In a press meeting SGI today announced the midrange server Altix 350 with one to 16 processors, Intel Itanium 2 processors with four different clocks and three different cache sizes. It is dedicated for work groups. Besides its traditional markets, scientific and media, SGI plans to sell these machines via partners in the commercial markets.

Apple is introducing the classiest 1U server with dual 64-bit processors. At speeds of up to 2.0GHz, Xserve G5 packs in the same G5 processor that powers the world's third fastest supercomputer cluster.

IBM and Topspin Communications have signed a multi-year agreement to integrate advanced Topspin InfiniBand switch technology on IBM systems, and resell Topspin InfiniBand switches to customers worldwide. The five-year agreement gives IBM access to current and future versions of Topspin's industry-leading server switches and software for use across the IBM eServer and TotalStorage product line.

InfiniCon Systems, a provider of shared I/O and switching solutions for next-generation server networks, has been selected as an inaugural member of Sun Microsystems' High Performance and Technical Computing (HPTC) Alliance Partner Programme. InfiniCon's industry-leading InfinIO interconnect technology, based on the InfiniBand Architecture, provides up to a 30Gbps infrastructure for building computing fabrics and creates a powerful complement to Sun's server and Grid solution offerings for the HPTC market.

Silicon Graphics' worldwide success of its acclaimed SGI Altix family of servers and superclusters has proven that the Linux OS is scalable and robust enough for the most demanding high-performance computing users. Only a year after its introduction at the 2003 LinuxWorld Conference & Expo where it was named Best of Show, the SGI Altix family returned to LinuxWorld in New York City, January 20-23, with new midrange models, a host of 64-bit applications, record achievements in scalability and performance, and growing worldwide customer acceptance.

At the UK/France Workshop on Grid Computing in November 2003, several groups disccused possible cooperation between France and the UK concerning Grid and e-Science. The application and middleware groups also had some interesting SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis of Frenhc and UK Grid developments.

At the UK/French workshop on Grid computing in November 2003, Antoine Petit, of theDirection de la Rechercheof theMinistère délégué à la Recherche et aux Nouvelles Technologies, gave an overview of the French initiatives. In France, there are several complementary national actions with a light informal coordination. There is a programme to support Infrastructures and there is a programme to support the research and development projects that can include industrial partners. A third line is support to fundamental research projects without funded industrial partners.

Apple has previewed Xgrid, a computational clustering technology from Apple's Advanced Computation Group (ACG). Xgrid helps scientists and others working in compute intensive environments to fully utilize all IT resources, including desktops and servers, by creating a grid enabled "virtual" IT environment that takes advantage of unused computing capacity to run batch and workload processing. Available as a free beta download, Xgrid brings Apple's legendary ease-of-use to computational clustering by providing the easiest way to run compute intensive applications, such as the popular gene-sequencing application BLAST, on multiple Macs using Apple's Rendezvous networking technology.

In what may be a sign that the long downturn for technology is coming to an end, e-commerce projects lead plans for this year in enterprise development project planning. The new Enterprise Development Management Issues survey from Evans Data has seen business-to-business e-commerce increase 40% in the last six months for planned projects and a move from 11th place to the 1st place ranking. Sixteen percent of enterprise companies plan to use Grid computing instead of a clustering environment and another 24% are considering the technology.

Scientists from Europe and the US teamed up and set a new record for sending data across the Atlantic in October 2003. Their Internet2 Landspeed Record results showed a huge increase both in the flow of data across wide area networks and between local systems closely linked together. In this article the DataTAG project that resulted in the record is described.

DataSynapse Inc., a fast-growing provider of Grid computing software for commercial applications, announced at the GlobusWORLD conference in San Francisco significant enhancements to its GridServer product. The new capabilities go beyond traditional compute-intense Grids to drive quantifiable benefits in application processing speed, resiliency, scalability and time-to-build and deploy.

Did you just load that interesting new software on your PC? Then wondered where all your storage space has gone, while at the same time your PC seems to have ground to a halt? Think of the same predicament but magnified, not thousands but millions of times. Now you begin to see the problems confronting the world's research community in cutting-edge research projects. And in particular, the challenges facing the DATAGRID project.

Organisers of GlobusWORLD 2004 have issued new programme details for the conference, which features top experts in Grid computing for e-Business and e-Science. The latest keynote speakers include leaders of companies and organisations that are at the forefront of deploying the Globus Toolkit (GT).

The open source Gridbus Project, led by the Grid Computing and Distributed Systems (GRIDS) Laboratory at the University of Melbourne, Australia, has released the next-version of Grid simulation software, the GridSim 2.2 toolkit.

Noregon Systems, a software development firm, has been subcontracted by Targacept Inc. to assist in the enhancement of the biopharmaceutical firm's molecular dynamics simulation programme. The work being completed by Noregon is one part of a $2.0 million project grant that Targacept recently received from the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Advanced Technology Programme (ATP).

In December 2003 five partners organised an info day on efficient crash simulation on cluster architectures with LS-Dyna. Altair Engineering, Dynamore, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Inprosim and ParTec discussed their hardware and software spectrum. A special offering with an 8 cluster node hpcLine and the software was issued that day.

Xilinx Inc., a programmable logic supplier, has achieved record revenue of $100M in a single quarter and $500M in cumulative revenue since product introduction for its industry-leading Virtex-II series FPGAs. Based on their industry-leading capacity, performance, and cost-effectiveness, Xilinx Virtex FPGAs are the number one choice of designers worldwide. With consistent evolution of the FPGA architecture, Xilinx Virtex-II, Virtex-II Pro and the most recently introduced Virtex-II Pro X FPGAs, have enabled many leading-edge applications in cellular base stations, high-end networking and storage equipment, broadcast video, and test and measurement equipment.

Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists will try to predict how the supercomputers of the future will perform under a three-year, $4.2-million grant recently awarded by the research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's High Productivity Computing Systems programme will fund performance analysis and modelling, system architecture analysis, software tool creation and networking evaluations. The research will take place in Los Alamos' Performance and Architectures Laboratory of the Computer and Computational Sciences Division, in partnership with IBM.

Silicon Graphics has launched an initiative that will bring the world's most advanced graphics technology to computers running the Linux operating system. The initiative comprises two elements: SGI's collaboration with various open source graphics projects, including Chromium, and delivery of a comprehensive developer tool kit.

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), a broad consortium of Russian ministries and science organisations and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)have launched the operations for the first round-the-world computer network ring, which will be used for joint scientific and educational projects. Completing the ring includes increasing the bandwidth between the United States and China and making the first-ever fiber network connection across the Russia-China border.