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| 11 June 2001 |
EuroFlash no. 462
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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 Opal Group and Aspex Technology will co-operate to produce a high performance, flexible, scalable processor which gives high performance for digital media appliances as well as in wired and wireless communications infrastructure. The VASP 4096 Linedancer, which will tape out later this summer, combines 4096 associative processing elements with functional blocks and glue logic enabling a single chip solution with 1.2 billion MOPS performance. Media processing applications such as information gateways, speech recognition or image processing systems can thus migrate from an integrated fixed function set of devices into a flexible software implementation.
The US Center for Strategic an International Studies(CSIS) has released a report tot the US government on the techniques behind the export regulations for supercomputers. The CICS commission concludes that the current measurement: MTOPS, millions of operations per second for a computer system is not useful anymore. Software has developed to a stage where any country can bundle a large number of micro-processors and get supercomputer performance.
The German Weather Service (DWD) signed an agreement with IBM to supply a 2 Tflop/s supercomputer in the context of the modernisation of the central IT systems. This is the latest stage of a larger contract for the German meteorological computing centre (DMRZ) in Offenbach, Germany.
The Human Genome has been unravelled, has it not? Not quite, although there is a rough understanding of the gene sequence, a lot of work still lies ahead of us. At the Supercomputer Conference in Heidelberg, Manfred Zorn, from the Bioinformatics group of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories' (LBnL) Human Genome Center presents an overview of the state-of-the-art. The immense amounts of data involved in this type of research, call for large multi-disciplinary research teams supported by large-scale supercomputer centres, much like the physicists have with for instance CERN. In a joint interview, Primeur/EnterTheGrid - Virtual Medical Worlds Magazine asked Manfred Zorn to give us an introduction to the current research in the field.
Cray has received a $3.3 million order for a Cray SV1ex supercomputer system and related services from Government Micro Resources (GMR). The subcontract with GMR calls for a 32-processor Cray SV1ex supercomputer to be installed in the second quarter 2001 at the NASA Ames Research Center facility in Moffett Field, USA. The system will support research aimed at improving the safety and durability of aircraft and aerospace vehicles.
Sandia National Laboratories will upgrade its computer center with Mercury's latest RACE++ multicomputers. Mercury's high-performance systems, which incorporate "G4" PowerPC processors, will be used to implement advanced algorithms for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems.
The U.S. Navy and The Weather Channel have signed a memorandum of understanding that encourages professional collaboration between these two important SGI customers. The agreement will allow the two organizations to jointly examine new methods and technologies for producing and presenting climate and weather forecasts.
In the USA, the 2001 hurricane season has begun, and a recently installed 1,152 processor SGI Origin 3000 supercomputer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton (GFDL), is helping the USA to better prepare for storms, high winds and flooding.
Sandia National Laboratories has released the Cplant system software, that significantly extends the capability of researchers to modularly assemble large blocks of off-the-shelf computer components.
Avaki Corporation, formerly Applied MetaComputing, has closed US$6 Million in its first venture capital funding, led by Polaris Venture Partners. The funding enables Avaki to commercialise its Internet-scale enterprise-class Grid middleware platform, which converges distributed, pervasive, and peer-oriented computing. The platform, in development for seven years at the University of Virginia, unifies multiple work platforms in multiple locations, robustly and securely extending enterprise capabilities to the edge of the Internet.
At bioinformatic's company NuTec Atlanta headquarters a 5,000 processor IBM eSever has been unveiled. Peak of the machine is 7.5 Tflop/s. NuTEC claims it is the fastes commercial super in the world. The NuTec Life Sciences supercomputing center will provide the technology platform to accelerate medical and academic research in disease management, treatment and drug discovery.
Engenia Software has acquired a comprehensive license to the peer-to-peer collaboration technology of Roku Technologies. Under the agreement, Engenia acquires a paid, non-exclusive perpetual license to the source code for Roku's remote PC-Access, PDA, wireless and file-sharing technologies. Engenia will integrate the new technology into the next major release of its Collaborative Services Platform, scheduled for release this summer.
A Report from the Yankee Group, "Peer-to-Peer: An Old Idea Becomes Revolutionary," finds that while many peer-to-peer (P2P) start-ups are struggling to find a business model that works, the P2P market is evolving into four primary market segments: resource aggregators, "people-to-people" collaboration tools, applications based on P2P architectures, and infrastructure tools upon which developers can build P2P applications. All these segments have radically different characteristics and business models, and their futures vary greatly.
The First IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid) was held on May 15-18, 2001, in Brisbane, Australia. CCGrid was hosted by the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and was organized by the General Co-Chairs George Mohay (QUT) and Rajkumar Buyya (Monash University) with the Program Chair Paul Roe (QUT). CCGrid symposium enjoyed the support of the IEEE Computer Society Task Force on Cluster Computing (TFCC), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and a number of industrial supporters including Sun, IBM, Intel, Akamai, Platform Computing, and MPI Software Technology. CCGrid focuses on the combined areas of clusters and Grid computing, which share many related technical issues and are both areas of intense interest and rapid growth. Cluster computing has enabled low-cost entry into supercomputing performance by using clusters based on commodity components, such as processors and network infrastructure. Grid computing borrows its name from the analogy with the electrical power grid. The electrical power grid made electricity widely available and easy to use. The "information power Grid" endeavours to make the discovery and sharing of information and resources widely available and easy to use. Clusters and Grids share many communication, scheduling, monitoring, and application development issues, with Grids being the most general case since they can be heterogeneous and open-ended.
The Molecular Science Computing Facility (MSCF) in the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in the USA is soliciting proposals, for allocations of computer time, for Computational Grand Challenge Projects of 3-year duration in environmental molecular science basic and applied research areas that address the environmental problems and research needs facing the U.S. Department of Energy and theUS Nation.
The Molecular Interactive Collaborative Environment (MICE) developed by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) has been integrated with the e Protein Data Bank (PDB), allowing teams of scientists worldwide to view and interact simultaneously with 3-D scenes of biological molecules through ordinary Web browsers.
Primeur Weekly is published per e-mail. Check out the subscription information for more details how to subscribe. You can find the back issues on the Primeur web site. The EuroFlash! and USflash! are published together with ESIS - European Supercomputing Information Service.
© 2001, Genias Benelux