NEC improves the performance of its vector computer from 8 to now 9 GigaFlop/s. Additionally the company doubles the size of the main memory. Thus the performance of biggest system with 1024 processors (128 nodes) grows to 9.2 TeraFlop/s.

The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) has released a new portable version of the Cray Bioinformatics Library (CBL). The library, which was developed in cooperation with Cray Inc. by ARSC MPP Specialist James Long, contains the same functions as the CBL, but is also compatible with hardware systems other than Cray.

The University of Utah has selected AMD Opteron processor-based systems from Angstrom Microsystems for a new supercomputing cluster scheduled to be delivered by October 2003. The 500-node cluster is designed to use 1000 AMD Opteron processors and is part of the University's plan to provide the vast computational power needed in its biomedical research.

IBM has enhanced the eServer BladeCenter. Systems based on these enhancements, including the latest Intel Xeon Processor technology, have also set new benchmarks that establish BladeCenter the world's most powerful blade server with 2 processors.

Xilinx's Virtex radiation tolerant FPGAs have been deployed on board Optus C1, the largest hybrid commercial and defence communications satellite ever launched. The UHF payload for the communications satellite was designed and manufactured by Raytheon in St. Petersburg Florida under contract with Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Japan, and was launched on June 11, 2003 for the use of the Australian Defence Force.

RackSave and TareByte Solutions partner to deliver high performance online backup for the data warehouse marketplace. The TareByte Backup Server (TBS) is a joint development between RackSaver and TareByte Solutions.

Dr. Jim Mitchell, Sun Fellow and Vice President of Sun Microsystems Laboratories, will lead Sun's High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) Research and Development Programme. Funded in part by the recent three-year $50 million grant from DARPA, the HPCS research programme will explore novel approaches to the hardware and software total system design leading to the next generation of supercomputers.

Over the recent two years, CSC (the Finnish IT Center for Science) has been placing increasing emphasis on the maturing of Grid activities. CSC surveys the current Grid technologies and tools, shares information on the Grid in various fields of science, supports the development of the Grid infrastructure in Finland, and participates in national and international Grid activities. CSC is currently involved in two European grid activities: the European Network for Advanced Computing Technology for Science project, or ENACTS for short, and the European DataGrid project, both funded by the European Union.

As part of EDG, ESA and partners, including IPSL, KNMI, NIKHEF, and SARA have concluded the GOME project. This project studied the Ozone analysis on the Grid. NIKHEF representative David Groep showed results during his Grid presentation at the Dutch ICT conference in The Hague.

Spanish Grid company GridSystem has released InnerGrid Nitya. According to the company this is a robust, mature platform, which inherits from the InnerGrid 2 series world-wide successes and all the accumulated knowledge that results from the feedback of GridSystems' customers.

Semlab, a the computational software developer for the materials- and life science industry, announced the launch of its Knowfuzz software product in the area of data mining and knowledge mapping technology. Semlab is the new name of ZooRobotics. The company is active in BioGrid, one of the EU funded Knowledge Grid projecst

Solving Einstein's equations is just another day at work for Ed Seidel, who was recently appointed director of LSU CAPITAL, the LSU Center for Applied Information Technology and Learning. Ed Seidel is world-renowned for his research on black holes and high-performance computing. He came to LSU from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, also known as the Albert Einstein Institute, in Potsdam, Germany. His work as head of the institute's numerical relativity group has prepared him for the research that he plans to pursue using the resources and expertise available at LSU CAPITAL, such as the centre's supercomputer, "SuperMike."

gridMathematica combines the power of the world's leading technical computing environment with modern computing clusters and grids to solve the most demanding problems in mathematics, science, engineering, and finance.

The United States' most powerful, academically-based computing resource, LeMieux, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center's terascale system, is now linked with supercomputers in Illinois and California as part of the TeraGrid, an integrated national system of cyberinfrastructure.

The US National Science Foundation has awarded the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) a grant estimated at $1.2 million to continue the initial efforts of PRAGMA, the Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly, for the next three years.

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego will participate in four National Science Foundation (NSF) Information Technology Research (ITR) awards. The ITR project awards focus on fundamental research in information technology and innovative uses of IT in science and engineering.

The First Advanced Topics Workshop on "Desktop Grids: Critical Systems and Applications Research" (DGRID 2003) will be held on November 17, 2003 in Phoenix, Arizona. The workshop is associated with Grid2003 and SC2003.

The National e-Science Centre at the University of Glasgow - the e-Science Hub - has officially been opened by Prof. Wilson Sibbett, Director of Research, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of St. Andrews, on 17 September. The Centre will provide a focal point for activities in e-Science across the University of Glasgow as well as leading UK-wide e-Science practitioners together with the co-holder of the National e-Science Centre, the University of Edinburgh.

John Hancock Financial Services has selected IBM to build an on demand technology infrastructure that will allow the company to accommodate unplanned surges in customer demand while improving reliability. Under the six-year, $254 million agreement, IBM will deploy leading-edge technology that continuously monitors performance to prevent service disruptions to John Hancock's multi-channel distribution system supporting insurance agents, banks, insurance brokers, broker/dealer firms and other intermediaries.

Platform Computing unveiled its strategy to help its customers Accelerate Intelligence with its grid computing technology. Platform also announced 10 new customers including global financial services institutions such as Royal Bank of Canada, Groupe Société Générale, and Landesbank Baden-Württemberg (LBBW); electronics customers including Adaptec and Qualcomm; government agencies including the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Japan's Hokkaido University ; and European energy companies Schlumberger and TotalElfFina.

Artificial Development has completed assembly of the first functional portion of a prototype of CCortex, a 20-billion neuron emulation of the human cortex, which it will use to build a next-generation artificial intelligence system. Artificial Development will initiate testing of CCortex in October. The cluster being assembled at the company's Data Center is a high-performance, parallel supercomputer, composed of 500 nodes and one thousand processors, 1.5 terabytes of RAM, and 80 terabytes of storage.

Platform said it will support for Oracle Database 10g. According to the company, joint solution of Platform software and Oracle Database 10g will enable customers to simplify their scheduling environment and efficiently manage grids across a virtualized, heterogeneous environment.

The GGF9 organisation will hold a "Peer-to-Peer and Grids: Synergies and Opportunities" Workshop on 5 October, 2003 in the Huron Room at Sheraton Chicago Hotel, Chicago, Illinois, USA. The workshop objective is to stimulate synergy between P2P and Grid communities. Each speaker will be given 15 mins to talk, followed by a heated discussion aggressively chaired by the moderator.

At the International Workshop on Information Processing in Cells and Tissues (IPCAT 2003), Xilinx announced that the Logic Systems Laboratory (LSL) of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) utilized 5,700 Xilinx Spartan FPGAs to develop the BioWall, a self-repairing electronic tissue and interactive display. The BioWall combines the latest in digital technology with the most instinctive of human gestures - touch. The creation of the BioWall is a major step towards the creation of intelligent, bio-inspired electronic tissues, capable of evolving, self-repairing, self-replicating and learning.

Netezza Corporation unveiled its Netezza Performance Server (NPS) data warehouse for bioinformatics. Integrated with BLAST ("SQL-BLAST”) and incorporating defined genomic data types, the NPS system delivers increased functionality and performance for large, complex and constantly growing bioinformatics analyses at half the cost of existing data warehouse systems.

Unisys Corporation has signed a six-year contract to provide infrastructure and enterprise application management services to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and three of its partner organisations. Under this multi-year, $27.5 million contract, Unisys and its subcontractor, Corio Inc., will deliver a full enterprise application suite including financials, human resources, data warehousing, and customer relationship management (CRM).

InfiniCon Systems has been selected by Fujitsu to provide an InfiniBand-based clustering fabric for the world's fastest Linux-based supercomputer. The Fujitsu cluster will be deployed by Japan's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) to accelerate biotechnology research. It will feature Fujitsu's newly developed Linux-based PRIMERGY servers containing 2048 Intel Xeon processors and deliver a peak performance of 12.4Tflop/s vaulting it to the third position in the Top 500 rankings of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

Topspin Communications, specialised in switched computing, has delivered the first InfiniBand driver software stack for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 for the Intel Itanium 2-based Computing Platform. The software will expedite the deployment of high-performance computing clusters that can now take advantage of the performance potential of the Itanium architecture, the scaling and clustering capabilities of InfiniBand, and the power of Microsoft Windows.

SURFnet has realised a gigabit connection at the University of Drenthe. This is the 100th institution that is connected at this high speed to the Dutch national research network SURFnet5. Through the gigabit connection, academic and research institutions have a link to the Internet which is largely sufficient to use advanced Internet applications with high quality video and Grid computing, for example.

Voltaire, a provider of InfiniBand solutions, has signed an agreement with two Hitachi group companies for the distribution of Voltaire's high performance InfiniBand switches, routers, and related products in Japan. The demand for Voltaire's solutions in Japan is growing as InfiniBand interconnect technology continues to gain traction in market segments such as high performance computing and enterprise data centres.