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| 04 December 2000 |
EuroFlash no. 437
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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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Nihon ESI, ESI Group's Japanese subsidiary, and NEC announce a strategic cooperation agreement dedicated to the development of the first Virtual Engine Factory system. The system will simulate the entire process of building an automotive engine, from design to manufacturing, including the engine's motion. Developed by NEC and ESI Group, the Virtual Engine Factory system will be designed for the NEC supercomputer SX-5 using ESI Group's advanced MCAE technology.
The Mannheim International Supercomputer Conference will next year be held in Heidelberg, June 20 - 23, 2001.
Laval Virtual is a major gathering for the international scientific and professional exchanges regarding Virtual Reality. The VRIC Conference is organised in four half days sessions chaired by international experts of Virtual Reality. The conference will take place in Laval, France 17 - 18th May 2001
The HLRS organises six workshops in parallel processing beginning next year in several German cities. The aim of these six workshops is to give people with some programming experience an introduction into the basics of parallel programming. The focus is on programming models, MPI, OpenMP and HPF, domain decomposition, load balancing and parallel numerics.
Euro-Par 2001 to be held in Manchester, UK, August 28 - 31, 2001 is releasing call for papers,
STN ATLAS Elektronik GmbH, Bremen, Germany, has selected the SGI Onyx 3000 series as the graphics system platform for the Swiss Army's Electronic Tactical Simulator for Mechanized Formations (ELTAM) program.
he Czech Air Forces is using SGI visualization and supercomputing technology to help train its pilots at Namest nad Oslavou. SGI , in conjunction with Virtual Reality Media and Leteck頯pravny Kbely, helped to develop a fully reconfigurable simulator modeled on the Russian Sukhoi Su-22 attack aircraft.
22-24 November 2000: Some 130 people from computer vendors, computer service providers and researchers in scientific fields, a few from industry, but mostly from UK universities, attended the 11th machine evaluation workshop at EPSRC Daresbury Laboratories, UK. Of great interest were the Beowulf solutions, where clusters can be cobbled from favoured commodity Chips and Interconnect Network to fit one's pocket, and hopefully computing needs. This article provides a flavour of the workshop.
This year's fall meeting of the different Fujitsu Siemens high-end computer users took place in the Munich facilities in Neu-Perlach South from October 9th to October 11, 2000. There, the Fujitsu International Supercomputer Users (FISUM) met the 9th, the SAVE Working Group Scientific Computing the 13th and the VPP Special Interest Group the 8th time. Users from all over the world, Japan and Australia as well as Europe, came together to discuss their experiences and the requirements with Fujitsu Siemens representatives too. This special report will cover first experiences with the Intel Pentium-based hpcLine, new developments, the porting of application packages on this architecture, virtual reality on hpcLine and some remarks from vector computer centers.
The hpcLine is installed at 18 sites in research, academic institutes and industrial research and development. Eric Schnepf gave an overview on the application areas, new hardware developments and the interconnect - system area network.
Hakon Bugge from Scali gave an outlook on the actual situation and coming products as a scheduled ScaSAN architecture, MPI2 and MPICH.
High End Low Price Virtual Reality is an affordable high-end virtual reality system. Usual VR labs cost about US$ 10 to 15 million. Thus Siemens ZT decided to port VR on PC platforms.
Application software is the most important issue on new hardware platforms. With the hpcLine parallelised engineering applications are extremely important. In the meantime more ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) ported their software on hpcLine.
Dr. Roesler from Computational Dynamics discussed first experiences and benchmark results of Star-hpc on the Fujitsu Siemens hpcLine. One year ago, industry was not heavily interested in Linux clusters. Most of the ISVs started a Linux strategy, but today Mr. Roessler ran big benchmarks on Linux clusters for leading companies.
The second day opened with the FISUM session, where VPP sites reported on their experiences. As the Japanese sites showed their structure and users, it was quite interesting to see, what they are doing.
Although it was late in November, the 20th, Sanger Centre in Hinxton near Cambridge presented itself from its sunniest side. It is a world leading genomics research centre and plays a key role in sequencing the human genome. Sanger scientists have generated more finished genomic sequence than any other organisation - public or private. It moves forward to play an equally key role in the postgenomic era, in functional genetics and informatics. This special covers some the most important topics from an IT and analysts view.
The Sanger Centre is a research centre and primarily funded by the Wellcome Trust. It is located in Hinxton Hall, near Cambridge, in the "Genome Campus". Richard Durbin from Sanger gave a short introduction into the centre, the international activities and the actual projects.
Munich, 30. November 2000 Bill Blake, Vice President Compaq world wide High Performance Technical Computing, gave an overview of this market and importance and highlighted Compaq's role and investments in new Alpha processors as well as their roadmap.
One of the most important aid in studying genomes is the use of high-end computers. Phil Butcher, Head of Information Technology at Sanger Centre, presented the storage and computing challenges as well as the actual usage of clusters of Alpha processors.
One of the actual projects concerned the fast search and all the computational requirements. Jim Mulliken from Sanger discussed the topics background, the SNP Consortium and the assembly of the whole genome.
An other extremely interesting project was the Cancer Genome. Here the normal cells are compared with cancer cells. Systematically they search for changes in the genome sequence. Mike Stratton presented the Sanger approach.
Tim Hubbard brought good but also bad news concerning the genomes. Additionally he discussed the Ensembl Project, to develop a software system which produces and maintains automatic annotation on eukaryotic genomes.
SGI's new Graphics Clusters will support demanding real-time 3D applications in the training and simulation market. It will have integrated software such as multiprocess OpenGL PerformerNT, to increase performance and realism and Advanced Cluster Environment (ACE) to simplify Linux cluster administration.
SGI announced the OpenGL Performer 2.4 application programming interface (API) upgrade for both IRIX and Linux operating systems.
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© 2000, Genias Benelux