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| 08 October 2001 |
EuroFlash no. 478
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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 Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG), announced its new release of the NAG Fortran Library. Mark 20 of the Fortran Library offers 95 new routines that extend and improve existing functionality, giving the Fortran Library a total of 1288 user-callable quality routines.
Dassault Systèmes will provide its software as well as technical support for a new digital enterprise laboratory in Purdue University's School of Technology.
Dassault Systèmes, and SchlumbergerSema have signed a partnership agreement to offer industrial clients comprehensive solutions for internet-based collaborative engineering (e-Collaboration). These solutions will enable companies to exchange data and share engineering design processes with their suppliers and sub-contractors over the web.
The Dutch Royal Weather Institute (KNMI) has bought SUN Fire 15K supercomputer. Early next year, the first 44 processors will be delivered. The machine, one of the fastest in the Netherlands, will be upgraded later to 84 processors. The machine will be used for weather prediction and climate research. Occasionally, the Netherlands suffers from a storm that develops so locally and quickly, they are difficult to predict. The new machine helps with the prediction by allowing to use a more detailed version of the popular HIRLAM prediction model.
ESI Group launched LCMFLOT 2001 at Plastics USA. This innovative software simulates advanced manufacturing processes known as Liquid Composite Molding (LCM), where a dry preform is held in a closed mold and injected with a resin. LCMFLOT 2001 can simulate various LCM processes, including Resin Transfer Molding (RTM), vacuum assisted RTM, and resin film infusion.
On October 3rd, NEC announced that their latest supercomputer, "The SX-6 Series," is on sale worldwide. The SX-6 Series is a parallel vector processor system with peak vector performance of up to 8 Teraflop/s, the fastest supercomputer available for technical computing in civilian use. In this contribition, Chris Lazou reviews and comments on the SX-6. The keywords which spring to mind are performance, capacity, reliability, future development path and Teraflop/s for the user.
Sun Microsystems informed the German HPC specialists in parallel to the New York presentation about the Sun Fire E15K server, the long expected successor of its top-Model the E10000. It is an SMP system (symmetric multiprocessor) with up to 106 UltraSPARC III+ CPUs with 900 MHz clock rate. The memory can be expanded to up to 576 GByte, more than half a TeraByte. The peak performance can be estimated wit 190 GFlop/s.
The Terascale Computing System (TCS), with 6 Tflop/s peak claimed to be the most powerful system in the world committed to unclassified research, is installed on schedule. The Quadrics switch is used as interconnection technology. Developed and implemented by the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in collaboration with Compaq Computer Corporation, with funding from the US National Science Foundation, the TCS provides computational capability to scientists and engineers nationwide.
The new Sun Fire 15K excels on FLUENT, an important Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software application.
A virtual lung model developed at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) may help predict the impact of pollutants on respiratory systems and provide new insights into asthma, a condition afflicting 15 million American adults, as well as other pulmonary diseases. The computer model, called the virtual respiratory tract, provides an unprecedented, three-dimensional view of how pollutants enter, travel through, and collect in the entire respiratory system. PNNL's prototype system models the nose, larynx, and lungs of a rat. Efforts are underway to similarly model the respiratory systems of monkeys and humans.
United Devices' network has reached a sustained operating capacity of 65 teraflops, approximately five times more powerful than the world's most powerful supercomputer, the company says. More than 560,000 members and 960,000 devices have joined the United Devices Member Community since its inception last year. Currently, the Member Community is working with the University of Oxford to find treatments for cancer and with Exodus Communications to test Internet performance.
NEC announced the latest addition to a series of evolutionary supercomputer systems, the "SX-6 Series." It has a peak vector performance of 8 Teraflop/s. The sale of the "SX-6 Series" begins today around the world. In the US, Cray will market the machine.
The National Research Council of Canada's (NRC) new Virtual Processing Laboratory was officially opened by Dr. Arthur Carty, President of the NRC. These new facilities, located at the NRC's Industrial Materials Institute in Boucherville, Quebec include a state-of-the-art 3D visualization station with collaborative viewing capabilities. The investment also includes a 128 CPU Beowulf cluster (parallel processor supercomputer) using a Myrinet 2000 interconnecting system for advanced computing capabilities, as well as state-of-the-art engineering workstations and parallel platform computers.
IBM introduced its new UNIX server. The IBM eServer p690 offers enterprises an efficient platform for both server consolidation and large, single-system applications. When tackling the most complex problems, multiple p690 servers can be linked together to create supercomputers powered by more than 1,000 processors. Initial p690 customers include Raytheon, Ahold Corporation, Telia Net, Tokyo Metro University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of the Sciences.
Hewlett-Packard said that the HP Superdome server continues to gain acceptance in the high-end UNIX server marketplace. New customers such as Alcatel, Liz Claiborne, Porsche, Mitsubishi Electric and GlaxoSmithKline cite the HP Superdome servers' high performance, scalability and overall total customer experience as reasons for selecting it.
A new Access Grid node to be installed at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami will serve as the first node in a testbed for US Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). The testbed will give MSIs the chance to use the Access Grid and its resources and to become contributing members of the Access Grid research community as it spreads throughout the world.
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© 2001, Genias Benelux