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| 06 January 2003 |
EuroFlash no. 538
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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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The annual machine evaluation workshop at EPSRC Daresbury Laboratories, UK 11-12 December 2002 illustrated the year's main general HPC trend: Cluster computers have got a firm foothold in the upper regions of the TOP500 list of supercomputers. At Daresbury workshop, new vendors of clusters, from the UK and abroad, presented their solutions, whilst the established vendors displayed their own cluster machines. There were some regrets expressed about this development: Number crunching UK Scientists in practice need a capability system, but because of the funding mechanism currently in place they ended up with a capacity system. (Chris Lazou)
The European Commission has launched the First Call for Proposals in the new Sixth Framework Programme for indirect RTD actions under the specific programme for research, technological development and demonstration: "Integrating and strengthening the European Research Area". All proposals in this First Call are due before March 25, 2003. They include the priority thematic area of research "Life sciences, genomics and biotechnology for health". Grid technology has to wait for the second call.
The Grid is not only about accessing remote computers, it is as much about accessing remote data in large quantities. But it would be very time consuming to figure out for each database you may need, what is in it, what is the value of the information, where it fits into the whole knowledge world and how you can access it. This is where web and grid services come in, this is where the semantic web comes in, this is where ontologies are needed: standard ways to capture knowledge. In the end this will lead to the Semantic Grid. This all was discussed at the "Convergence of Web Services, Grid Services and the Semantic Web for delivering e-Services" conference in Brussels, December 12, 2002. That is a lot of buzzwords. But underneath are a few important concepts that are useful for Grid people.
The Earth Simulator rocketed into the first position of the TOP500 in June. Cluster computers invaded the TOP10 in November. That were the two main news items in supercomputing in 2002. In Grid computing everyone continued relabling meta-computing, distributed computing, p2p computing and the like into "Grid computing". The waiting for and working on standards was the main development. All major countries like for instance the UK, France and Italy now have national Grid programmes under way. With a record of 35 Gbit/s into one location in Amsterdam during iGrid2002 and a lot of applications running on it, it looks like indeed the network is not the bootleneck for high-end Grid computing anymore: it is the application. (Flying kites that where calculated on different locations over the world and displayed in a Virtual Reality Cave in Amsterdam, showed it is not only eScience and commercial Grid computing that use grid resources, it can also be applied for arts.) Of course, most of use, especially in industrial Grid computing, do not have that type of band width yet. A selection of the articles illustrating the main developments that were published in Primeur/EnterTheGrid in 2002.
The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) has signed a $16.4 million order for a 128-processor Cray X1 supercomputer system with peak performance of 1.64 trillion calculations per second (teraflops), along with maintenance for this system and ARSC's existing Cray SV1ex, Cray SX-6, and Cray T3E supercomputers.
Cray Inc. has shipped the first production version of the new Cray X1 supercomputer system at the end of 2002.
New doors to genetic understanding will open at a remarkable rate in the near future, thanks to upcoming applied research in the field of bioinformatics, say university and industry experts. Ahead of the curve, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and IBM have launched a collaboration based on RIT bioinformatics expertise and IBM's scientific computer leadership. Toward that end - with the help of an award from IBM's Shared University Research (SUR) programme - RIT is constructing an IBM eServer xSeries Linux Cluster to support a high-performance computing environment for genomic research and development.
Engineered Intelligence Corporation (EI) has launched "GRID WARS", a parallel programming challenge where competing programmes written in CxC fight for survival of the fittest in a grid of processors. With EI's language for parallel programming, developers are asked to write battle programmes and upload them into the on-line GRID WARS battlefield, where they compete for prizes and industry recognition.
IBM is the sole application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology provider for the new Cray X1 supercomputer, which is now being shipped to customers. The Cray supercomputer contains 800 IBM ASIC chips, designed by Cray exclusively for the X1 and manufactured by IBM. The chips feature gate counts as high as 14.2 million, an average gate count of about 9.5 million, and a total gate count of about 7.5 billion (a gate is a basic logic circuit).
Transmeta Corporation has introduced new energy efficient Crusoe Special Embedded (SE) processors targeting a wide range of x86 embedded applications, including industrial automation, scientific instrumentation, retail kiosks, point-of-sale terminals, automotive infotainment, process control and home automation systems. Transmeta also announced an Embedded Partners Programme for leading BIOS/firmware companies, embedded operating system companies, and silicon component suppliers committed to supporting customers developing efficient embedded designs based on Crusoe SE processors.
The U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is now accepting applications for the Luis W. Alvarez Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Computational Science. The deadline for applications for the coming academic year is Monday, March 3, 2003.
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