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| 02 April 2001 |
EuroFlash no. 453
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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 Grid is not only about high-performance computing, explained Jean-Raoul Scherrer from the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics at the Grid workshop organised in March 2001 by the European Commission in Brussels. Hundreds of large medical and bio-molecular databases and information sources already exists, that can benifit from Grid technologies to make them more accesisble."If it is allowed somehow to consider the 'Grid' as an offspring of the HPCC action, then one large part of the use of such an infrastructure should be devoted to 'Education, Research and Health" (ERH) dealing with co-ordinated resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic, multi-institutional organisations' Scherrer notes. In a pioneering experiment, called Health on the Net, several Swiss organisations built an advanced intelligent agent based search engine called MARVIN, that searches the Internet for medical information, that can be considered a prototype for future implementations in the Grid's knowledge layer.
One of the 'traditional' Grid applications - is the Grid already mature enough to talk of traditional and new applications? - is space technology. As Luigi Fusci from the European Space Agency (ESA) explained at the Grid workshop organised by the European Commission in Brussels in March 2001, his organisation is actively involved in the demonstration of Grid technologies for different space applications. ESA is, for instance, partner in the DataGrid project. This is an example of a project that develops the Grid infrastructure in the space research and application domain.
The Grid, and especially high-speed networking, could allow to replace the current data transport of European radio telescopes, that uses magnetic tapes, by data transport through fibre. This would create a large Europe wide real-time radio telescope. This was explained by Richard Schilizzi from the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe (JIVE) explained at the Grid workshop organised by the European Commission in Brussels in March 2001.
The Workshop on Metacomputing Systems and Applications MSA'2001, will be held in Valencia (Spain), September 3, 2001. Dead line paper submission April 8th.
Recently released sales figures of version SuSE 7.1 set new records in US markets. According to a recent PC data report, SuSE has a 48% market share of the Linux retail market in the USA, second is RedHat with 29%
Compaq and the Amsterdam computing centre SARA installed an Alphacluster configuration of 16 workstations, coupled via a Myrinet with a peak performance of 20 Gflop/s. The system will be used for Grid and Bio-informatics research.
Sun and Cray inked an OEM agreement that gives Cray the ability to rebrand, directly market and sell Sun's new Sun Fire servers as data management (input/output) nodes within Cray's next-generation Cray MTA-2 and Cray SV2 systems.
United Device, a distributed computing company, and iArchives, entered into a partnership in which iArchives will use United Devices Global MetaProcessor service to help preserve printed history. The Global MetaProcessor service works by securely sending a small portion of a project to each of the thousands of individual devices in the United Devices Member Community. This community is made up of thousands of individuals and organizations that have volunteered their PCs' computing power to generate the needed massive power for distributed computing projects.
The Ohio Supercomputer Center is using AVS visualization software for visualizing fossil bones to understand the relationship between bone structure and the functional characteristics of a skeleton, investigating void-finding algorithms to define voids in 3D galaxy surveys, and completing a research project for the US Department of Defense.
Dolphin Interconnect introduced SCI high-performance clustering support for Novell NetWare 5 and NetWare 6 platforms. Dolphin is releasing NetWare Loadable Modules (NLMs) that support Novell's Cluster Services for Dolphin's range of PCI to SCI interconnect cards such as the 32Bit/33MHz PSB32, 64Bit/33MHz PSB64 and the 64Bit/66MHz PSB66. Dolphin is also releasing their SISCI programming libraries under GPL (GNU Public License) for the Novell NetWare 5 and NetWare 6 platforms.
CADRE, a US National Science Foundation-funded facility for high-performance I/O characterisation and optimisation, announces a newly expanded repository of resources that aid in the design of efficient I/O systems. The upgrade to the Web-based CADRE repository was made possible by hardware contributions from IBM and Intel and by the addition of new software tools.
A Japanese government and several Japanese universities will establish nanotechnology research institutes. The research aims to develop, for example, fingertip-size supercomputers and non-degradable plastics, and promote technology transfer to industry.
SGI and Platform Computing introduced the SG Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Technical Compute Farm for Linux. Platform LSF (Load Sharing Facility) software will be a key component of the offering. For a limited time, beginning April 1, the SGI EDA Technical Compute Farm for Linux will be offered at a special introductory pricing.
Agilent has new test solutions for ipv6 (internet protocol version 6), including a system for testing the performance of tunnelled ipv6 traffic. The new ipv6 testing solutions allow equipment manufacturers and service providers to verify the performance and interoperability of next-generation ipv6 equipment and services, as well as their compatibility with earlier-generation equipment, helping to speed the transition to the new industry standard.
NEC has set a new Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) transmission capacity world record. NEC has successfully transmitted 10.9 Tbit/s (273 channels, each with 40 Gbit/s data speed) of information over 117km.
NEC developed the industry's biggest sized plasma display monitor with h a panel size of 61-inches (diagonal 155 cm). A sample of the new NEC 61-inch model can been seen at the "Cebit" exhibition in Hanover, Germany.
AXS Technologies - whose patented parallel processing technology increases the speed at which high quality digital images are viewed online - announced that Digipict has partnered with the company for use of its AXS EyeSpy Image Server.
Princeton Softech announced the RT Server Option, a major new component of the Relational Tools for Servers, the enterprise-scale toolset that automates extraction, migration, editing, browsing, comparison and archiving of referentially intact sets of data from the most complex databases.
Cray reported that a large Cray T3E system has successfully completed the 30-day acceptance test at a government customer site. As a result, this order will contribute approximately $21 million in product revenue in the quarter ending March 31, 2001.
The NASA Ames Research Center, in Moffett Field powered up a 512-processor SGI Origin 3800. Working under a memorandum of agreement, NASA Ames and SGI have been cooperating in order to push the boundaries of high-performance computing. It was NASA Ames computer scientists who first encouraged SGI to connect many computer processor chips in a new way when building its 512-processor supercomputers.
VA Linux introduced the VA Linux 100 remote management solution for 1U server farms. Leveraging VACM, VA's cluster management software, the VA Linux 100 turns racks of VA Linux 1120 and 1220 1U servers into unified server arrays and enables systems administrators to manage them securely from anywhere in the world.
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