Dot Hill is showcasing its SANnet II storage solutions to the Australian market at Storage World Australia 2003, October 13-14, at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre. The SANnet II Fibre Channel and SANnet II Blade storage systems will be featured in Dot Hill’s stand.

HP achieved top high performance technical computing results on the SPEC OMP benchmark suite for compute-intensive processing.

Marking another milestone on its roadmap for AlphaServer customers, HP has begun shipment of its most powerful AlphaServer system yet, the 64-processor HP AlphaServer GS1280. The company also introduced a new entry-level system, the single-processor HP AlphaServer DS15.

The Belgium company Hemeris is delivering computing on the tap for universities and companies from their Brussel's location. Today, they have two 32 dual Athlon processor clusters online. The plan is to make available a 512 processor system in the near future. Alain Marsily, CEO of Hemeris, sees a growing market for this, even for university departments which traditionally are more interested in owning their own clusters. But, as these clusters are in general not very large, they are interested in running their simulations once and a while on a very large high performance computing system. Hemeris is also working with commercial companies, but details on that are not yet made public.

GridIron Software introduced version 1.2 of GridIron XLR8, a Grid application development tool and runtime software. GridIron XLR8 enables computationally intensive applications to run faster on multiple computers.

IBM and Cisco announced a set of open software technologies designed to increase the end-to-end intelligence and responsiveness of the global IT infrastructure as part of the development of "self-healing" computing systems and networks. The companies are working on a set of proposed technologies and standards creating a common language to detect, log and resolve system problems. BM has submitted a Common Base Event (CBE) format, which is envisioned as the basis for standardized exchange of problem determination data via web services, to the OASIS Standards Body.

Novartis has adopted an Intel Pentium 4 processor powered PC Grid platform as a strategic part of its 5-year plan for extending R&D capabilities. The PC refresh programme forms part of enhancements to the organisation's IT strategy. These enhancements include boosting computing power, strengthening R&D efficiencies and supporting efforts to bring novel medicines to patients faster. Novartis is also looking to apply the PC Grid infrastructure to mainstream business-computing challenges.

HP has launched a joint initiative with UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, to improve scientific research in southeastern Europe by providing Grid computing technology to four universities. The initiative, which will be implemented over a two-year period through HP's University Relations and Philanthropy and Education programmes, will help enable the universities to harness the power of Grid computing.

The pyGlobus version 1.0.2 has been released. There are two versions: one for the globus-2.2.x and for globus-2.4.x.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $9 million to support 20 projects as part of its ongoing NSF Middleware Initiative (NMI). The projects extend NMI's efforts to develop and distribute production-quality open-source and open-standards middleware and include awards that focus on experimental applications of new middleware capabilities.

SchlumbergerSema and Sun Microsystems have signed an agreement to bring utility computing solutions to customers in the energy, finance, telecommunications and public sectors around the world. The agreement enables SchlumbergerSema, a member of the Sun iForce community, to deploy Sun's utility computing architecture so that customers in these sectors can dynamically match IT sourcing to business needs. These customers can have a globally available, secure outsourced business solution that includes consulting and managed services as an option with SchlumbergerSema.

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, teamed up with the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the University of Geneva in demonstrating technology of the future on the Lake Geneva Region stand at Telecom World 2003.

GlobusWORLD 2004 will be held January 20-23 in San Francisco. The conference will deliver a content-rich three days with four concurrent sessions of presentations, training and discussions for users at all levels, with an additional day devoted solely to workshops on topics such as the Grid's use in financial services, the life sciences and medical imaging.

The National Cancer Institute's Advanced Biomedical Computing Center (ABCC) in Frederick, Maryland, has purchased from SCICOR, an authorized SGI solution provider, an SGI Altix 3000 server, which was put into production last month. The new SGI Altix system, which contains 64 Intel Itanium 2 processors and runs the open-source Linux operating system, will serve as an important scientific computational resource that is part of a growing list of SGI servers supporting the United States' pre-eminent scientists at NCI and the National Institutes of Health.

The University of Texas (UT) at Austin, the Us's largest university, introduced a Dell high performance computing cluster (HPCC) at its Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), to help enable critical research by scientists and engineers across disciplines.

AstraZeneca, a pharmaceutical company, has purchased SGI Altix 3000 and SGI Origin 3000 servers and superclusters. Installed in the R&D facility at AstraZeneca's U.S. corporate headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, the systems will support simulation studies and the large computational requirements of identifying promising drug candidates.

ArboNed, a Dutch-based provider of health and workplace services, has deployed a new centralised IT infrastructure based on an HP Superdome server cluster running Oracle9i Database with Real Application Clusters. HP and Oracle's integrated solution, implementation and support services enable ArboNed to provide employees and clients with availability to services and information and the option to move towards offering a complete range of Web-based services in the future.

Virginia Tech is building a supercomputer that "will arguably be one of the world's cheapest world class supercomputers. The system will also be the most powerful homebuilt supercomputer in the world," according to Charles Steger, president of Virginia Tech, speaking at the Fifth Annual Commonwealth of Virginia's Information Technology Symposium (COVITS).

A new, $15.1 million supercomputer formally began operations on October 6, giving the USA Aeronautical Systems Center's Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) more than double the computing capability and available compute-hours. The new system is the largest such computer in the world. It has a computing environment of 2048 processors, two Tbyte of memory and 40 Tbyte of disk storage, according to Steve Worums, the Center's high computing division director.

SGI has successfully installed the world's largest and most powerful SGI Origin 3000 series supercomputer at the Aeronautical Systems Center Major Shared Resource Center (ASC MSRC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. To celebrate the complete installation of the SGI Origin 3000 series supercomputer in Q4 of FY2003, a formal ribbon-cutting ceremony was held October 6 at Wright-Patterson and was attended by several base dignitaries and local politicians.

SUSE Linux has released Standard Server 8 aimed at small and medium-sized businesses.

NASA Ames has peformed several benchmarks on Linux SGI Altix 3000 systems. Running on NASA Ames' 256-processor single system image, for instance the ECCO ocean circulation model ran a one-quarter-degree global problem at a rate of 1.4 simulated years per wall clock day, the fastest ECCO result ever achieved on any system. "Working with the JPL team, the Altix system has enabled us to complete computations in ocean modelling involving terabytes of output at record speeds", stated James Taft, president of Sienna Software Inc. and currently a consultant at NASA Ames.

SUSE LINUX will release SUSE LINUX Openexchange Server 4.1, bringing to Linux a groupware, collaboration, and messaging tool, providing enterprises of all sizes with an innovative all-in-one communication and groupware package at an unmatched price/performance ratio.

VERITAS Software Corporation, a storage software provider, and SUSE LINUX have signed an engineering and marketing partnership for the development, certification, support and sale of VERITAS storage management and high availability software on the SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server platform.

RackSaver is collaborating with AMD to design digital audio workstations based on the 64-bit AMD Opteron processor. The new RackSaver NemeSys DAW64 Digital Audio Workstation was introduced in New York City at the Audio Engineering Society (AES) Convention, October 10-13 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. The system will be present in the Steinberg Media Technologies booth running Steinberg's NUENDO 2.0 Media Production System.

Purple Insight has licensed development, support and distribution rights for MineSet, the real-time, 3D visual mining software from SGI. Introduced by SGI in 1999, MineSet is a suite of powerful yet easy-to-use software tools for data mining and visualization. It distills complex information into accessible and easily understood graphics to help users quickly identify trends and patterns.

Internet2 will have access to a 10 gigabit per second wavelength provisioned on the national footprint of the optical networking infrastructure recently announced by National LambdaRail Inc. (NLR), a consortium of major U.S. research universities, Internet2, and other collaborating organisations. With access to both the NLR wavelength and the existing high performance Internet2 Abilene backbone network, the Internet2 community gains the ability to explore the potential of combining new optical circuit technologies and existing high performance Internet services to develop a next generation of advanced networking capabilities.

Mintera Corporation, a technology provider enabling the migration to 40G optical transport in metro-core, regional, long-haul, and ultra-long-haul optical networks, has launched its first product line, the MI 40000.

Representatives of Internet2 and CLARA (Cooperación Latino-Americana de Redes Avanzadas) signed an agreement at the Fall 2003 Internet2 Fall Member Meeting to collaborate on developing the next generation of Internet technologies and applications for the global research and education community. The agreement will provide a basis for the two organisations to work together toward establishing high-performance Internet connectivity between their respective communities with the goal of enabling researchers to collaborate internationally.

CERN, SURFnet, the University of Amsterdam and Carleton University selected Ixia equipment to successfully validate the world's first transcontinental 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) WAN PHY network.

The Parallel Programming Workshop in Spring 2004 will be held February 17-19, 2004 in Dresden, Germany. Lectures will be given by Dr. Rolf Rabenseifner (HLRS, member of MPI-2 Forum) and Claudia Schmidt (ZHR).

The 2003 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon for pioneering discoveries on the selectivity of ion channels in cell membranes. Related to this work, the Nobel public information highlights simulations last year using LeMieux ,the terascale system at Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center, by Klaus Schulten and colleagues at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, both in the USA.