|
|
||
| 08 April 2002 |
EuroFlash no. 502
|
|
|
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 Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Computing of the University of Heidelberg (IWR) has just finished the installation of a parallel high speed PC cluster with an excellent, yet unknown price/performance ratio. This parallel high-performance computer, named HELICS - the Heidelberg Linux Cluster System - which has been acquired together with the computing centres of the University of Mannheim (RUM) and the University of Heidelberg (URZ), is set up with standard components, so-called "Commodity off the Shelf" components. It consists of 512 AMD Athlon MP PC processors; two of them are placed into one computing node. These processors have frequencies of 1.4 GHz and reach a theoretical peak performance of 2.4 billion floating point operations per second (Gflops) for each processor.
A multi-million pound investment is about to put Wales "on the Grid" as it plugs into the ultra-powerful successor to the Internet. As well as a super-fast version of the Internet, Grid enables users to tap into raw computing power as easily as we now get electricity through a socket in the wall. The Welsh e-Science Centre has been formed in the Department of Computer Science at Cardiff University to bring this huge technological advance to public and private sector organisations throughout Wales and South West England. It is one of eight such centres across the United Kingdom.
Computational methods can be applied in several fields of medicine. For example, highly selective tumour targeting is being developed as a radiation therapy to fight severe brain tumours, and effective computational methods are needed to simulate the radiation effects. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is mainly applied to modelling of blood circulation. The achieved models can be used to examine, for example, the origin of heart and vascular diseases, the function of the artificial cardiac valve, or to evaluate the effect of bypass surgeries on blood circulation (virtual surgery). Different types of application targets include, for example, molecular modelling used in drug discovery, or the effect on people of radio-frequency electromagnetic fields, such as those caused by cell phones. These are a few of the items discussed in the report on the current status of computational medicine and its challenges for the future, published by CSC, the Finnish centre for high-performance computing and networking.
French artist Jackie Matisse, creator of kite-like art works, will premiere a new art form when her kites fly in Virginia Tech's virtual reality CAVE and take people along for the ride. Now people can float along with the kites through the technology of the CAVE during a public workshop Jackie Matisse will conduct at Virginia Tech in April, her first workshop in the United States.
CSC, the Finnish IT center for science has chosen Juniper Networks M10 and M20 routers as the new Funet network equipment. The system will be supplied by Sonera. Offers were received from eight companies and included six different brand names. The total size of the acquisition will be 13 routers, dispersed around Finland at the various Funet access points. The system will be implemented during the spring and summer of this year.
The Digital Shipbuilding Innovation Center (DSIC), Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, has been awarded research funding by the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research (ONR). DSIC was founded in 2001 with the support of DELMIA Corporation.
TRAIN-IT is an Accompanying Measure in the IST Programme, designed for participants out of finished or ongoing European co-operation projects (IST, ESPRIT, eContent) who plan to start-up a business or a spin-out of an existing company.
Pervasive 2002 will be held August 26-28, 2002 at the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland and aims to offer an in-depth, state-of-the-art view onto the emerging field of ubiquitous and pervasive computing. An integral part of this conference will be a special demos and exhibitions track, showcasing both industry applications and research prototypes that turn pervasive computing visions into reality.
The Grid is a new wave of technology. With Primeur/EnterTheGrid, we want to focus in the forthcoming issues on a number of European companies that are new on The Grid. We start with the Italian Datamat. The company participates in no less than three European projects, DataGrid, CrossGrid, and SpaceGrid, hence it is typical of the system integrators and consultancy companies that are active on the Grid.
The Finnish supercomputer centre CSC organised a one-day Grid Seminar on Wednesday 6 March 2002 in Otaniemi, Espoo, Finland. International and Finnish speakers brought their grid expertise to the seminar. It attracted an audience of over 60 participants. The Access Grid technique was applied when one of the speakers held her presentation via videoconferencing from the UK. The seminar ended with a panel discussion on the future of the grid. In one of the presentations, John Brooke from the CSAR supercomputing centre in Manchester, descibed new emerging Grid entities, coined MiniGrids.
The NIKHEF in The Netherlands, is one of the five DataGrid centres that participated in a successful DatGrid demo, on March 1st 2002. For the demo, clusters and computers at CERN in Genève, CNAF in Bologna, IN2P3 in Lyon, Rutherford Appleton Laboratorium in Engeland, and NIKHEF in Amsterdam were linked. The demo was a proof-of-concept of the DataGrid appraoch.
Merck & Co., a pharmaceutical company, has selected IBM e-server p690 systems to help develop a new generation of drugs.
Cray Inc. has received an order valued at more than $16 million from the U.S. Department of Defense for a Cray T3E supercomputer system and related services. Delivery is scheduled for the third quarter of 2002. No other details were disclosed.
Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals is advancing its human health care research and development processes with a 120-processor Linux NetworX Evolocity cluster supercomputer. The Ridgefield, Connecticut laboratory of Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals is using the cluster supercomputer to help predict the suitability of certain molecules in potential drugs.
The University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI) has deployed Foundry Network's IEEE 802.3ae standards-based 10-Gigabit Ethernet solution in its network backbone to enable ultra-high speed network-based applications and communications among its research departments.
The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has awarded a $5.4 million, five-year grant to researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the Keck Graduate Institute (KGI), and the Burnham Institute to develop a community resource for systematic protein annotation and modelling (SPAM).
The Mind Electric a software infrastructure vendor, has announced a distribution agreement with Tocka to bring its GLUE and GAIA service-oriented grid computing platform product lines to Japan.
There is a mammoth contender challenging the animated feature film kingdom. Ice Age , Blue Sky Studios' first feature-length 3D computer-animated film, released by Twentieth Century Fox, easily skated into first place at the box office on its opening weekend, March 15-17, with a $47.9 million take, breaking the record for March movie openings. Powered by close to 100 Silicon Graphics visual workstations, two Silicon Graphics Onyx visualisation systems and six SGI Origin family servers, Blue Sky artists modelled and animated Ice Age entirely in Maya software from Alias|Wavefront, a division of Silicon Graphics Limited.
The 29th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA-2002) will be held May 25-29, 2002 in Anchorage, Alaska.
IBM Storage Systems Group senior vice president and group executive, Linda Sanford, in a recent keynote address challenged the industry to reduce the complexity of storage for customers.
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.
© 2002, Genias Benelux