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| 06 November 2000 |
EuroFlash no. 433
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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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Sweden's main academic computing center, Parallelldatorcentrum, organises its annual conference on December 14 and 15. "Simulation and Visualization in the Life Sciences" will explore some of the life science fields in which the use of computer technology is steadily increasing. Topics will include bioinformatics, computational biology, the medical sector, neuroscience, and radiation therapy.
An SGI and ESI team was able to achieve sustained performance of more than 12 Gflop/s using the SGI Origin 3000 series with 96 processors and 400 MHz MIPS processors. This marks the highest level of performance ever achieved in a crash simulation.
Dell is one of the first workstation vendors to offer the Fire GL2 graphics adapter from FGL Graphics, a division of S3 Inc. The 64 MB Fire GL2 offers high-end performance and supports both analog and digital outputs. Dell today also introduced "Dell Graphics Plus" for workstation customers who need specialized graphics products.
Desh R. Urs has been appointed vice president of Business Intelligence, SGI. He will report to Kenneth L. Coleman, executive vice president of Global Sales, Service and Marketing, SGI.
The most powerful supercomputer in Europe, is located at LRZ in Munich. In number of systems, Germany leads Europe with 55 systems in the TOP500 of the most powerful systems in the world, followed by the UK (34) and France (29). As usual, Europeans by both Japanese and US machines at the same distribution as world wide: 10% Japanese and 90% USA made supercomputers. In the USA almost 100% of the machines is mad-in-the-USA. while in Japan it is 50% Japanese and 50% US manufactured systems. Again, Luxembourg has the largest number of supercomputers per person: one for each 150.000 inhabitants.
A new number one, about half of the machines are new entries. IBM almost dominating the list, Europe is growing USA fall below 50%. It sure has a lot of news in it, the most recent TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. At last, a new number one in this November 2000 version of the list, although it is specifically build for the ASCI programme, the IBM ASCI White system with 4.9 Tflop/s of Linpack performance installed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in the USA. Numbers 2,3 and for are also ASCI machines. The Intel ASCI Red at Sandia, the former number one; the IBM ASCI Blue Pacific at LLNL, the SGI ASCI Blue Mountain at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The performance of these for ASCI machines is the same as that of all the Japanese TOP500 supercomputer power combined, and half of Europe's combined performance.
The 16th edition of the TOP500 list of the most powerful Supercomputer, compiled by Hans Meuer, Erich Strohmaier, Jack Dongarra, and Horst D. Simon released in time for SC2000 sees IBM establish itself as current leader of this list. One year after IBM became the leader in the TOP500 IBM is now able to gain a share of 43% with respect to the number of installed systems as well as installed performance up from 29% only 6 months ago. Second in the number of systems is again Sun with 18% while Cray Inc. is holding on to the number 2 spot in performance with 16%.
At the occasion of the SC2000 Conference on High Performance Computing and Networking, the sixteenth edition of the Supercomputer Top 500 is presented. The new list, traditionally issued twice a year in June and in November, includes five supercomputers which are exclusively dedicated to medical research and health data mining. Three of them were acquired in 2000 by the United States National Cancer Institute, United HealthCare, and the British company, Pharmaceutical Stevenage. The other two machines are located in Japan and applied for genetic data research since 1995 and 1998. In addition, a substantial number of supercomputing facilities figuring in the top 500, is frequently used for advanced medical visualisation purposes and bio-informatics.
For the third quarter ended September 30, 2000, Cray Inc. reported revenues of $33.7 million, compared to revenues of $850,000 for the third quarter of 1999. Exclusive of imputed interest and amortization of expenses related to the acquisition of the Cray business unit assets, the company reported a net loss of $3.9 million, compared to a net loss of $13.9 million in the year ago period. Including the $2.2 million in imputed interest and amortization expenses, the net loss for the third quarter of 2000 was $6.1 million
The University of Waterloo in Canada has been selected by IBM as a recipient of a Shared University Research (SUR) grant to help establish the UW/IBM Facility for Scientific and Deep Computing. This Facility will enable the university to pursue leading-edge research in the area of large scale parallel computing by providing researchers and students alike with access to IBM's RS/6000 SP technology.
The USA based National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) has released version 1.0 of its NPACI Rocks software, a set of open-source enhancements for istalling and managing large Linux-based clusters, called Rocks.
For the last quarter, Intergraph incurred a net loss of $5.3 million,, on revenues of $159 million. The 15% decline in revenue from the second quarter level and the net loss were largely attributable to the Company's exit from hardware, which was completed this quarter with the sale of the Intense3D graphics card business to 3Dlabs Inc., and the sale of the high-end workstation business to Silicon Graphics Inc.
Aerojet has awarded SGI a contract to providetechnology to power mobile satellite stations for the U.S. Air Force's Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS), the U.S.'s next-generation ballistic missile early warning system. Under the contract, SGI will provide 18 SGI Origin 3000 series servers and 27 SGI Onyx 3000 series visualization systems that will be colocated in the mobile satellite ground stations. The SGI Origin 3000 series servers will be used as the front-end of the mission for the ground stations from SBIRS satellites high above the earth. The SGI Onyx 3000 series systems will graphically display the data for U.S. military operators.
SRC Computers, the company founded by legendary computer architect Seymour R. Cray, will preview Serial Number 1 of its forthcoming SRC-6 computer at SC2000, showcasing the architecture that company officials say represents both Seymour Cray's final design and "the next big thing" in high performance computing (HPC).
Syrrx and MolSoft, have entered into a 10-year strategic alliance to accelerate structure-guided drug discovery through the combination of MolSoft's Virtual Ligand Screening (VLS) technology with Syrrx's high-throughput structural proteomics platform.
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© 2000, Genias Benelux