 supercomputer pave the way for faster development of new Volvo car models with even greater precision. Volvo's supercomputer capacity allows for a crash situation to be simulated any number of times at different speeds with different types of safety system and different body sizes for the occupants. Six simulated full-car crashes can be carried out per 24-hour period.

Switzerland

CSCS Visiting Researcher Programme

Swiss supercomputer centre CSCS announced a Visiting Researcher Programme (VRP) offering possibilities to not only young students but also junior and senior researchers active in their field to broaden their horizons of knowledge and gain unique experience during their stay at CSCS.

Swiss supercomputer centre to become a science & technology centre

The NEC SX-5 at the Swiss supercomputer centre CSCS could well be the last of the vector computers there. In a recently published document "High Performance Computing Technology Trends in Relation to the Swiss Center for Scientific Computing CSCS", it is concluded that to keep up with the performance demands posed on a national supercomputer centre, CSCS will probably have to turn to a massively parallel processor system for the next generation, even though these machines are much harder to program. Furthermore the report suggests CSCS should change from service centre to science and technology centre, strengthening its R & D activities.

ETH Zürich nominates CTO for National High Performance Computing

At the Swiss Center for Scientific Computing (CSCS Manno) Dr. D. Maric takes over the new function of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the national HPCN (High Performance Computing and Networking). Such new management position was created in order to assure continuity in national HPCN activities in Manno and to properly plan ahead, in view also of the fast changing market characteristics and trends. Dr. Maric has been successfully playing an active role in CSCS management since the early days of its foundation, and holds a wide and solid experience and know-how in HPCN. In his new position he will be responsible for the direction of the national HPCN strategies and will report directly to the ETH Vice-President for Research and Business Relations.

The Netherlands

SARA opens second office in Almere

The Dutch academic supercomputer centre SARA, based in Amsterdam, opens a second office in Almere. The city of Almere, wants to strengthen the ICT sector in the city and provides SARA with a grant of 2 million euro.

HPaC seminar in Delft

The the second HPaC seminar will be held in Delft on Friday the 14th of April 2000. The aim of the seminar is to give you comprehensive information on what to expect from running parallel codes on the Cray T3E at TUDelft and on aspects of Virtual Reality.

United Kingdom

Enhanced HP 9000 N-Class at BT

Hewlett-Packard Company enhanced the HP 9000 N-Class Enterprise Server.The heart of the midrange N-Class server is the 64-bit PA-8600 processor, running at speeds up to 550MHz. Also contributing to the overall 25 percent performance improvement is a the 100 percent increase in memory capacity to 32GB, enhanced connectivity and an increase in aggregate I/O bandwidth to 6.4 Gb/s. The system's secure, remote-management capabilities make the N-Class a robust platform for Internet applications. Global telecommunications giant British Telecom (BT) is using the N-Class in its billing department to verify call records at a rate of nearly 350,000 records per minute.

PixelFusion designs most complex general-purpose chip design to date

Mentor Graphics announced that Bristol based PixelFusion, Ltd., has adopted and successfully deployed a comprehensive set of deep submicron (DSM) Mentor Graphics tools to design and verify the computer industry's most complex general-purpose chip design to date - the FUZION 150 .

IBM NUMA-Q for Scottish Qualifications Authority

The Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA), the body responsible for most types of educational qualifications in Scotland, has purchased two IBM NUMA-Q 1000 enterprise servers in a GBP 180,000 deal. These will form the hardware platform for a new bespoke business application that maintains and processes all of the data for some 350,000 examination candidates each year.

Applications

SX-5 exceeds 6 Gflop/s for Sparse Eigensolutions using 1 CPU

NEC's Advanced Technology Computing Center released benchmark results for its tuned version of BCSLIB-EXT 4 for the NEC SX Series supercomputers with an overall performance of 6 GFLOPS for problems of 1 million degrees of freedom (DOF) or larger, executed on a single processor.

Catia available on new RS/6000 44 models

IBM and Dassault Systemes announced general availability of CATIAVersion 4 and CATIA Version 5 on the new RS/6000 44P Model 170 and Model 270 workstations.

Mercury RACE systems power new generation Schlumberger Odyssey

Mercury Computer Systems has shipped multiple RACE systems to Schlumberger Technologies for integration into its new Odyssey 300 silicon wafer inspection system.Semiconductor manufacturing processes have driven geometries below the 0.15-micron level, moving the market to a point at which traditional optical inspection systems cannot detect critical electrical defects.Mercury's cutting-edge multicomputers for signal and image processing, the Odyssey 300 improves manufacturing efficiency by identifying problems earlier in the fab process.

Veritas revenues improve - NEC XS5 computer installations near completion

Seismic company Veritas showed released thre-months financial figures. Revenue for the second quarter was $91.0 million, an increase of 32% over the $68.7 million generated in the first quarter. Compared to a year ago, the results were worse. As previously announced, the Company has added a visualization center in Crawley, England; and is in the process of adding centers in Calgary, Canada and Perth, Australia. The upgrade of the Company's three supercomputer centers to the latest NEC SX-5 is nearing completion.

RCI Aerospace / Automotive Special Interest Group Executive Conference

An RCI Aerospace / Automotive Special Interest Group Executive Conference on June 7. The conference will be held in conjunction with Supercomputer 2000 Conference in Mannheim, Germany. The conference will feature international experts from Europe and the United States and luminaries from the Aerospace / Aeronautics and Automotive fields.

Fujitsu VPP5000 installed at Toyota

Fujitsu Limited received an order from Toyota Motor Corporation for a multi-processor VPP5000 Series HPC Server which will be fully operational later this month. The Fujitsu VPP5000 system selected by Toyota comprises 30 vector processing elements and has a theoretical maximum performance of 288 Gflop/s . With 320 gigabytes of memory installed, it will be the world's second largest supercomputer system installed in a private enterprise.

Electromagnetic scattering of full-size airplane simulated

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign simulated the electromagnetic scattering effect of a full-size aircraft at X band microwave frequencies, the first time such a complex real-world problem has been solved in a computer simulation. Weng Cho Chew, a professor of electrical and computer engineering in the U of I's Center for Computational Electromagnetics, and Senior Research Scientist Jiming Song used a 128-processor Silicon Graphics Origin2000 supercomputer at the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) to complete his team's simulation.

General Dynamics to be prime contractor for world's fastest commercial satellite transmission system

SpaceData International LLC announced selected General Dynamics Worldwide Telecommunications Systems, as the prime contractor for its SeismicStar program. SpaceData's SeismicStar is the fastest commercial satellite transmission system in the world. Amongst other things, General Dynamics will be responsible for procuring and operating the SeismicStar network's terrestrial earth stations and high-speed fiber connectivity to terrestrial supercomputers for seismic exploration data processing.

ASP on RS/6000

Application service provider Xspeedium.com has launched a business-to-business Web trading exchange supported on RS/6000 servers. The Xspeedium.com marketplace will bring together buyers and sellers within a common vertical industry and facilitate the real-time transfer of information, money and goods.

Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents' World

First International Workshop on Engineering Societies in the Agents' World , ESAW'00 will take place August 21, at the Humboldt University, Berlin, in conjunction with ECAI 2000, the 14th Biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Performance Technologies and SUNY Buffalo partner on a faulttolerant supercomputer

Performance Technologies provided three of its Nebula 8000 Fault Tolerant Ethernet Switching Systems to the Center for Computational Research at SUNY Buffalo. The PTI equipment is designed to support continuous operation of the University's cluster of 64 Sun Ultra 5 workstations, thereby elevating this collection of workstations to fault tolerant "supercomputer" status.

Idaho Powers new customer application with IBM S/390

In the recently deregulated energy market, Idaho Power Company is using information technology from IBM to seize new market opportunities. Idaho Power is replacing its 20-year-old customer accounting system with a new enterprise resource planning application running on IBM S/390 enterprise servers.

Cluster computing

SUN extends cluster technology to SPARCengine CP1500

Sun's Cluster 2.2 software has been extended to the SPARCengine CP1500 CompactPCI board. Sun Cluster 2.2 software for CompactPCI enables communication equipment providers to cost-effectively offer carriers extremely high levels of availability or "uptime" while retaining an open-systems based approach for rapidly adding capacity for new services.

Sun HPC ClusterTools 3.1 software released

Sun Microsystems released Sun HPC ClusterTools 3.1 software, the latest version of its integrated package of development tools that connect multiple shared-memory machines for supercomputing-class performance. The new high performance computing (HPC) software provides extended functionality over version 3.0 and compatibility with Solaris 8, as well as Solaris 2.6 and 7 Operating Environments. The universities of Utrecht, The Netherlands, and Leipzig, Germany, are among the ClusterTool users.

Boulder high tech firm to offer supercomputing power on PCs and workstations

Massively Parallel Computing, a new Boulder firm is successfully raising capital from private investors for a revolutionary new technology that, the company claims, will bring the power of supercomputers to any individual who owns a PC.

Parallel Tools Consortium meeting

Is your main debugging "tool" PRINT or printf? Is /bin/time your favorite performance tool? Does it seem like the software tools you have tried for parallel work were designed more for tool developers to admire than for programmers to actually use? Then the organisers of the 5th Annual Meeting of the Parallel Tools Consortium ask you to join them, to meet academic and vendor tools developers, as well as other users. May 17-19, 2000 San Diego Supercomputer Center, USA.

Compaq Canada And The University of Western Ontario Establish Centre For Computational Research

Compaq Canada announced that it has partnered with The University of Western Ontario to establish the (CDN) $1.6 million Compaq-Western Centre for Computational Research. The Compaq-Western Centre for Computational Research harnesses the power of 70 Compaq Alpha processors installed in Compaq AlphaServer ES40 and Compaq AlphaStation systems running in a pure Linux operating system and Beowulf cluster environment. The research centre, an arm of the University's Faculty of Science, offers the largest academic installation of Compaq Alpha processors in Canada for research and development purposes.

Financial

Tera's 1999 financial results

Tera Computer Company reported results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year ended December 31, 1999. For the fiscal year ended December 31, 1999, Tera reported a net loss of $34.5 million, on revenues of $2.1 million compared to a net loss of $19.8 million for fiscal 1998 on revenues of $2.0 million.

HPCN industry

Tera to acquire Cray vector business from SGI

Tera Computer Company has acquired the Cray vector business from SGI. This includes the customer base of Cray C90, T90 and SV systems, and the production facilties. Approximately 800 SGI employees will move to the new company. The combined company will be named Cray, Inc. Finacial details have not been disclosed. SGI will concentrate in the high-end on the Origin machines. Although the SGI/Cray vector customers are exactly the first main target for the Tera MTA architecture, the new company also gets the Cray vector technology, that up to now did not prove to be real competition in the high-end to the Japanese vector vendors outside the USA. On the other hand, the expertise acquired by Tera is an important asset for the company. It could help Tera in getting out of the position were it did not have enough customers to be interesting enough to new ones.

StorageTek delivers 9840 Fibre Channel tape drive

StorageTek announced the StorageTek 9840 Fibre Channel (FC) Tape Drive, a Fibre Channel version of its i 9840 tape drive. The 9840 continues to set rate-of-adoption records for high-end storage products with 20,000 SCSI and ESCON drives shipped to date. The 9840FC delivers the high performance, high capacity, reliability and fast access capabilities of the 9840 across traditional enterprise and SAN environments.

IBM claims its RS/6000 is outselling the SUN Starfire

IBM says that its RS/6000 S80 server is outselling the E10000, Sun Microsystem's competing UNIX system, by a wide margin, according to a report issued by International Data Corporation (IDC). The Q4CY99 server market report reveals that IBM sold nearly three times as many new RS/6000 S80 servers (715), as compared to new Sun E10000 Starfire servers (255), in the fourth quarter of 1999. IBM claims its mid-range prized S80 performs as well as the high-end Starfire, using TPC as a benchmark.

HP posts record SPEC rates

Hewlett-Packard Company today announced record-breaking SPECjvm, SPECint and SPECfp results for its HP 9000 N-Class Enterprise Servers, running with the recently introduced PA-8600 processor. The three tests are the worldwide standard for measuring and comparing computer performance in Internet and compute-intensive workload environments.

Sun leads mid range Unix server market

For the fifth quarter, Sun Microsystems outpaced both IBM and HP in shipments of midrange Unix servers, according to International Data Corp.'s quarterly report on the server market. Sun shipped 8,053 midrange Unix units during the fourth quarter of 1999. HP logged 6,842 midrange Unix shipments and IBM registered 2,669 shipments.

Mercury and Motorola develop high-performance embedded interconnect

Mercury Computer Systems collaborates with Motorola in developing the RapidIO switched-fabric interconnect architecture. This architecture will enable chip-to-chip and board-to-board communications at performance levels that scale to meet the explosive demand for higher bandwidth within embedded computer systems. In addition, Mercury plans to work with Motorola and the giants of the networking industry to form the RapidIO Trade Association that will drive the adoption of the new interconnect as an open standard.

Linux

SGI and SuSE to bring high-availability functionality to Linux

SGI and SuSE Linux AG announced plans to develop a version of IRIS FailSafe for high-availability applications in Linux environments.

VA Linux Systems Announces SourceForge CompileFarm

VA Linux Systems introduced the SourceForge CompileFarm, a service that gives Open Source developers a convenient way to build and test applications on multiple versions of the Linux and BSD operating systems over the Internet. Other new features on SourceForge, the world's largest Open Source development centre, include the SourceForge Patch Manager and Support Manager. These two Web-based tools that make it easy for project administrators to manage code submissions and support requests.

SuSE Linux 6.4 available

SuSE Linux AG announced the latest version of SuSE Linux. Available April 3rd in Germany and approximately two weeks later in the US, SuSE Linux 6.4 focuses on optimal installation and server support while offering over 1500 programs.

Enlighten monitoring software on SuSe

Enlighten Software Solutions and SuSE Linux AG announced a strategic partnership under which SuSE will bundle Enlighten's Linux System Monitoring and Reporting technology with the SuSE Linux 6.4 for Intel distribution.

Extreme Linux conference

The third Extreme Linux conference EL2000 will be held on October 12-14, 2000 in Atlanta USA in conjunction with the Annual Linux Showcase. The date for submission of papers will be April 17, 2000.

Media and visualisation

New release of 3D software Maya 3

Alias|Wavefront, an SGI announced Maya 3, the upcoming fifth major release of its award winning 3D animation and visual effects software for film, broadcast, video and game development. With this release, Alias|Wavefront will introduce Trax , an advanced nonlinear animation tool especially beneficial to games artists who often need to edit large amounts of motion capture data or mix together multiple animation sequences of the same character in a non-destructive, hierarchical and time-independent manner. Maya 3 software is slated to ship this summer.

Eurographics Workshop

The 6th Eurographics Workshop on Virtual Environments (EGVE '00) will be held at the Center for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam. The workshop features invited papers that present research results from all areas of virtual environments. A highlight of the event will be a live tele-immersion demonstration by Drs. Jason Leigh and Andrew Johnson between the CAVE at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the CAVE at the University of Amsterdam.

Advanced Internet Digital Media Lab at Loudeye Technologies

Seattle based Loudeye Technologies , a provider of digital media solutions on the Internet, has chosen SGI as its hardware vendor to accommodate the growth of digital media on the Web. Together, Loudeye and SGI have developed a technologically advanced commercial digital media lab for Loudeye's Seattle facilities. The lab was designed to increase Loudeye's service capacity and efficiencies for managing large volume projects such as preparing the North American music library for Web delivery through its partnership with Valley Media. The lab includes a 2-processor Origin 2400 server.

Intergraph supports Pentium III for Its Zx10 ViZual workstations and servers

Intergraph Computer Systems today announced support for Intel's Pentium III 866 MHz processors with 133 MHz frontside bus (FSB) and 850 MHz with 100 MHz FSB technology in its Zx ViZual Workstation family and Zx Servers. The Wahoo Technology-based Zx10 ViZual Workstations, powered by Intel's fastest Pentium III processors and broad 2D/3D graphics options, provide the highest-performance levels ever for creative and technical professionals in the broadcast and entertainment, digital media, content creation, publishing and prepress, MCAD, and visual simulation markets.

Visual Numerics Announces Invizion v2.0

Visual Numerics' Version 2.0 of Invizion will be available in April. Invizion is a customizable time-series analysis application written in Visual Numerics' PV-WAVE software product.

US Navy's Flight Simulation Lab adopt Quantum3D's visual computing systems

Quantum3D has delivered eight Heavy Metal Mercury systems to the U.S. Navy at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland.Quantum3D's open architecture systems are in use in the F18 simulator at the Air Combat Environment Test and Evaluation Facility's Manned Flight Simulation (MFS) Laboratory, along with Quantum3D's scene management software, OpenGVS.

TOP500

Send in your entries for the June TOP500 list

The next release of the TOP500 Supercomputer List will be presented at Supercomputer 2000 Conference, June 8-10 in Mannheim, Germany. When you expect your computer system to be powerful enough to enter the list, you can submit it through the TOP500 web site. The deadline for submitting entries is April 15, 2000.

The Grid

Workshop on Scalable Web Services

The Workshop on Scalable Web Services (SWS 2000) that will be held in Toronto, Canada, in conjunction with the 29th International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP 2000) has issued a call for papers.

Fujitsu Siemens in ASP market

Fujitsu Siemens Computers partners with Argus Systems Group as part of its new ASPect initiative to establish the company as the number one supplier of server technology for the emerging European Application Service Provider (ASP) sector. Fujitsu Siemens Computers is targeting the ASP sector as one of the key markets for its Intel-based and SPARC-based server systems, and is targeting revenues of 250 million Euros by 2003 following the launch of its first European ASP Center in Munich last month.

Gridware's Codine/GRD available on Solaris 8.0

Gridware, Inc. announced incorporation of support for Sun Solaris 8 into its line of advanced computing resource management products. Gridware develops, markets, and supports advanced computing resource management, job scheduling, and load management software for use in clustered multi-processor, high-availability, and supercomputing environments.

Experimental Technology Grid at University of Tennessee supported by Microsoft

The University of Tennessee announced that Microsoft Corp. has donated $225,000 in cash, hardware, software, and other resources for the Scalable Intracampus Research Grid (SInRG) project lead by Dr. Jack Dongarra and a team of researchers. SInRG is an experimental "computational power grid," centered on the Knoxville campus, which is being built over the next 5 years by Dongarra and his colleagues under a 5 year, 2 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation.

SDCS Gridport for computational science portals

The Computational Science Portals group of SDSC's Scientific Computing Department created a Grid Portal Toolkit. The group also announced that a new, interactive version of the NPACI HotPage based on GridPort is now ready for beta testing.

British scientists to develop ultra-fast grid for distributed exchange of research data

A "Grid" project is currently being prepared within the United Kingdom in co-operation with CERN, the European particle physics centre in Geneva. This "Grid" network is expected to perform a million times faster than the existing Internet. according to the "Finacial Times", the British government will probably in the course of this year, submit a request for the reservation of about euro 165 million of public funding for the UK "Grid" initiative. The "Grid" has to enable the academic world to retrieve requested scientific information from anywhere in the world, within seconds. As such, it will allow for instance biologists to exploit genetic data following the completion of the human genome project.

The three main supercomputing centres in Spain join effort to improve its technological offer

The Centro de Supercomputación de Galicia (CESGA), the Centro Inform´tico Científico de Andalucía (CICA) and the Centre de Supercomputació de Catalunya (CESCA) signed last February 18th a collaboration agreement in Santiago de Compostela (Spain). Their representatives are convinced that this collaboration will contribute to improve the access of researchers from this three autonomous regions to advanced research infrastructures. Also, it will make easier the exchange of experience between managers and technicians in charge of communications and high performance computing.

XML

space2go.com application service provider chooses IBM RS/6000

Berlin based Internet startup space2go.com has selected powerful IBM RS/6000 servers to energize its innovative service, which allows customers to access data "anywhere, anytime" via a wide range of electronic devices through use of XML basedWireless Markup Language (WML).

US NSF extends vBNS for three years

MCI-Worldcom and NSF have entered into a no-cost extension of the cooperative vBNSagreement. MCIW will continue to operate the vBNS under this extension beginning on April 1, 2000. NSF's analysis of the connections status of its 177 High Performance Connection sites at US universities indicates that somewhere between 26 and 52 of them are planning to remain on vBNS.

ESF: Critical phase for high-speed academic networking approaching

In a joint statement the Academia Europaea and the European Science Foundation (ESF) call for continued and new investment in a high bandwidth computer network in Europe. There is a critical date which is fast approaching, in May 2000, when funding from the present TEN-155 Network (Trans-European Network at 155 mbit/sec core) runs out. The European Commission will need to continue funding if this network is not to collapse.

Central European academic backbone upgraded to 622 Mbps

Network organisation DANTE announced several upgrades to the European academic research network. The central backbone, linking Paris, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Brussels, will be upgraded to 622 Mbps. Connections to the Netherlands and Germany will be upgraded to 310 Mbps.