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.