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| 12 March 2001 |
EuroFlash no. 450
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Primeur-EnterTheGrid is the premier news service on HPCN, supercomputing and The Grid in Europe. Primeur Weekly delivers the news each week in your e-mail box. Check out http://EnterTheGrid.com for all information on The Grid. Check out the Primeur HPCN 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 Dutch national research supercomputer Teras, the largest SGI supercomputer in Europe, still is not on-line. Software instabilities plague the system that should have been operational from mid February
The 192 Gflop/s, 128 IBM SP system at SARA in Amsterdam, will be inaugurated on April 4th.One of the key-notes at the inauguration that will take place in the Watergraafsmeer Science Centre, is David Klepacki from the IBM research centre in Yorktown Heights.
Hewlett-Packard Company announced the deployment of a high-availability HP system with two 8-processor, 4 Gbyte memory high-end V-class servers, and three mid-range N-class servers to improve revenue accounting at the Lufthansa group of airlines.
ESI Group announced its new generation of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software, PAM-FLOW 2000. New version offers aero-acoustics simulations for identifying and quantifying flow-induce noise sources. PAM-FLOW 2000 enhances coupling with PAM-CRASH. PAM-FLOW 2000can be used for simulating a numerical wind tunnel and numerical anechoic chamber.
CINECA, a supercomputer centre in Italy, run by a consortium of Italian universities, has selected software from Advanced Visual Systems to visualize a broad range of scientific, analysis and high-performance computing projects at the new state-of-the art facility.
The European Commission organises a workshop: Expanding the Grid reach in Europe, on March 23, 2001 in Brussels. The one-day workshop will be an ideal forum for policy-makers (Commission and Member States), and leading experts and managers from Research, Industry and Business from Europe and the rest of the world.
NetCurrents an Internet Intelligence Agency, has entered into a Strategic Technology Partnership with Cobion, a company that provides global solutions for brand, copyright and identity protection. Headquartered in Germany, Cobion's technology finds visually finding corporate brands, logos, marks and symbols in websites, irrespective of their size, placement and the native language of a site. Cobion employs highly advanced algorithms and a 1,000 CPU supercomputer to process over 50 million online images each day in its Global ImageCenter. The Company reports cases of brand misuse in detailed online reports.
EnterTheGrid, brought to you by Primeur, is your entrance to Grid Computing, distributed computing, peer-to-peer-computing and parallel computing. The Grid is an emerging infrastructure, that makes computing and data access possible anywhere, anytime in a seamless way. The Age of the Grid has just dawned, with hundreds of active research projects in Europe, and other parts of the world, with active user groups as the Global Grid Forum and the Peer-to-Peer working groups, with many companies that try to harness the unused powers of the millions of PCs out there on the Internet, sitting idle. With the editors of Primeur, we report on leading edge computing, since the dawn of supercomputing. Now the Grid calls for new initiative to keep you up to date with the developments in Grid Computing: that is why we have started EnterTheGrid.
In a welcome word to the Global Grid Forum Conference audience, Charlie Catlett, chairman of the Global Grid Forum, offered a brief survey on the goal, history, organisation, structure, and potential of the GGF Initiative. Started in 1988, the GGF has now organised for the very first time a global conference in Amsterdam where addicts to grid computing from Europe, Asia and the USA are offered the opportunity to meet, discuss, seek partnerships, and actively contribute to the different GGF working groups.
At the first edition of the Global Grid Forum Conference held 4-7 March in Amsterdam, Brian Carpenter, IBM Programme Director of Internet Standards and Technology, provided a keynote on future networking and peer-to-peer computing. Being chairman of the Internet Society, the speaker who is equally involved in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Work Group for Differentiated Services, pictured a realistic view of the hard work which still needs to be done in order to solve today's problems of congestion, the chronic lack of address space, and packets blockages or even hijackings because of firewall protection and interception via gateways and proxies. Mr. Carpenter offered a three-fold solution in terms of Quality of Service control, a fast deployment of IPv6, and the introduction of middle boxes for Grid and P2P computing.
Until a year ago, Genias Software was developing and marketing the Codine resource management system for networked computers. As one of the very few European companies specializing in high-performance computing, it stayed independent until, after an intermediate merger with Chord Systems in San Jose, it became acquired by Sun. Codine became Sun Grid Engine and Genias Software CEO Wolfgang Gentzsch moved from Neutraubling in Bavaria to Menlo Park in California. We met him during the First Global Grid Forum conference in Amsterdam, where he explained the success the Grid Engine already has with over 5000 downloads in just six months, and the plans of Sun to not only incorporate Grid Engine into other Sun products like the HPC ClusterTools, but also contribute to the development of the Grid.
"Where the ??**!?! is my program? I thought I did send it to the US to do some calculations for me, but it seems it got to Czech Republic on its own and is now stuck somewhere in Prague!". Science fiction? No it was scientist in the chair next to me who was attending a session at the Global Grid Forum meeting in Amsterdam. Well, he was following two lectures at the same time, and monitored the activities of a program he did send off from the computer at his department in Poznan Poland. His laptop was connected via a high-speed wireless connection to the Internet. Over the Internet he followed a live video broad cast of the lecture in another room of the conference. The program he did send off from his machine in Poland from another window on his laptop, was living on the Grid, a new Internet based environment, where programmes can move themselves to computers that have time available to run it. Whether that computer is in Europe or Australia, the programme does not care, it just goes to where the best resources are available. When it is kicked away, it just find another place on the Grid.
Andreas Schreiber from the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) in Cologne offered the attendants of the First Global Grid Forum Conference a brief overview of the TENT distributed simulation system which is used as a problem solving environment for engineering applications. TENT consists of a component system based on CORBA. The TENT applications are wrapped to the components which in turn are interconnected by event channels. In the Summer of 2001, the TENT team plans to integrate the system with the Globus Toolkit to create a grid version of TENT, which will be operational for industrial use.
Dr. Henri Bal, who is working in the Faculty of Sciences at the Free University (VU) of Amsterdam, was invited at the First Global Grid Forum Conference to give an overview of current grid computing activities in The Netherlands. Dr. Bal presented DutchGrid, Virtual Laboratories (VL), and Distributed ASCI Supercomputer (DAS) to the audience, three recent grid projects which are focused on multi-disciplinary research, also in the medical field. In addition, the speaker illustrated some important issues of distributed supercomputing using DAS, based on a set of application case studies and experimental programming environments, in order to indicate which challenges soon will need to be met by computer scientists.
The European Union has formulated a policy on Grid computing. The Grid is considered an important item of the e-Europe action plan. It is supported in the current Research programme (IST) and will probably be part of the next Sixth Framework programme, that will start in 2002. This was explained by Frans de Bruine from the European Commission at the Global Grid Forum in Amsterdam.
From April 1st, Professor Tony Hey currently Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Southampton will join EPSRC, where he will direct the e-Science Core Programme. The e-Science programme, coordinated by UK Research Council EPSRC, will invest in new information technologies. Scientists today are faced with processing vast amounts of complex data and the Grid would enable them to do this efficiently and effectively. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is the largest of the United Kingdom's seven government-funded research councils. At the Global Grid Forum in Amsterdam, Tony Hey explained the ambitious UK plans that includes GBP 69 million for Grid test beds.
Considering a Grid project and looking for European funding? Then you better hurry, because as Kyriakos Baxevanidis from the European Commission explained at the Global Grid Forum that the closing data is April 25 2001. Projects requested for CPA9 are: Grid test beds, deployment and technologies.
Grids attract a lot of attention. Is it all buss or is there something real behind it. According to Paul Messina, who lectured at the Global Grid Forum in Amsterdam, Grids enable large-scale computational science. He used the Virtual Observatory that will include space data from many sources and make them accessible to all of the astronomical community, as an illustration.
It is not so much technological issues that have to be overcome to make the Grid a success, but financial and political issues. Hence, Bob Raiken from CISCO proposed to use Postel's two additional layers to the seven techies use to describe the network: Layer eight (financial) and layer nine (political). The problems with for instance accounting in cross-border testbeds are very complex. To get all the organisations involved to co-operate on a political level is even harder.
There are many data and information sources available that could be useful to neuroscience. However, they are stored in different formats and put together by experts in specialised domains. Hence they are incompatible, not only in format but also in terms and wording used. As Bertram Ludaescher, an NPACI representative from the San Diego Supercomputer Centre explained at the First Global Grid Forum Conference, creating a mediator service which understands the user's question and can translate it to the language used by the different information sources to get a composite answer, could be the solution.
In the second day session on Grid data farms and other Japanese scientific Grid efforts at the First Global Grid Forum Conference, Dr. Satoshi Matsuoka presented the MEG project running at Osaka University, in which complex magnetoencephalography data is analysed to detect early symptoms of brain disease. Grid and IPv6 technologies are applied in order to build the sophisticated MEG data analysis environment where highly advanced signal processing techniques, including Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and wavelet are helping to reveal the different functions within the human brain. In contrast with electrocorticography (ECoG), MEG is a non-invasive method to capture the magnetic field which arises from brain activity via helmet-type sensors.
A 3D VRML visualization of the precise location of the 6.8 Seattle/Tacoma earthquake that occurred in February is made available on the web by researchers of the universities of Michigan and Minnesota as part of the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation grid (NEESgrid).
AXS Technologies a company selling parallel processing technology that increases the speed at which high quality digital images are viewed, announced a strategic partnership with Avatech Solutions a local US provider of design automation tools, training, integration services, and technical support. Avatech will market AXS' EyeSpy Image Server software to companies that develop computer aided design (CAD) and engineering document management technologies.
Paracel, a business unit of Celera Genomics, has launched its new GeneMatcher for Education (GME) programme, a supercomputing opportunity for academic researchers. The GME program offers a pre-owned GeneMatcher-Plus - a fully configured nine-board unit comprising a total of 6,912 processors, a suite of sensitive search algorithms and the Paracel user interfaces, BioView Toolkit and BioView Workbench.
Caltech's Center for Advanced Computing Research installed an early access 32-processor Hewlett-Packard Superdome system. First benchmark results are promising, getting a big part of the performance out of the machine.
Santa Clara, California-based NVIDIA Corporation, a provider of advanced graphics processing technology, has chosen Platform's LSF software to manage development work in its data center operations and across its entire engineering network that consists of almost 1,000 processors.
At NPACI, a US research alliance, a large-scale molecular dynamics calculation has compressed a month's computing into just 36 hours, using a parallelized version of the Charmm molecular modelling and simulation package and the Grid operating system Legion on six supercomputing systems with five distinct architectures located in four different states in the USA.
For the fourth quarter ended December 31, 2000, Cray reported revenues of $33.4 million, compared to revenues of $343,000 for the fourth quarter of 1999. The company's net loss for the fourth quarter was $13.9 million.
Sun Microsystems will acquire InfraSearch, a privately held company based in Burlingame, California. InfraSearch is a providing peer-to-peer (P2P) searching technology. With this acquisition, Sun intends to strengthen and accelerate efforts within Bill Joy's Project Juxtapose (JXTA) - an incubation research effort addressing new styles of distributed computing.
Sun has worked with BMC Software to integrate Sun's automated Dynamic Systems Domains with BMC Software's PATROL to produce a new solution for Workload-based Automated Dynamic Reconfiguration (LADR). BMC Software developed its PATROL for Sun Automated Dynamic Reconfiguration (ADR) solution specifically for Sun to monitor system performance and proactively manage the domains of the Sun Enterprise 10000 Starfire server.
On March 22 the Cornell Theory Center Advanced Cluster Computing Consortium (AC3) annual meeting will be held at the World Trade Center, New York City. The seminar theme will be the "Future of High Performance Computing with Windows."
BRECIS Communications, a communications company focused on leading-edge, broadband multi-service network processor architectures for the "last mile," today unveiled the world's first "Multi-Service Processor" (MSP) architecture. The BRECIS architecture is expected to make possible a new class of powerful but cost-effective network processors that uniquely enable multiple, diverse applications such as voice telephony, video, and data to be delivered to customer premises with the requisite levels of quality of service.
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© 2001, Genias Benelux