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| 17 December 2001 |
EuroFlash no. 487
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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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A 91-node/182-processor supercluster computer is installed at the University of Manchester to provide a real-time processing backend for the Lovell Radio Telescope at the Jodrell Bank Observatory. It will be called COBRA (Coherent On-line Baseband Receiver for Astronomy). COBRA is being built and installed by Amersham-based Workstations UK using a proprietary PC-cluster platform, the MIMCluster20. Each of the 91 nodes in the cluster features dual Pentium III Tualatin 1.13 GHz processors for a total of 182 processors. The nodes are interconnected in a two-dimensional switching architecture using Dolphin Interconnect’s WulfKit.
Hewlett-Packard Company said that in the third quarter of calendar year 2001 it grew revenue market share in the entry-level, mid-range, high-end and total UNIX server categories worldwide and is in the lead position in mid-range and high-end server revenue. In the high-end, HP sells the Superdome
IBM says it is on schedule with delivering its new Regatta servers based on the a chip with two 1 Ghz e-p690 processors. IBM expects Linux for the p690 to be available from third party distributors in 2002.
Platform Computing announced two new Performance Management solutions, Platform Analyzer and Platform Explorer, designed for distributed and Grid computing architectures. These solutions give senior management increased visibility to the link between effective IT management and improved product development. Performance Management is an essential element of distributed computing, enabling an organization to manage, provision and budget for IT assets, resulting in improved productivity and reduced overall cost.
Since 1984, SARA, a Dutch academic supercomputing centre is organising a supercomputer user seminar. This year it attracted some 100 participants. Although the computing power installed has changed considerably, the largest machine is currently a 1024 processor SGI Origin, with processors that in performance come close to the first 1984 supercomputer: a Cyber 205. The supercomputer seminar format, however, did not change over time. This year, Bert van Corler reported on the experience with the supercomputers during the past years. Teras, the 1024 processor SGI Origin, experienced hardware problems, which did not enable it to perform as one supercomputer. Hence each half is presented in the TOP500 (on position 76 and 77) whilst the whole machine would probably have been found around place 25. Latest SARA acquisition is the first IBM Itanium cluster in Europe, which is just being unwrapped.
At the supercomputing seminar in Amsterdam, Patrick Aerts, director of NCF, the Dutch foundation responsible for scientific supercomputing in the Netherlands, said that he will financially support the installation of a 32 processor, 32 Gbyte Cray SV1 at the University of Groningen. Although there are much more powerful machines available to Dutch researchers, still a number have existing code which is optimised for vector processing. Aerts also reported on plans for NCF for the future.
In December 2001, 21 European partners started with the PRISM project. Goal of this project is to integrate all already available Earth research models, like climate models, atmospheric models, sea-ice models, etc, into one large coupled model. PRISM could the be used to study all effects that certain measures, or events could have on the Earth system as a whole.
Entropia and Mersenne.org announced that Michael Cameron, a 20 year-old participant in the worldwide mathematics research project called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), has discovered the largest known prime number using his PC connected to the Entropia Mersenne Grid.
A consortium of scientists managing the Protein Data Bank (PDB), the world's central on-line archive containing detailed structural data on proteins, nucleic acids, and protein-nucleic acid complexes, has released a software toolkit that provides more seamless access to this information.
The Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, will dedicate one of the world's fastest supercomputers devoted entirely to ocean modelling. Partnering with the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Cal-(IT)2), the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research and IBM, Scripps obtained two PC "clusters" with a peak performance of 500 billion calculations per second.
Terra Soft Solutions, a developer of Linux solutions for PowerPC microprocessors, has announced shipment of its first book, "Getting Started with Yellow Dog Linux".
Force Computers, a Solectron company and active in embedded computing, has introduced the fastest member of its family of PowerPC processor-based PCI mezzanine card (PMC) modules, the PowerPMC-260, for telecommunications, data communications and industrial control applications that require data or control processing capability in a very small form-factor.
RLX Technologies has made available new second-generation RLX ServerBlades that extend its advantage to 5X the number of Web pages served per square foot vs. traditional 1U servers. The new RLX ServerBlade 667 offers up to 36% greater performance than the first-generation RLX ServerBlade 633 and supports up to 1.125 GB of memory.
Einux, in conjunction with AMD, has launched its next generation Dual AMD 1U rackmount servers offering the fastest and highest density rackmount servers available in the industry utilising AMD's newest Athlon MP 1900+ multiprocessing processors and next generation 760MP-X.
Terra Soft also announced the official Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) Developer Support Programme.
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© 2001, Genias Benelux