|
|
||
| 29 October 2001 |
EuroFlash no. 481
|
|
|
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.
|
||
As reported earlier in Primeur in the article "Dutch Weather Institute buys SUN Fire super", the Royal Dutch Wheather Institute KNMI acquired one of the first new SUN Fire 15K supercomputers. The machine will get 84 processors. Primeur did ask Mart de Ras and René van Lier from the KNMI to provide a little more background of this acquisition
MosixView 1.0 has been released. MOSIXVIEW is a GUI for managing MOSIX-Cluster.
October 24-25: About 130 scientific researchers from academia and industry met at The Royal Society (UK Academy of Science) and discussed the new science emanating from the use of high performance computing. The presentations were a tour de force of the latest research in chemistry, biomolecular modelling, materials, engineering, lasers, the makeup of the earth?s core, the climate of the whole earth, elementary particles and the theory of everything in the makeup of matter, to cosmology, the makeup of the universe. Below Chris Lazou reviews some of the chemistry and biomedical chemistry talks. Most speakers used computers with hundreds of Gflop/s peak performance, but all of them wanted access to Terascale systems to enable them to improve the capabilities of their models and obtain more realistic results and better scientific insights. Some speakers were concerned that peak performance claimed for PC based systems overshadowed the reality of poor sustained performance delivered to the user application.
The European Commission's Information Society Technologies (IST) Event will take place this year in Düsseldorf on 3-5 December 2001, under the banner of "Technologies Serving People". This event is organised annually by the European Commission's Information Society Directorate-General, set up this time in close co-operation with the Ministry of Economy and SMEs, Energy and Transport of the State of NorthRhine Westphalia in Germany.
TAN Projektionstechnologie located in Düsseldorf, Germany has set up the first TAN VR-CUBE using DLP projectors in active stereo mode. The Fraunhofer Institute IPK in Berlin opened the 5-sided room with TAN's latest projection technology. TAN supplies active stereo systems using DLP projectors at up to 10000 ANSI lumens.
Sony Corporation - Home Network Company - Home Visual Company of Tokyo, Japan, a manufacturer of consumer electronics, has selected CATIA Version 5 (V5) solutions from IBM and Dassault Systèmes for the design of its popular flat-screen WEGA television monitors. Utilising all of CATIA's newest capabilities such as modelling, analysis, and evaluation using digital mock-up (DMU), Sony engineers speaking at the European CATIA Forum 2001 said they were able to apply their latest technical advances to the product line more quickly as a result.
SGI has reached definitive agreement with NEC Corporation to create a strategic alliance that is expected to strengthen SGI's presence in the Japanese market. Under the alliance NEC, will acquire from SGI an interest in SGI Japan, Ltd., the subsidiary that supplies SGI equipment, services and solutions in Japan. SGI Japan will be converted from a wholly-owned SGI subsidiary to a company jointly owned by SGI, NEC and NEC's publicly-held affiliate, NEC Soft, Ltd. The name of the business will remain SGI Japan.
Sun Microsystems reported results for the first quarter of fiscal year 2002 which ended September 30, 2001. Revenues for the first quarter were $2.861 billion, a year-over-year decrease of 43 percent.
Camping Companies, a repossession and investigations company, has implemented an innovative new paperless system based on a Linux NetworX cluster computer system, leading to record profits and improved efficiencies. The paperless system has increased the company's processing capacity by more than 50 percent without hiring any additional staff, and has cut time dedicated to account management in half. The success of the Linux-based paperless system is an indicator of how the Linux operating system and computer cluster technology is moving into enterprise business environments.
Fakespace Systems and SGI have provided a state-of-the-art visualisation system to Murphy Oil Company Limited in Calgary, Canada, a division of Murphy Oil Corporation. The new system, which is the first active stereo digital projection system purchased for use in energy exploration,enables geologists, geophysicists and engineers to work together in a collaborative visualisation environment.
In a strategic move, NuTec Sciences Inc. has appointed Richard C. White as President and Chief Executive Officer of NuTec Energy Services Inc. Thomas M. LaHouse, current president, will assume the duties of Chief Operations Officer responsible for daily operations and technology development. NuTec Energy Services provides advanced seismic imaging solutions to the oil and gas industry, using massively parallel supercomputing technology.
Avaki Corporation, a developer of grid software to enable resource sharing across large-scale, highly distributed computer networks, today announced a $10 million second closing of its series A financing by Polaris Venture Partners, General Catalyst and Sofinnova. This brings the overall company investment to $16 million, led by Polaris Venture Partners. AVAKI closed the first round of $6 million in June 2001.
On the heels of closing $16 million in funding from Polaris Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and Sofinnova, Avaki Corporation today announced charter availability of AVAKI 2.0, the first commercial grid software solution providing highly secure, virtualised access to data and compute resources in wide-area, multi-platform environments.
ApoCom Genomics' powerful GrailEXP gene prediction software will support the BSML data format, the widely accepted open XML standard for exchange and integration of bioinformatics data. The use of BSML makes the enhanced gene identification technology of ApoCom's GrailEXP immediately interoperable with all other systems that use BSML.
Compaq Computer reported financial results for the third quarter ended September 30, 2001. Revenue for the third quarter was $7.5 billion, a year-over-year decrease of 33 percent. Net loss from operations for the quarter was $120 million.
Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated reported consolidated financial results today for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2001. Vertex also installed a new supercomputer cluster, one of the most powerful in the world dedicated to in silico drug design applications. The new cluster represents a key component of the technology infrastructure that is expected to accelerate productivity in Vertex's gene family-based drug discovery research.
No arena in contemporary medical science holds more potential for revolutionary approaches to preventing and curing human disease than genomics. And no tool in genomics is more crucial to its researchers than high-performance computing.
A substantial short cut to the biologically important information embedded in the human genome has been taken by an international research consortium with the completion of a draft sequence of the genome of the Japanese pufferfish Fugu rubripes. The Fugu draft sequence was announced at the 13th International Genome Sequencing and Analysis Conference in San Diego, California on October 26th.
Posdata Co. has developed a massive high-performance parallel supercomputer in conjunction with IBM Korea and Linuxone Co., with 160 units of IBM x Series Server 330.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced today that Danny Powell of Rice University in Houston is the new executive director of the centre. Mr. Powell, an administrator with more than 15 years of experience managing academic IT research programmes, joins the NCSA staff November 1.
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