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March 2000

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Parallel processing

Media and visualisation

The Clinton-Gore Administration announces measures to strengthen US manufacturing for the 21st century

The U.S. White House announced a series of proposals that should help strengthen U.S. manufacturers, workers, and communities, and help keep manufacturing a strong and vital part of the U.S. economy in the 21st century. These initiatives were developed as part of the interagency Manufacturing Task Force announced by Vice-President Gore last summer. Included is an almost US$600 million increase in information technology research, which could lead to faster supercomputers capable of developing manufactured products more rapidly, using modeling and simulation and virtual reality.

New NSF funded terascale supercomputer on the drawing board

Within a year the first components of an eventual new terascale supercomputer funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) should be finished. The completed system will perform up to five trillion operations per second.

First 3-D Simulation Of Nuclear Weapons Trigger

US Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson announced that the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Stockpile Stewardship Program has successfully completed the first-ever three-dimensional (3-D) simulation of a nuclear weapon "primary" explosion using the IBM Blue Pacific supercomputer at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

SGI Cray for Indian weather forecast

According to "Asia Pulse", SGI, formerly Silicon Graphics Inc, said it had received a large order for a Cray supercomputer from India's Department of Science and Technology (DST). Asia Pulse quotes US$102 for the deal. This seems a high amount for the 24 processor supercomputer that will be used for weather forecast.

East meets West in Hawaii to discuss supercomputing issues

Technology leaders will gather on Maui April 5 and 6 to discuss the changing role of advanced technologies at the RCI Global Symposium, "East Meets West: The Globalization of High Performance Computing and Communications." Hosted by the Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC), this conference will provide a forum for users, vendors, technologists, and consultants to analyze the forces and challenges that are propelling the supercomputing industry.

"New age" supercomputer gets a name

NPACI officially named its new 1,152-processor IBM RS/6000 SP system "Blue Horizon" at a dedication ceremony at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) February 9. The system is the most powerful computer available to US researchers, but is that reason enough to officially give it a name at a ceremony?

SC2000 in Dallas

The first submission deadlines for SC2000, Dallas USA, are already approaching: April 28. Extended abstracts for technical papers are due by then, as are Gordon Bell Award nominations, and proposals for tutorials, and panels, and applications for the Education Program.

New Tflop/s SGI SN-1 for Dutch research

The Dutch National Science Foundation (NWO) has decided to install a new Dutch national supercomputer. The new 1024 processor SGI SN-1 with Tflop/s performance, will propel The Netherlands back in the top 10 of most powerful machines in the world. The SN-1 next-generation Origin machine will be operational in November this year at the SARA computer centre in Amsterdam. The new supercomputer will replace a Cray C90 supercomputer currently in use by Dutch academic researchers for scientific, technical and medical applications. The total value of the contract is approximately 14 million euro.

Wulfkit got its own web site

Wulfkit is an off-the-shelf product to build your own fast parallel computer with Sun or Intel platforms. It combines Scali and Dolphin technology. Recently a web site (http://www.wulfkit.com) has been opened with information on the product.

New fasterSSP ScaMPI

Scali released version 2.0.0 of its Scali Software Platform (SSP) core MPI product. The new release shows improved MPI performance with multiple MPI processes per node, fault tolereance capabilities, and news graphical montioring tools.The SSP 2.0.0 is available for RedHat Linux and Solaris/x86. SuSE Linux and Solaris/SPARC versions will be available shortly.

Finland

CSC upgades T3E computer to 400 Gflop/s

Finnish supercomputer centre CSC has upgraded its T3E supercomputer, doubling ithe performance to 400 Gflop/s. The machine has 544 processors running at 375 MHz. The machine was upgraded using a machine that was purchased from the French company CEA.

France

Fujitsu European Centre for Information Technology opens technical computing facility in Paris

A Fujitsu Technical Computing Facility was opened in Paris. This centre will host Fujitsu parallel compute servers for use by technical ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) to port, tune and validate their applications. The Facility will be managed by Fujitsu European Centre for Information Technology Ltd, the applied technical computing research division of Fujitsu, headquartered in London, UK, with subsidiary offices in Toulouse, France.The has several advanced compute servers, including a VPP5000 vector-parallel supercomputer with a peak single-processor performance at 9.6 Gflop/s.

French ORAP supercomputer seminar

On March 21, the French Supercomputer organisation ORAP organises its ninth seminar in Paris. The topic is HPC strategies and solutions. Lectures will be given by Robert Borchers, Friedel Hossfeld, Rolf Riesen and others.

Germany

Amdahl key-note speaker in Mannheim

For fifteen years, the Mannheim Supercomputer conference is the meeting place for everyone in Germany and Europe, interested in supercomputer topics. This year, the name of the key note speaker, Gene Amdahl, is associated with a law that everybody in the field has come across. Apart from the new TOP500 list, and applications, ranging from weatherforecast to cardiology, clusters will be a focal point of the conference that will be held in Mannheim from June 8-10, 2000.

Platform opened offices in Germany

Platform Computing has opened a German office in Munich. In one year's time, with new offices in the UK and France too, the European staff of Platform has increased six fold.

Ireland

Super Solutions - Super Future workshop

The Irisch HPCN TTN, ICETACT, organises a seminar on February 24 that will address HPCN. The emphasis will be on practical applications of the technology, particularly in the smaller business arena. In the US, three major initiative are currently underway to foster the use of supercomputing technology for the benefit of US society, defence, commerce and academia.

United Kingdom

IBM builds one of the world's largest Data Warehouses for BT

British Telecommunications (BT) has invested euro 8 million in phase one of a major customer business intelligence initiative based on IBM NUMA-Q servers. The implementation on completion will be one of the largest data warehouses in the world with over 13 terabytes of storage capacity. It will include a powerful and functionally rich integrated e-marketing software suite from Prime Response.

Applications

Supercomputer class electronic warfare simulator

Comptek Research reported record financial results for both the third quarter and the nine-month period that ended on December 31, 1999. One of the key accomlishements of the company in this period was the development of a "supercomputer class processing engine" enabling the electronic warfare simulator to generate real-time threats U.S. combat aircraft can expect to face in electronic battle situations

ESI Group and Fujitsu in strategic collaboration for Crash and CFD Simulation

ESI and Fujitsu Limited, will develop ESI Group's range of technical simulation software, including PAM-CRASH for Crash Analysis and PAM-FLOW for Computational Fluid Dynamics, on the latest Fujitsu VPP Series supercomputers. ESI Group will be using the VPP5000 supercomputer located at the newly announced Fujitsu Technical Computing Facility in Paris.

Retek retail benchmark excels on IBM RS/6000 Server

IBM's RS/6000 S80 has produced industry leading results on critical Sales Upload and Forecasting tests using Retek software solutions for the retail industry. Using the Retek Demand Forecasting application, a 24-way RS/6000 S80 processed 60 million SKU (stock keeping unit) combinations in 134 minutes. This data was representative of the point of purchase sales information that a 5,000 outlet retailer might typically process in one week. The S80 processed the data faster than any server ever tested by Retek.

DB-2 on NUMA-Q

IBM announced the DB2 Universal Database for its Intel processor-based NUMA-Q servers. NUMA-Q servers and the DB2 Universal Database today run many of the world's largest multi-terabyte commercial databases. The NUMA-Q architecture combines the linear scalability of parallel processing and the manageability of a single image SMP platform with industry leading technology for moving massive streams of data generated by large scale e-business activity.

Shark for NUMA-Q

IBM today announced immediate availability of its top-performing "Shark" Enterprise Storage Server for Intel-based NUMA-Q systems. NUMA-Q is scalable from 4 to 64 Intel Xeon processors and is able to support storage ranging from 100 GByte to 500 TByte.

Veritas increases its computational capacity to delive more seismic data

Veritas DGC Inc. is substantially increasing its global capability to deliver and interpret enormous volumes of 3D seismic data with the installation of three new-generation NEC SX-5 supercomputers and three additional data visualization centers.y April, the Company will begin installation of a third SX-5 in its London, U.K., processing centre.

Cluster computing

SCA's Linda Delivering a 15-fold Performance Improvement in Parallel Processing on the Giganet cLAN Network

Giganet, and SCIENTIFIC Computing Associates announced support for SCIENTIFIC's Linda application development software over Giganet's cLAN high performance server farm network products. Based on the industry standard Virtual Interface (VI) Architecture, the combined solution offers scientific and financial services users a 15-fold application performance boost over previous Ethernet-based implementations. Message passing latency (delays) also improved by more than 10-fold.

LSF on Solaris 8

Platform Computing's LSF Suite is now fully optimized for Solaris 8, the newest version of Sun Microsystem's operating system.

TotalView 4.0 shipping

Etnus has started shipping TotalView 4.0, the first parallel debugger to support multiple development platforms for both traditional Unix and Linux. TotalView 4.0 has undergone extensive testing at more than 50 beta sites and is now shipping against a backlog of orders. In Europe, Pallas is one of the distributors.

Grid computing

First European GRID Forum Workshop from newly formed e-grid group

The 1st European GRID Forum Workshop will take place in Poznan, Poland, during the ISThmus'2000 conference, 12-13 April, 2000. The European Grid Forum (EGRID) was recently established to create a forum for improving the conditions for Grid-related research and applications in Europe. EGRID is supposed to be a medium for information exchange as well as a place where users, researchers, and companies from all over Europe can find partners for projects of mutual interest.

"Grid-ready" LSF 4.0 released by Platform

Toronto based Platform Computing released version 4.0 of its LSF suite of resource management tools. Most significant additions are extensive reporting and accounting facilities in the newly added LSF Analyzer. Beneath the surface, a lot of improvements concern scalability. Especially those make LSF "Grid-ready". Computational grids are a new paradigm of an Internet based infrastructure that can make computational power available to anyone at anytime. Resource management tools like LSF are needed on the Grid to direct computational traffic and to administer billing information on who uses which resource.

HPCN industry

IDC Mid-Range Server Figures for Western Europe show fast growth for Compaq

According to International Data Corporation (IDC), Compaq was the fastest-growing computer company in the UNIX segment of the mid-range server market in Western Europe in Q3, 1999. IDC reports that Compaq's year-on-year customer revenue increase was 54 percent and that unit sales of Tru64 UNIX running on the Alpha platform soared by 73 percent. In the same period Compaq also increased its total share of the $2.3 billion mid-range server market by 3.5 percentage points to 10.2 percent, says IDC.

Stratus doubles performance of Continuum Server Family

Stratus Computer announced a new family of Stratus Continuum servers that delivers twice the performance on average of predecessor models. The six models comprising the Continuum 400, 600, 1200 Series of continuously available servers are based on Hewlett-Packard Company's 360MHz PA-8500 RISC processor.

SUN debuts Solaris 8

Sun Microsystems unveiled the Solaris; 8 Operating Environment. Sun also announced free access to the Solaris source and end-user binary code to foster innovation and ubiquity. The Solaris 8 Operating Environment is available for both the SPARC and Intel platforms.

AMD demonstrates 1.1 GHz processor

AMD demonstrated a 1.1 GHz (1100 MHz) version of the AMD Athlon processor manufactured in its Fab 30 facility in Dresden, Germany.

Hitachi introduces 3 Bips mainframe

Hitachi Data Systems introduced a new Hitachi Skyline Trinium 16-way mainframe server delivering nearly three billion instructions per second (3 Bips), making it the world's most powerful commercial enterprise server, the company claims.

Breakthrough in chip design allows 4.5 Ghz for future chips

IBM Research announced breakthrough results in developing a new family of experimental high-speed computer circuits that run at test speeds up to five times faster than today's top chips.The new circuits employ an innovative design -- called "Interlocked Pipelined CMOS" , to reach speeds of 3.3 - 4.5 billion cycles per second (3.3 - 4.5 GHz), using conventional silicon transistors, while dramatically reducing power consumption. IBM researchers estimate that chips made with IPCMOS circuits would require only half the power used by a standard high-performance chip.

SUN Starfire on IntormationWeek's top 10 of most influential products

In the Dec. 20-27, 1999 edition, InformationWeek, honored Sun Microsystems' Java platform and its high-end flagship Sun Enterprise 10000 Starfire server as among the top 10 most important and influential products of the last decade. Sun's Starfire serve was the only hardware solution to make the list.

Tera raises additional money

Tera Computer Company has completed a private placement of common stock raising approximately $26 million.

Compaq and Unisys partner to deliver 32-processor server for Windows 2000 Datacenter server

Compaq and Unisys signed of a letter of intent under which Compaq will deliver Unisys Cellular MultiProcessing (CMP) based 32-processor platforms under the Compaq ProLiant brand.

IBM's next generation supercomputer powered by copper chips

IBM introduced the industry's first supercomputer powered by copper chip technology and announced a milestone in copper chip manufacturing - the two-millionth copper chip.The new version RS/6000 SP will be announced later today at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) during a dedication ceremony for the Center's new RS/6000 SP with 144 nodes and 1,152 processors, the SDSC system is the world's most powerful supercomputer available for academic research.

Copeland responsible for marketing and sales at Tera

Tera Computer Company announced that Rene G. Copeland has been appointed Vice President-Sales and Marketing. Copeland previously worked for supercomputer departments at IBM and Cray.

Babayan to deliver plenary keynote at HPC Asia

Russian top supercomputer designer Dr. Boris A. Babayan will deliver the pleanry key-note at HPC ASIA 2000: The Fourth International Conference/Exhibition on High-Performance Computing in Asia-Pacific Region May 14-17, 2000 in Beijing, China. Babayan's talk will discuss the architecture principles underlying the 1999 Russian high-performance microprocessor called E2K.

Java

Java fast on HP-UX

Hewlett-Packard Company today announced best-in-class SPEC JVM98 results on commercially available products for Java applications on its HP 9000 N-Class server and J-Class workstation. Additionally, HP is delivering 3-D technology for Java and a new Java browser plug-in on the HP-UX platform.

Linux

New Linux tools from SGI

SGI announced several additions to the company's portfolio of Linux operating systems offerings, including the introduction of a new SGI Internet server, SGI Advanced Clustering Environment and global Linux services.

SCO's Tarantella on Linux

SCO and SuSE plan to deliver SCO's Tarantella web-enabling software to SuSE Linux customers worldwide. SCO will bring Tarantella web-enabling software to the SuSE Linux platform and work with SuSE to market the software to its customers. Tarantella for SuSE Linux will be available during Q2, 2000. SCO announced similar plans for theCaldera's OpenLinux platform.

IBM DB2 available on SGI Linux servers

SGI announced that IBM's DB2 Universal Database is available on all Linux operating system-based SGI 1000 series servers. In addition, a team of engineers from SGI and IBM is currently collaborating to optimize DB2 Universal Database for Linux on IA-32 systems and IA-64 systems when available.

Trillian Project Releases IA-64 Linux Source Code for Itanium Processor

The Trillian project team announced that the source code for the port of Linux to Intel's forthcoming IA-64 processor family for servers and workstations is being released to the Open Source community.The Trillian Project was formed in early 1999 to port the Linux operating system to IA-64 architecture. The project currently includes Caldera, CERN, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel, Red Hat (Cygnus), SGI, SuSE, TurboLinux and VA Linux Systems.

SuSE changes American team

SuSE Linux AG has changed its US management team. The U.S. management team now includes Dirk Hohndel, Chief Technology Officer (worldwide); Stefan Wintermeyer, Director of Worldwide Support; Chris N. Simmons, VP, Marketing and Sales; and Jan Fuxell, Director of U.S. Operations.

SGI introduces ACE cluster technology for Irix and Linux

SGI introduced the Advanced Cluster Environment (ACE) for compute-intensive applications. ACE brings technology used by the US national labs to a broad range of technical users and easily scales compute power to meet individual needs. Available now on SGI's IRIX operating system platform, a Linux version of ACE will soon be available.

enFuzion clustering technology from TurboLinux

TurboLinux rleased its new enFuzion clustering technology that transforms a company's existing network of Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows servers and workstations into a "supercomputer".

Media and visualisation

HP extends Visualize Work station family

Hewlett-Packard officially introduced the HP VISUALIZE C3600 and J5600 workstations. These advanced technical-computing workstations are based on the PA-8600. The HP VISUALIZE C3600 and J5600 are the newest members of HP's VISUALIZE workstation family. These systems offer a 38 percent performance increase over HP's PA-8500 RISC processor.

Dynamic Information Systems and Visual Numerics form strategic partnership

Dynamic Information Systems Corp. (DISC) and Visual Numerics have formed a strategic partnership that will accelerate the query, reporting and analysis of business intelligence data, the companies say.DISC's flagship data access tool, OMNIDEX, will seamlessly integrate with Visual Numerics' iDecision, an analysis and visualization product used to gain meaningful information from complex business intelligence data.

New business intelligence tool from VN

Visual Numerics, unveiled iDecision at the Business Intelligence World conference in Chicago. iDecision is a new solution that accelerates the acquisition and analysis of corporate data made available through Enterprise Information Portals (EIPs). iDecision combines advanced data visualization and numerical analysis tools with fast database connections, giving users an integrated solution that analyzes and makes graphical sense of large volumes of complex corporate data.

ScanLine partners with PixelFusion

ScanLine Technologies, a provider of leading-edge text and graphics solutions to the TV broadcast and post production markets, and PixelFusion Ltd signed a "memorandum of understanding" for the development of next-generation Character Generator (CG) products based on PixelFusion's FUZION 150 chip. PixelFusion's FUZION 150 is an 80 million-transistor, 0.25 micron chip with 24 megabits of embedded DRAM. This single-chip massively parallel SIMD processor delivers unmatched performance and advanced features, bringing supercomputer-like performance to the high-end video market.

A 3-D map of the world

SGI computers will transform nearly 1 trillion measurements recorded by Shuttle Endeavor into the most detailed 3D topographic map of Earth ever made. Once complete, the map of Earth will have numerous scientific, commercial and military uses such as disaster relief, agriculture, city planning, mineral exploration and military planning.

Parallel processing

Fujitsu introduces a VLIW based processor

Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe is showing its first implementation processor core of the FR-V (Fujitsu RISC-VLIW) family, a new CPU architecture that can execute parallel instructions. VLIW architecture allows the compiler rather than the processor to be responsible for guaranteeing simultaneous issuing of each packet, as opposed to a superscalar processor which has to decide itself whether or not multiple instructions can be executed at the same time.

XML news

New HTML standard XHTML approved

The World Wide Web Consortium has approved a new standard XHTML. XHTML is the well-known HTML 4.0 used on the Internet today, but then reformulated in XML. XHTML documents have to conform to somewhat stricter rules than HTML documents. The advantage is that XHTML can be used in a wide range of applications, ranging from small mobile devices that use a mini browser, for instance for telemedical applications over long distance, to exchanging information between large scientific datasets that are to be processed by supercomputers.

Eurolink web site opened

Euro-Link is a National Science Foundation-funded initiative that facilitates the connection of European and Israeli National Research Networks (NRNs) to the high-performance vBNS and Abilene networks. As part of the NSF's High-Performance International Internet Services (HPIIS) program, Euro-Link is funded through 2003 as a next-generation Internet initiative that supports international research collaboration.

Motorola and Dolphin ink partnership agreement

Motorola Computer Group, Inc. and Dolphin Interconnect Solutions, AS announced a partnership agreement today confirming Dolphin's position as one of the leading suppliers of network adapter cards for high-speed interconnectivity in VME and Compact PCI environments.

3Com provides e-networking capabilities for Mission Operation Center at UCSD for Space Shuttle Mission

3Com Corporation announced that images from EarthKAM, a NASA-sponsored program that enables middle school students to take photographs of the Earth from a camera aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, will be transmitted to and stored on a 3Com e-Network for education. Over 11,000 middle-school students from the United States, Germany, France and Japan will use interactive Web pages to monitor the shuttle's flight path and to select areas of interest to photograph.

A TOP100 list for network bandwidth-intensive applications

Internet2 announced the Internet2 Land Speed Record competition for the most demanding end-to-end, bandwidth-intensive Internet applications in the world. The contest is expected to attract entries from the fastest networkers on the face of the planet. The first Internet2 Land Speed Record award will be presented at the Spring 2000 Internet2 Member Meeting in Washington, D.C. on March 29.

DFN-Project Gigabit Testbed West experiences discussed at ZAM in Juelich

In a two day colloquium in Juelich, ZAM (Central Institute for Applied Mathematics) at the Research Center Juelich and GMD (National Research Center for Information Technology) partners of the DFN (German Research Network) Gigabit Testbed West Project presented results of their activities - the Gigabit technology and the applications that used the Testbed. It connected in the first phase ZAM (two T3E 512 and a T90) with GMD (IBM SP2, HPC graphics SGI Onyx 2 and SUN E5000) in Sankt Augustin, near Bonn. DFN disclosed their activities for the Gigabit research network that will be installed in Germany this year, starting in April. Applications presented included multimedia applications, multiscale molecule dynamics, visualisation at the responsive workbench e.g. in medicine, distributed computation of climate and weather models, distributed, virtual production of television, distributed traffic simulations and visualisation, magneto-encephalography and pollution propagation. DFN will install a G-WiN (Gigabit Resarch net) in April 2000. The transition to the G-WiN will be supported by the German Ministry of Research (BMBF) with about 80 Million DM (40 Mio euro). In the first step 622 Mbit/s will be realised and extended to 2.4 Gbit/s for level 1 POPS. The access capacity for the customer in a center will be extended from 622 Mbit/s to 2.5 Gbit/s in 2001 and to 10 Gbit/s in 2003.