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| 18 September 2000 |
EuroFlash no. 426
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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.
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The Swiss Center for Scientific Computing (CSCS, Centro Svizzero di Calcolo Scientifico), an affiliation of ETH Zurich based in Manno, Lugano, steps up toward a more agile, effective and efficient organisational structure in order to cope with the ever growing and more sophisticated HPCN (High Performance Computing and Networking) needs and requirements of Scientists, Researchers and Engineers, both at National and International level, and to stay a top of the technology and market trends for HPCN solutions.
In the spring of 2000, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation awarded 7.5 million Swedish crowns (MSEK) for bioinformatics development to Gunnar von Heijne and Björn Engquist. The grant will be awarded over 5 years, at 1.5 MSEK per year, and is part of an 800 MSEK grant for functional genomics.
To provide a basis for statistics on high-performance computers, Hans W. Meuer, Erich Strohmaier and Jack J. Dongarra, have put together the TOP500 Supercomputer List. The list is a collection of the sites that, according to stipulated criteria, have the 500 most powerful computer systems installed. The next release of the TOP500 Supercomputer List will be presented at the SC2000, November 4-10 in Dallas, TX. The deadline for submitting entries is October 6, 2000.
The German HPCN Technology Node in Thuringia (TTN-T) has published a brochure on "Image Processing and Parallel Computing in Medical Applications" which summarises a number of European take-up and support projects on application of HPCN in medicine.
SuSE Linux 7.0 is now also available for the Sparc architecture from Sun Microsystems. SuSE Linux currently supports PowerPC, S/390, RS/6000 and Alpha processors in addition to the Intel platform.
The 6th edition of the Euro-Par Conference, a union of several, former independent conferences, attracted more than 400 participants from all over the world. Additionally to the keynote and invited talks, 167 have been accepted from 326 papers. The proceedings have been published in Springer Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 1900. Around the Conference tutorials and two other conferences have been organised, SCI Europe 2000 (Scalable Coherent Interface), proceedings are available and APART 2000, Automatic Performance Analysis.
Although not in the upper regions, HP has a strong presence in the TOP500 with its V-class servers and clusters. The newly introduced Superdome should reassure this position for the next few years. Superdome comes with a maximum of 64 processors and 256 Gbyte of memory. It can be clustered to a total of 512 processors. Although interesting for technical computing too, HP main target markets are large dotcom companies, and commercial applications.
This year, SC2000 will host a competition for teams building there own machine for less than US $10,000 and bring it with them to Dallas. There a number of predefined benchmarks will be run to determine the winner.
NEC has completed the first shipment of a major W-CDMA infrastructure system for NTT DoCoMo's commercial service deployment scheduled to begin operating from May 2001.
The Workshop on Communication Architecture for Clusters , to be held in Conjunction with the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium in San Francisco, April 23-27, 2001 has issued a call for papers: closing date October 16th 2000.
The First International Workshop on Internet Computing and E-Commerce to be held in San Francisco, California, USA, April 27, 2001 Has issued a call for papers. Deadline October 16, 2000 .
IBM today announced a Unix cluster system dedicated to Web-based commerce. Code named "Blue Hammer," the high performance cluster for the first time brings the comprehensive management capabilities of IBM's supercomputers to its RS/6000 S80 enterprise server.
Parabon Computation a provider of distributed supercomputing, has reached a milestone this week: Individuals from over 70 countries on 6 continents have downloaded its Pioneer software since the company's June 14, 2000 launch. In a mere 80 days, news of Parabon's Internet computing platform moved thousands of computer users from around the world to harness their computers' idle power via the Internet. Today, this places Parabon's platform among the 100 most powerful computers in the world, the company claims.
GlobeXplorer, Inc., an online company supplying images of the earth over the Internet, unveiled a first-of-its-kind rich media web site. GlobeXplorer imagery provides broad views of the entire earth down to detailed views of neighbourhoods, buildings and streets in a way never before possible, right to the desktop
The IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid to be held on 16-18 May 2001, Brisbane, Australia has released a call for papers. Deadline: 4 November 2000.
NEC announced the Express5800/120Rc-2 server, aimed at the fast-growing e-businesses. In addition NEC Computers' service provider platform offers customers an all-in-one solution, including fibre channel storage from EMC Corp. , rack systems from APC, factory hotload options for Red Hat Linux and new UltraCare installation services.
SGI and Intergraph have finalised the terms of a strategic alliance announced in July.
Sun Microsystems announced availability of its newest UltraSPARC processor, targeted for embedded applications. The 400/500 MHz UltraSPARC IIe microprocessor is the first highly integrated 64-bit processor for embedded applications in the telecommunications, network infrastructure and ISP markets based on SPARC architecture.
Compaq Computer Corporation delivers an other 1300 computers to extend the "home-made" Sandia Cluster Cplant, which ranks 62 in the June 2000 Top500 list. It delivers 232 Linpack GFlop/s compared to a peak performance of 560 GFlop/s out of 580 processors.
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© 2000, Genias Benelux