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| 20 August 2001 |
EuroFlash no. 471
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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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SuSE Linux AG a is the first provider to deliver a Linux operating system for IBM eServer iSeries, IBM's high-performance, integrated business server for small to mid-sized enterprises.
The SuSE Linux Knowledge Portal will be transformed into an independent Linux Portal. The entirely bilingual knowledge portal contains a wealth of various info channels, individually configurable access possibilities, and a flexible full-text search engine.
McDATA Corporation's 6000 Series Director: ED-6064 now provides FICON support for IBM's mainframes, Enterprise Storage Server (ESS), and the Magstar 3590 A60 tape controller. For the first time, a complete FICON network, tying together both open systems and mainframe channels, directors, disk storage and tape, has been achieved.
ESI Group has acquired the Canadian company L3P, an expert in manufacturing simulation by injection method of composite material reinforcements.
The U.S. Government dedicated the world's fastest supercomputer, an IBM system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that will bring the nation an important step closer to the goal of simulating a nuclear detonation inside a computer. The IBM machine, known as ASCI White, is capable of 12.3 Tflop/s more than the combined speed of the next three most powerful supercomputers on earth. Located in a classified area at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, ASCI White covers a space the size of two basketball courts and weighs 106 tons. It contains six Tbyte of memory, and has more than 160 TByte of disk storage.
Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced its first commercially available, massively scalable visualization architecture. The architecture and the first product based on the architecture: the HP visualization center sv6. This configuration initially will support up to 80 graphics pipelines exceeding 500 million polygons per second.
New enhanced versions of the rendering application programming interfaces (APIs) based on OpenGL, including OpenGL Shader, OpenGL Volumizer and OpenGL Optimizer wer announced by SGI. OpenGL Volumizer 2.0 has been explicitly designed to increase interactivity when users work with extremely large data sets of up to 100 GByte and leverage 3D texture-mapping hardware that boosts application performance by 10 to 100 times over CPU-based methods.
Compaq and Entelos entered a three-year IT agreement that will provide pioneering technology to support new drug development, disease research, and improved patient care. Under terms of the agreement, Entelos has adopted Compaq's high-performance AlphaServer systems running Tru64 UNIX and Compaq ProLiant industry standard servers running Linux as the computational platforms for its current and next-generation high-throughput PhysioLab systems. Using Compaq systems, Entelos will have a scalable, virtual laboratory that can be integrated with the drug discovery and development processes of its customers.
The TriZetto Group and Sun Microsystems will collaborate to make TriZetto's HealthWeb e-business solution available on the Sun and iPlanet platforms. Sun's Solaris 8 Operating Environment will serve as the preferred UNIX system-based development platform for TriZetto's HealthWeb, a solution that allows health plans to open their back-end systems to the Internet and offer real-time self-service to their constituents.
McDATA Corporation's 6000 Series Director: ED-6064 now provides FICON support for IBM's mainframes, Enterprise Storage Server (ESS), and the Magstar 3590 A60 tape controller. For the first time, a complete FICON network, tying together both open systems and mainframe channels, directors, disk storage and tape, has been achieved.
SAS Institute has begun shipping Platform Computing's LSF Job Scheduler with SAS/Warehouse Administrator's software Release 2.2. The solution makes it possible to schedule, analyze and monitor steps of distributed application workloads across the enterprise.
There are new Silicon Graphics O2+ visual workstations with the PMC-Sierra RM7000A 350 MHz processor and the MIPS R12000A 400 MHz processor. O2+ is targeted at creative and technical professionals in markets such as medical imaging, scientific visualization, 2D and 3D animation, broadcasting, simulation and defense. The new O2+ visual workstation delivers up to 47% more compute power and 32% more graphics performance than its precursor, and support for over 900 MByte resident texture memory from available system memory in a 1 Gbyte memory configuration.
The two major enhancements in Version 7.5 are OpenGL support via VTK (The Visualization ToolKit), an Open Source, freely available software system developed by Clifton Park, New York-based Kitware, that provides 3D graphics, image processing, and advanced visualization; and the addition of 77 new CNL functions, including 50 that were specifically designed for the finance and insurance industries.
SGI announced a range of enhancements for SGI Reality Center visualization facility.
Vertex Pharmaceuticals installed a new supercomputer cluster, one of the most powerful in the world dedicated to in silico drug design applications, the company claims. This cluster will perform parallel computations using proprietary software and broad in-house modeling expertise that supports Vertex's structural biology, combinatorial chemistry, medicinal chemistry, high throughput screening, bioinformatics, and pharmacology groups. The new supercomputer cluster was created for Vertex by Blackstone Computing. The initial installation will consist of 56 computers and 112 computing processors (933 MHz Pentium III) providing approximately 110 Gflop/s at theoretical peak computing power, which is approximately five times faster than Vertex's current supercomputer cluster. The system is designed to be scalable, and will allow further expansion to 450 computers and 900 processors to keep pace with Vertex's computing needs.
Cray has successfully completed the acceptance test for a Cray SV1 supercomputer at India's National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF). The system will help NCMRWF enhance models used to develop medium range forecasts (three to 10 days in advance) of monsoons and other weather patterns that affect agriculture, ocean state forecasting and other public services.
Physiome Sciences will use IBM's next-generation supercomputing technology for research on biological systems, diseases and potential drug targets. In addition, IBM will license biological modeling technology from Physiome Sciences for its internal use. Physiome Sciences and its development collaborator, the University of Auckland in New Zealand will receive two of the first shipments of the new IBM eServer POWER4-based supercomputers. The system will enable Physiome Sciences to speed up its current capability to simulate complex models of cells, tissues and organs, and simulate the behavior of diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and asthma.
Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) ) and Oracle announced a record-breaking data warehousing benchmark for the HP Superdome server, Oracle9i Database and the HP Surestore disk array XP512.
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© 2001, Genias Benelux