|
|
||
| 17 September 2001 |
EuroFlash no. 475
|
|
|
Advertisement
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.
|
||
The 18th TOP500 list will be introduced at the Supercomputing Conference 2001 (SC2001) in Denver, Colorado, taking place November 10-16, 2001. Deadline to submit an entry is October 1, 2001.
The SARA VR-Server is a high quality Virtual Reality platform with active stereo vision and head/hand-tracking. The system enables full blown Virtual Reality for in-house VR needs, at any location, and is also suited for trade-show presentations. SARA's Virtual Reality expertise covers a wide field of application areas including architecture, engineering, biotechnology and medicine.
The Grid Resource Broker (GRB) is one of the current Globus projects of the HPC Lab of the University of Lecce, Italy, in collaboration with CACR, California Institute of Technology.
The SGI Origin 3200 server was chosen as a key component of a recently installed video/audio capture, asset management and archiving system at the Ministry of Justice in Madrid, Spain. To comply with a new law requiring all civil court sessions to be recorded and made available to court staff and involved parties, Vitelsa of Madrid and ADM (Andalucia Digital Multimedia) tendered the offer. The special engineering division of ADM, which has now become a separate company named Tedial, was the project integrator.
The Dutch public broadcaster NOS (Nederlandse Omroep Stichting), in Hilversum, The Netherlands, hosts one of the country's largest Internet sites using 20 IRIX OS-based SGI Origin 200 high-performance servers. The SGI Origin 200 servers consistently and reliably handle more than 65,000 hits per minute all the way up to NOS's record of 25 million hits in one day. A single SGI Origin 200 server handled most of that record-setting day's work: 18.5 million hits, with peaks of up to 60,000 hits per minute. The SGI Origin 200 server used to distribute the RealMedia files handles more than 600,000 files per month.
In a bold step, the US Navy and The Weather Channel have signed a memorandum of understanding that encourages professional collaboration, leading to a joint examination of new methods and technologies for producing and presenting climate and weather forecasts.
Mental Images of Berlin, Germany, recently purchased a 16-processor SGI Origin 3400 server with 4GB system memory network interface cards and storage system. The modular OS-based SGI Origin 3400 server is currently being used as Mental Images's main platform for the development of its host and thread parallel software products, including the high-performance, photo-realistic rendering software mental ray and mental matter, proprietary, highly modular modelling technology. Users of Mental Images products include most of the leading visual effects and digital film studios, game developers and companies in the automotive and aerospace industries. Mental ray 3.0, the most recent version of mental ray, will be released commercially in October and will feature expanded capabilities developed on the SGI 2000 series and SGI Origin 3400 servers.
Five SGI Media Server for broadcast systems have been sold, delivered and implemented to Salsamedia of Oslo, Norway. The SGI Media Server systems will serve as the initial communications structure for a new broadcast-quality Salsamedia solution named Salsa On-Air, which will supply Internet-based, format-independent exchange of television commercials. An SGI Media Server system running Salsa On-Air is now operational in TV2's technical centre in Bergen, Norway; two are placed with post production houses in Scandinavia, a fourth is placed in Salsa's offices; and a fifth has been installed at a television station in London, UK.
With the demand for on-line storage capacity showing no signs of slowing, the concept of the storage area network to provide both capacity and high availability is now common in broadcast installations. Raidtec is currently developing the SAN further with what it calls storage virtualisation.
The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, established in 1994 by Steven Spielberg to collect the testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses of the Holocaust, recently purchased two SGI Origin 3400 servers to facilitate production of television/feature documentaries and interactive teaching aids.
Two SGI Origin 3200 high-performance servers and a 5TB SGI Total Performance 9400 (TP9400) RAID storage array have been installed at Peaktime Belgium, a Brussels-based company delivering a variety of monitoring and tracking services to the Belgian TV industry.
Tippett Studio, in Berkeley California, recently created more than 60 3D animated shots for the Warner Bros. movie Cats & Dogs and over 150 3D shots, plus 15 CGI creatures, for Evolution from DreamWorks SKG. To complete the work, it recently invested in 10 Silicon Graphics Octane2 Irix-based visual workstations, 25 230 and 330 workstations running Windows NT and Linux, an SGI 2100 high performance visualisation server and two terabytes of storage to add to its existing SGI hardware.
Min Bimbangal Productions (MPPL), an India production house, has purchased a virtual studio from vi[z]rt. The system is installed in a custom-built facility in Chennai and will be used in the production of talk shows, current affairs and music programmes.
For-A, maker of the 2D virtual studio digiWarp-EX, is launching a new NT-based 3D virtual studio at IBC 2001. DigiStorm is aimed at the virtual studio customer that needs full 3D facilities but has a limited budget. The system is designed with a similar philosophy to digiWarp, according to For-A, making it low cost and easy to use, maintain and set up.
Researchers with the Computational Materials Institute (CMI) at the Cornell Theory Center (CTC) experienced a 3.4 x speedup when they moved their code to the new Intel Itanium (IA 64) architecture. CMI scientists perform large-scale finite element simulations of critically important materials science problems such as failures in engine gears, tears in airplane fuselage surfaces, and cracks in dams. Working with specialists at Intel's Applications Solutions Center (ASC), the CMI team delved into the details of this new architecture and optimised the performance of critical parts of their simulation system for the Itanium.
SGI has launched the CXFS Version 2.0, a scalable, journaled clustered filesystem with extended capabilities to support the Solaris operating system. SGI CXFS is a clustered solution that provides a single filesystem accessible on a heterogeneous storage area network (SAN) from multiple hosts, including IRIX, Linux, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and now Solaris. With this new capability, SGI IRIX OS-based customers can seamlessly share data with Solaris OS-based systems in real time, thereby increasing productivity and reducing costs. Built on the high-performance SGI XFS filesystem and the next-generation SGI XVM volume manager, CXFS enables multiple computers direct access to a shared filesystem, which means all systems in a CXFS environment have access to the same file at the same time at local or near-local speeds.
Mercury Computer Systems Inc., a provider of embedded real time digital signal and image processing systems, has been selected by Integrated Sensors Inc. (ISI) for a U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Information Directorate Electronic Intelligence (ELINT) development programme to provide surveillance and tactical mission support.
The Compaq ProLiant servers will support the new Novell NetWare 6 operating system. As part of its support, Compaq will extend its directory management, fault and performance management, and high availability offerings to include updated eDirectory Collection Agent and Compaq Management Agents for ProLiant servers, and ProLiant Cluster Kits for NetWare 6. By providing continued support and optimisation on ProLiant servers for customers that plan to deploy NetWare 6 servers, Compaq will deliver simple solutions that enable customers to maximise their resources,plan for change and growth, and to ensure continuous operations.
NEC Computers Inc., a provider of mobile, desktop and server computing solutions for the enterprise market, has launched a new line of Fault Tolerant servers for the North American marketplace. The NEC Express5800/ft series is based on Intel Corporation's Pentium III processors and runs on Microsoft's Windows 2000 Advanced Server operating system.
SGI featured immersive, interactive displays of its industry-leading collaborative visualisation technologies at the Society of Exploration Geophysicists 2001 International Exposition and Annual Meeting, which took place in San Antonio on Friday, September 14.
The cost of handling the hundreds of thousands of transactions typical of the busiest on-line enterprise operations has been slashed to unprecedented levels, according to the TPC-C benchmark, the industry's standard measure of computer power. Unisys now achieves 200 percent of the performance of any other Windows-based single server, becoming the only non-UNIX/RISC server in the single-system TPC-C Top Ten.
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