Undoubtedly, High Performance Computing (HPC) is the key to unlocking many of the complex problems facing modern science and engineering, massively increasing the progress which can be made, ultimately creating a significant impact on day-to-day life. Almost all scientific disciplines are making impressive advances using computational methods, which exploit HPC resources.

With the new CELSIUS V810, Fujitsu Siemens Computers is the first supplier to offer a high-end workstation based on an AMD Opteron processor, which supports both 32-bit and 64-bit computing. The resultant performance level of up to two AMD Opteron processors makes it the ideal system for all workstation target markets, including CAD (Computer Aided Design), CAE (Computer Aided Engineering), DCC (Digital Content Creation), visualization, virtual reality and software development.

The Southampton Oceanography Centre (SOC) has invested £1/4 million in a High Performance Computing solution, supplied by Bull Information Systems. The SOC is one of the world's expert centres for research and education in marine and earth sciences. Under the terms of the deal, Bull, an IT infrastructure specialist, will implement its High Performance Computing solution, based on its NovaScale servers, at the SOC research centre.

Xilinx unveiled a new architecture that will enable rapid, deployment of multiple domain-specific FPGA platforms with an optimal blend of features. At the heart of the ASMBL architecture is a modular framework of silicon subsystems, enabling a new FPGA development methodology for rapid and cost-effective deployment of platforms targeted to different application domains. As a result, customers will have a greater selection of devices, and will benefit from an up to 10x increase in capability for a given price point.

Cray has received an order from an undisclosed European customer for a Cray X1 supercomputer system, along with other technology and services. No further information was given.

Burton J. Smith, Cray's chief scientist, was awarded the prestigious Seymour Cray Computer Science and Engineering Award. Established in 1998 by the IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors, the Seymour Cray Award is given each year to recognize innovative contributions to high-performance computing that best exemplify the creative spirit demonstrated by the late Seymour Cray, widely considered "the father of the supercomputer". The award includes a crystal model, certificate, and honorarium of $10,000. Dr. Smith accepted the award at SC2003, the annual high-performance computing conference, held this year in Phoenix, Arizona.

In a presentation at the 20th annual SARA Supercomputer Seminar in Amsterdam last week, Jules Wolfrat said he expects the new European Union FP6 funded project DEISA "Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications" will start in May 2004. The contract has not been signed though. DEISA will link a number of large supercomputers with an aggregrate power of more than 20 Tflop/s in Europe together. In this way, it resembles the US TeraGrid project. However, it also has a strong application chapter. The project's supercomputer centres are CINECA (Bologna), CSC (ESPOO), EPCC (Edinburgh), ECMWF (Reading), FZJ (Jülich), IDRIS (Paris), RZG (Garching), SARA (Amsterdam). In addition, there are several industrial partners.

The Dutch Government will fund the Lofar project with euro 52 million. Lofar - Low Frequency Arry telescope- is a large scientifc instrument that consists of thousands of antennae that will be combined in a Wide Area Sensor network linked to a cluster supercomputer. Lofar will be used as a telescope, but also for "precision agriculture". The tigth integration of a sensor-data collector and supercomputer as a decising choice makes Lofar an example of a next generation of Grid. In September, a committee advised the government to not fund the project. After a successful lobby in the Dutch media and parliament, focusing on the long history of outstanding astrophysical research in The Netherlands, the Government decided to fund Lofar anyway.

A report "Grid Computing - Projected Impact on North Carolina's Economy and Broadband Use through 2010", authored by Dr. Robert B. Cohen, predicts that the state of North Carolina's economy will ahow additional grow upto 2010 as a reaulresult of Grid computing and Web services with an additional US$ 10.1 billion in output and a net job growth of 24,000 jobs. Within the order of 6 million inhabitants, North-Carolina is comparable to a small European country. Hence, although his report is a detailed description of the economic projections in one specific US state, the qualitative message can be that world-wide, Grid computing could have an important economical impact.

The Flemish Government (Flanders is the nothern region of Belgium) has decided to fund the BEGrid pilot initiative with euro 717.000. Flemish scientists can apply with a proposal for getting hardware that fits into the Grid. The goal of the BEGrid pilot is that research can gain experience with Grid technologies and also get access to international Grids. BEGrid is very much focused on being a computational Grid. It will look like a Flanders wide distributed computing cluster. As part of the preparation, the Flemish Government conducted a survey amongst potential Grid users.

The EU-funded SeLeNe project organises an IST Workshop on "Metadata Management in Grid and P2P Systems (MMGPS): Models, Services and Architectures", 16th December 2003 at the Senate House, University of London.

The Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council has announced 16 million to create a massive computing Grid, equivalent to the world's second largest supercomputer after Japan's Earth Simulator computer. This Grid, known as GridPP2 will eventually form part of a larger European Grid, to be used to process the data deluge from CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, when its new facility, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), comes on-line in 2007.

During Autumn 2003 Fluent Sweden AB has launched its Fluent On Demand for its existing customers. Fluent customers now have the possibility to cover temporary needs of higher computer power and licenses by hiring CPU time from Gridcore through the Internet.

Red Hat will acquire Sistina Software, a storage infrastructure software company. Concurrent with Red Hat's Open Source Architecture strategy, the acquisition will provide Enterprise Linux customers a path to virtualization and vendor-independent Grid enabled storage solutions.

The OSCAR working group has released a new version of the Open Source Cluster Application Resources (OSCAR) toolkit, OSCAR 3.0. OSCAR is a software package that supports high-performance computing by reducing the work of cluster configuration, installation, operation, and management. Enhancements in the 3.0 release include the ability to install and uninstall OSCAR packages after a cluster has been installed and a more expressive packaging API.

Sun will fund the worldwide release of a new generation of SETI@home, an experiment managed by a group of researchers at the Space Sciences Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley that uses Internet-connected computers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Based on Sun hardware, the SETI@home project has developed a software platform, Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), that makes it easy for academic and industrial scientists to create public computing projects more inexpensively and quickly than previously possible and allows PC users to participate in several projects simultaneously.

HP has expanded its portfolio of virtualization offerings with new technologies and services. HP's approach to virtualization creates an environment where information technology (IT) resources are pooled and shared so utilization is optimized and supply automatically meets demand.

Etnus has made available the CodeRoad JNI Bridge 2.0. The CodeRoad JNI Bridge, offers debugging of mixed C/C++/Java code that utilizes the Java Native Interface (JNI), providing a tight bond between the Etnus TotalView C/C++ debugger and the most popular Java debuggers.

Nearly 99 percent alike in genetic makeup, chimpanzees and humans might be even more similar were it not for what researchers call "lifestyle" changes in the 6 million years that separate us from a common ancestor. Specifically, two key differences are how humans and chimps perceive smells and what we eat. A massive gene-comparison project involving two Cornell University scientists, and reported in the latest issue of the journalScience(December 12, 2003), found these and many other differences in a search for evidence of accelerated evolution and positive selection in the genetic history of humans and chimps.

The Department of Bioinformatics at Merck & Co. Inc. has turned to SGI to support ongoing informatics efforts at its Merck Research Laboratories (MRL). The global, research-driven pharmaceutical company has installed two SGI Origin 3000 family of servers for complete integration of informatics and molecular profiling into basic and pre-clinical research.

Wichita State University installed a SGI Altix 3000 supercluster. More than 130 faculty members, research associates, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in such fields as computational fluid dynamics, structural and design engineering, and chemistry currently use the system installed in the university's High-Performance Computing Center.

Hallmark has selected IBM to build an on demand technology infrastructure that will allow the company to accommodate seasonal surges in customer demand, like the year-end holiday rush, while improving reliability. As part of the agreement, IBM will create, host and manage Hallmark's consumer web site.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.3 is now available across the entire IBM eServer product line. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is packaged with sales of IBM's xSeries and BladeCenter servers in Japan, North America, and eventually around the world. The packaging will include Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, ES and WS, and in the future the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.3.

The Linux based ChessBrain project wants to attempt a science and technology world record, in accordance with the requirements and guidelines set forth by the Guinness World Record office in London. On Friday, January 30th, 2004 at the NordU USENIX 2004 conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, ChessBrain will play a live exhibition game against Chess Grandmaster Peter Nielsen.

Fischer Imaging has received a fast track Small Business Innovation Research grant from the US National Cancer Institute (NCI). The $1.2 million grant will fund an effort with IBM to characterize and evaluate the technical performance and clinical efficacy of the advanced IBM T221 flat-panel display as part of Fischer's SenoScan digital mammography review workstation. FDA clearance will be required before the IBM 9-megapixel monitor could be made available to SenoScan customers.

Sun Microsystems. has introduced new products: the Sun Blade 2500 workstation, the Sun Fire Visual Grid system, the Sun XVR-600 graphics accelerator card and the SX1500 and SX2500 OEM boards. The Sun Fire Visual Grid is a Grid solution designed for high performance visualization workgroup environments. The Sun Fire Visual Grid provides a customized solution built with Sun systems, software and services that handles the visualization, data management, scalability and support needs of such markets as scientific research, oil and gas, and manufacturing.

According to Juniper Networks, a new bandwidth speed record between Japan and the United States was set by Tokyo University using its T320 platform at the SC2003 High Performance Network and Computing Conference in Phoenix, Arizona.

HP ProCurve Networking has made available two new Ethernet switches that offer Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) functionality in an affordable, stackable design. The new switches allow businesses of all sizes to more easily and efficiently deploy IP phones, wireless access points, Web cameras and other devices requiring an external power supply.

LogOn Technology Transfer is looking for Tutorial and for Business Presentation Submissions for the LogOn Briefings Europe 2004. The LogOn Briefings are building upon LogOn's established series of European events such as the OMG Information Days, Linux@work, LogOn Web Days including Java Days & XML Days, and Storage Days.