|
|
||
| 11 September 2000 |
EuroFlash no. 425
|
|
|
Advertisement
Primeur is the premier news service on HPCN and supercomputing in Europe. Primeur Weekly delivers the news each week in your e-mail box. Check out the Primeur web site for the Calendar, the Analysis section with background on the TOP500, the Monthly en Live! special issues, information on HPCN centres and industry.
|
||
Business Objects announced record-breaking performance of WebIntelligence 2.5 on the IBM RS/6000 SP. Results of this real-world simulation, performed at the IBM benchmarking center in Montpellier, France, showed that WebIntelligence 2.5 running on an 8-node IBM RS/6000 SP can be deployed for up to 300,000 users depending on usage type. The testing simulated users who log on and view and refresh WebIntelligence reports.
Muse Virtual Presence has won a major defense competition to deliver new close-range gunnery simulators to the Naval Recruitment and Training Agency (NRTA) for the Royal Navy. The simulators, based on mature Virtual Reality (VR) technologies, will "immerse" trainee operators within synthetic ship-based environments where they will be trained in the procedures for engaging a wide range of dynamic air, sea and coastal targets.
Walt Disney Feature Animation (WDFA) did buy more than 500 Silicon Graphics visual workstations. The purchase, announced at IBC 2000 in Amsterdam, gives WDFA powerful new computing power. Most recently, Disney used a full range of SGI workstations and servers to create digital characters and special effects for such visually driven feature films as Gone in 60 Seconds, Mission to Mars and Dinosaur as well as the upcoming 102 Dalmatians.
Linux company Terra Soft offers a portable, 8-node PowerPC cluster with Black Lab Linux installed and configured for parallel processing and development.
ESI Group announced new versions of its flagship products PAM-CRASH and PAM-SAFE. The PAM-CRASH crash simulation software predicts how a vehicle will respond to crash tests, while PAM-SAFE enables the simulation of the effects of restraint systems such as airbags and seatbelts, on occupants represented either as dummies or biomechanical models of the human body.
From the March 1997 until March of this year, The European Commission (EC) has funded a number of Technology Transfer Nodes (TTN's) that should bring the benefits of previous research in HPCN to SME companies. The programme took 46 million euro of EC funding, industry invested and additional 30 million euro and academic institutions another 2 million. Over 656 man years were invested by 630 project partners. There was a network set up with two coordinating companies to manage the whole TTN programme. But was it successful? According to the official "HPCN Network Impact Report" published by the HPCN TTN network, this type of activity clearly represents good value for money, but analysing the financial details in the report leaves some doubts.
The US National Science Foundat awarded the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) $300,000 to lead a national partnership of research centers in planning and designing the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) grid, a national virtual laboratory for earthquake engineering.
A non-profit Open Source Development Lab has been formed that for developers of Linux software with enterprise capabilities. The lab will be located near Portland, USA. Intel Corporation, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and NEC Corporation will be founders of the lab. Companies that are supporting it are Caldera Systems, Dell Computer, Linuxcare, LynuxWorks, Red Hat, Silicon Graphics, SuSE, TurboLinux, and VA Linux Systems
The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC)has signed a US$3 million order for a 32-processor Cray SV1 supercomputer. ARSC's academic and government researchers will use the new system to study atmospheric, environmental and geophysical problems unique to the Arctic, polar regions and high latitudes.
The Pittsburgh Supercomputer Centre did sell a 16 Gflop/s Cray-C90 machine through E-bay. The seven-year old machine was decommissioned in 1999. Hopefully the buyer does not think he is really buying a supercomputer...
Critical Path is supporting AIX with a optimised version of its InScribe Messaging Server. The Tec of Monterrey, a private University in Mexico, has selected the InScribe Messaging Server on AIX as the foundation for its internal messaging system.
Sybase announced record-setting results of an audited Transaction Processing Performance Council-C (TPC-C) benchmark of Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 12.0.0.2, its flagship, portal-ready database, on the Sun Enterprise 10000 Starfire server. ASE 12.0.0.2 captured the No. 1 slot in SMP database performance.
Primeur Weekly is published per e-mail. Check out the subscription information for more details how to subscribe. You can find the back issues on the Primeur web site. The EuroFlash! and USflash! are published together with ESIS - European Supercomputing Information Service.
© 2000, Genias Benelux