In the CAE Symposium Dave Turek, IBM Vice President Deep Computing, gave a broad view on Linux, IBM's hardware strategy, application areas, the HPC on demand facility and compared Blue Gene with the Earth Simulator. Then he presented the Deep Computing activities and offerings.

The Lehrstuhl für Rechnertechnik und Rechnerorganisation (LLR-TUM), Professor Arndt Bode, at Technical University Munich got a cluster donation from Intel. It is based on the new Intanium2 processor architecture. This grows the existing cluster to 40 processors. (Uwe Harms)

The new Cray X1 supercomputer is running challenging applications up to 25 times faster than previously achieved by the Department of Energy's Center for Computational Sciences (CCS) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

SC2003, the annual conference on high-performance computing and networking, concluded lasy Friday with record numbers for overall attendance (over 7500), exhibit space sold, technical program registration and tutorials attendance.

At the SC2003 conference last week, the winners of the Gordon Bell Prizes, the HPC Challenge, and the best research papers and poster were announced. The conference itself gives awards for Best Paper, Best Student Paper, Best Poster, and the HPC Challenge and Bandwidth Challenge. In addition, SC2003 serves as the venue for presenting the Gordon Bell Prizes, which reward practical uses of high-performance computers, including best performance of an application and best achievement in cost-performance. Additionally, two special awards are presented by the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) to recognize longtime innovators in high-performance computing.

HP has launched new HP Integrity and ProLiant servers and Linux clustered systems. Announcement includes the HP XC3000 and XC6000 Linux clusters for high-performance technical computing.

HP solidified its position as the leading global server vendor with 29.7 percent of total unit shipments worldwide, according to preliminary results for the third calendar quarter of 2003 released by analyst research firm Gartner Dataquest, HP said.

Winners of the 2003 Gordon Bell Prizes, one of high performance computing's most prestigious honours, will be announced at the SC2003 conference on high performance computing and networking. The Gordon Bell Prizes are awarded each year at the annual SC conference to recognize outstanding achievement in the field of high performance computing.

On October 29, the first Belgian Grid workshop was held, organised by the Belgium reserach network organisation Belnet. At the workshop, Rosette Vandenbroucke, Grid co-ordinator at Belnet, introduced BEGrid, the Belgium academic research Grid initative. BEGrid will start on a small scale and initially will use the EDG software. The Flemish government, one of the regional governments in Belgium, said they will support the initiative.

At the BEGrid workshop in Brussels, Guy Wormser explained the EGEE project that will start early next year as a follow-on to the DataGrid project. EGEE will install a production quality Grid infrastructure across Europe. According to Guy Wormser, the negotiations with the Europan Commission have been finished, so it is almost certain the project will start in April 2004. The whole EGEE infrastructure and support structure will cost tens of millions of euros.

Platform has introduced an adapter for its integrated Symphony Suite, which makes Microsoft Excel Grid-enabled. Big, complex Excel sheets can be partitioned and sent to different servers. This shortens the computing time, improves and fastens the financial trading operations.

The Singapore National Grid Office has been established to help steer Singapore towards a Grid-enabled economy. The broad objective is a Grid which allows suppliers and users, public and private, to plug into a high-speed network easily and securely. The Singapore government must progressively allow market forces to allocate resources and incentivize innovation in the Grid. This has to be done in a gradual and experimental way, as stated by Minister for Trade and Industry George Yeo at the launch of the National Grid Pilot Platform in Singapore.

As part of TeraGyroid, supercomputers in the UK and the US have been linked to carry out an interactive scientific experiment. The "TeraGyroid" experiment was jointly funded by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the National Science Foundation, USA (NSF). TeraGyroid is based on the e-Science pilot project RealityGrid.

ExaGrid Systems, an emerging company providing reliable data recovery through Grid Protected Storage, has launched the company and its approach to addressing the cost and complexity associated with ineffective storage, backup and disaster recovery.

Research staff from