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| 11 March 2002 |
EuroFlash no. 498
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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 9 node TeraRack from Scali has been installed at the Geophysics Branch of the Naval Air Systems Command Weapons Division at Point Mugu in California.
The Free University of Amsterdam organises a 5-day course on Component-Based Design of Intelligent Multi-Agent Systems from May 29 to June 4, 2002, which consists of both lectures and practical work. Registrations are due before April 27th, 2002.
KPNQwest, a pan-European data communications and hosting company, has signed an agreement with the Estonian national public broadcaster to provide the content delivery services and backbone infrastructure for the Eurovision Song Contest. The event, now in its 46th year, is scheduled to take place on the 25th May in Tallinn, Estonia. This year promises to be a big hit reaching some 100 million viewers worldwide.
GeneProt Inc. and Zymark Corporation have entered into an agreement in which Zymark is named as an exclusive automation provider to GeneProt in the U.S. and Europe. Concurrently with this agreement, Zymark will make an equity investment in GeneProt.
During the Fourth DataGrid Conference in Paris, Michel Cosnard introduced the ACI Globalisation of Computing and Data Resources (GRID) project to the audience. Mr. Cosnard, who is manager of ACI GRID, explained how the ACI GRID initiative reaches beyond the initial phases of grid computing by combining parallel and distributed computing models. ACI GRID will offer scientists a powerful tool to remotely access high-performance systems with large storage and complex calculation capacities in a very transparent way.
At the DataGrid Conference in Paris, Fabrizio Gagliardi, responsible for the European DataGrid project at CERN funded by the European Commission and supported by no less than 21 partners spread over Europe, presented recent project achievements. Three pilots are currently running in a test-bed powered by the high-speed Géant network. More experiments will be set up in the third quarter of 2002. The DataGrid project passed its first annual review with the European Commission.
Since several decennia, informatics have fundamentally changed the organisation of our society. Thierry Priol, Director of Research at INRIA, described in his talk at the DataGrid Conference in Paris how computational science, allthough fairly young and in constant interaction with mathematical and physical sciences, has been the object of numerous evolutions. The last development has been excessively focused in the media and involves a brandnew computing infrastructure, called the Grid in analogy with the infrastructures for distributed electrical energy.
Is the Grid about connecting computers? Yes it is. Is the Grid about making very large amounts of data available over the Internet? Yes it is. Is it about connecting information sources to create knwowledge? Yes it is. And the list continues. The Grid is not just about very large scale efforts, but also about departments clustering, and about commercial nonstop-self repairing computers. And this is only a selection of the interpretations of what belongs to Grid computing that was heard on the DataGrid conference which was held in Paris. One interpretation, or definiton perhaps, caught my attention: the Grid is about connecting people. The whole DataGrid effort for instance allows 6000 physicists to collaborate better, by having access to the same data, the same programmes and a collaborative working environment. This vision was expressed by Manuel Delfino from CERN during a panel discussion on March 7.
The French Ministry of Research has turned the access for researchers to larger computer systems and information and communications technologies into a first-class priority. Whatever the scientific disciplines may be, ranging from physics to medicine or social sciences, the use of powerful information tools has become indispensable to the knowledge progress and to its effects on society, pleaded Catherine Roucairol, representative of the French Ministry of Research, at the Fourth DataGrid Conference in Paris. The understanding of large climatological or economic phenomena as well as the analysis of the human genome and matter in general require the increasing use of the most powerful computers in the world and the largest data storage capacities. High-performance tools combined with the use of high-speed networks constitute the necessary equipment for scientific research. International competitivity and the efficiency of the French Research are directly depending on it.
The DataGrid Conference participants were presented with the initial HPC-GRID results within the EuroGrid project and future plans for setting up Internet grid services to the benefit of the European scientific community by Victor Alessandrini, Director of the French high-performance computing centre IDRIS. The HPC-GRID builds on the technical acquisitions of the German UNICORE project but is now being installed and tested by the supercomputer experts at IDRIS.
NEC Corporation has completed its delivery of the ultra high-speed vector parallel computing system known as "the Earth Simulator", to the Earth Simulation Center (ESC, Tetsuya Sato, Director). The system is slated to begin operation on March 11, 2002.
Carl Kesselman, an expert in grid computing, has accepted an invitation to become the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure's (NPACI) chief software architect. In this new role, Kesselman will be instrumental in helping to deploy the TeraGrid and support NPACI infrastructure across the partnership.
NEC Solutions has received an order for a bio-grid platform system for bio research from the Osaka University Cyber Media Center.
Two California universities, a California Institute for Science and Innovation, and four California-based companies unveiled the world's first visualisation complex dedicated to Earth and ocean sciences, linking wide-screen, "immersive" environments over a 2.5 gigabit-per-second optical network. The group also dedicated a permanent Visualisation Center at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), linked to a similar facility at San Diego State University (SDSU) through 44 miles of optical fiber, with optical switches and 3.2-million-pixel screens at each end.
DataDirect Networks has launched a Silicon Storage Appliance to serve the needs of departmental-level computing and workgroup applications, setting new standards in application acceleration and simplicity. DataDirect Networks has based their S2A 3000 line on the company's proven Silicon Storage Appliance technology, creating a solution that offers the leading features of their enterprise-class appliances in a more compact form factor with an exceptionally attractive price point.
"The Search for Life: Are We Alone?", the new space theater show at the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, premiered March 2 in New York to rave reviews. The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) played an important role in creating a realistic animation showing the birth of our solar system. The show is developed in collaboration with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Platform Computing organises two live web seminars on distributed and grid computing. The first one on March 12 at 4pm is titled "Grid Computing: A Strategic Business Solution" and the second one on March 14 at 5pm is called "Supercharge Your Technology Now".
Michael P. Haydock has resigned as president and chief executive officer at Cray Inc. and from the company's board of directors due to differences with the board of directors in how to restore the company to long-term industry leadership. Cray remains committed to the strategic plan developed last autumn, to current financial guidance for 2002 and, most importantly, to profitability. To achieve consistent profitability the company is committed to carefully controlling expenses and developing a cost structure that matches its revenue stream.
RLX Technologies has launched the RLX BLAST Cluster Solution featuring Platform Clusterware running on RLX Systems. The RLX compute platform utilises Platform Clusterware to facilitate scale-out compute clusters that process BLAST jobs for bioinformatics research.
Linux NetworX, a provider of powerful and easy-to-manage cluster supercomputing solutions, has elected Bernard Daines chairman of the board and named Stephen Hill president and CEO. Daines, a recognised expert in the networking and Ethernet industry, has been a member of the company's board of directors for more than two years. Former Linux NetworX Vice President Stephen Hill replaces Glen Lowry as president and CEO.
For the second consecutive year, Compaq Computer Corporation is the number one vendor in high performance server revenue with a 22.8 percent overall market share and $1.15 billion in sales revenue, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Technical Systems and Servers 2001 Year in Review Report released in February 2002.
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© 2002, Genias Benelux