HPC-EUROPA is an EC funded Project, started on January 2004. HPC-EUROPA integrates within a single project three main activities: Networking, Joint Research, and the provision of Access to six major HPC infrastructures (CEPBA, CINECA, EPCC, HLRS, IDRIS and SARA) for European scientists. About 800 researchers will make short research visits to one of the HPC centres, to use the facilities there and to work in collaboration with a local research group. HPC-Europa will pay travel costs plus a daily subsistence allowance for the researchers admitted. The Call for Applications for the Access programme is now open. The closing date for the first selection is February 15, 2004. Four selection meetings are expected per year. The Project will integrate and structure better the way HPC Infrastructures are operating in Europe and thus lead to the creation of a true European Research Area, without frontiers for scientists mobility, knowledge and technologies.

On February 16, the inauguration of the fastest supercomputer in Europe took place in the Research Centre in Jülich (RCJ). First there was a press meeting, where officials from RCJ, the ministries and IBM discussed the applications and the tasks of the new supercomputer. In the afternoon, at the colloquium, the biography of John von Neumann, the perspectives of HPC and 15 years NIC were presented.

Registration for the 19th annual International Supercomputer Conference (ISC2004) opens Sunday, February 15. The conference will be held June 22-25, 2004. The annual conference is held in Heidelberg, the home of Germany's oldest university as well as a thriving modern research community.

Cray Inc. has named Andreas Kerl director of the company's new worldwide High-Performance Computing (HPC) Services business unit. The company also has hired Ulla Thiel as director of sales for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Before joining Cray, Thiel was IBM's director of Scientific and Technical Computing Sales EMEA.

Fujitsu Siemens Computers will be offering the new Symmetrix DMX-2 series from EMC. Together with a range of new software offerings, this new high-end storage technology helps customers consolidate, centrally manage and better protect ever larger amounts of information.

Fujitsu Siemens Computers is now offering a complete new range of next-generation networked storage systems. The FibreCAT CX series supports a larger number of end-users than the existing models and delivers at the same time more power, functionality and scalability.

The first computing systems of the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid project are in production mode, making 4.5 teraflops of distributed computing power available to scientists across the United States who are conducting research in a wide range of disciplines, from astrophysics to environmental science.

The Dutch organisation National Computer Facilities (NCF) will provide the Dutch science community with extra funding of nearly one million euro annually for Grid infrastructure during the period 2004-2006. NCF has been awarded the funding of 2,8 million euro in total from the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). NCF has been witnessing in recent years a clearly increasing need in the Grid computing area in The Netherlands. NCF's plans are being supported by the scientific funding organisation NWO.

The UK MS.NETGrid Project has released MS.NETGrid-OGSI 1.2. This is a prototype of an OGSI-compliant container for the Microsoft .NET platform. The Austrialian Gridbus researchers have described Alchemi, a .NET-based Grid computing framework that provides the runtime machinery and programming environment required to construct desktop Grids and develop Grid applications.

Supported by the French Ministry of Economics, Finances and Industry, 13 structural mechanics companies, the professional syndicate GIMEF, the Mining School of Albi and CETIM have signed a partnership to develop a virtual computing laboratory for Professional Manufacturing Tools (OME).

HP will support an operational Grid for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. The LHC, the world's largest scientific instrument, enables research into the fundamental nature of matter. It is in the final stages of construction at CERN's facility outside Geneva. HP will link computing resources at its HP Labs locations in Palo Alto and Bristol (U.K.) as well as HP Brazil and HP Puerto Rico to CERN's LHC Computing Grid (LCG) to help manage and analyse the massive quantities of data expected to be produced by the facility.

The need to address the industrialisation of Grid software was emphasised at a recent workshop, organised by the European Commission, which sought to assess how EU actions and research can support the development of middleware for distributed applications with low installation and maintenance costs.

HP has joined forces with the University at Buffalo, State University of New York (UB), to deploy infrastructure technology and academic resources that will power the university's world-class Center for Computational Research. As a foundation for bioinformatics and life sciences research, HP and UB are building an open storage area network (SAN) with a capacity of 75 terabytes, capable of housing roughly four times the information found in the Library of Congress.

A new three-year joint initiative between the Government of Alberta, Canada, Silicon Graphics and the University of Alberta will make it easier for Alberta researchers, universities and organisations to use Grid computing to solve complex scientific problems.

Grid computing is one of the hot topics in distributed computing. Using a Grid of computers, located around the world, it is possible to carry out truly massive calculations. To achieve this requires a high level of interoperability between computer systems. Addressing this is the IST project GRIP. Its system will be used to enable the European weather services to share resources and allow applications for which the resources are beyond the capabilities of a single service.

With solar flares of record intensity hitting the headlines in November 2003, the public is more aware than ever of the many ways in which solar activity can affect our day-to-day lives: power grids and navigation system disrupted, some satellite operations suspended – our need to understand and accurately predict such phenomena is clear. A major hurdle encountered in many areas of solar research is the location of useful data from scattered archives of space and ground-based observations. Using a Grid computing test bed, IST-project EGSO is addressing the problem of combining heterogeneous data into a virtual solar observatory.

Western Canada's powerful new Grid computing system is helping University of Calgary biomedical engineers reduce the costs and time involved in developing new heart-healing drugs and devices, such as implantable defibrillators. Dr. Joshua Leon and his colleagues in the Faculty of Engineering, such as Dr. Edward Vigmond, are using the WestGrid system to build complex computer models of the heart to provide an early cost-and-time-saving step in testing new medical ideas and innovations.

Platform has released Symphony 2.0, the most powerful production-proven, enterprise-class Grid computing software available for financial services institutions.

Alleviating Brain Drain in South-East Europe is the aim of the joint UNESCO/Hewlett Packard Project, which is currently focused on delivering and installing the latest Grid enabling technologies at the University in Sarajevo and the University of RS in BiH. This top equipment will also be donated in the upcoming days to the universities in Croatia, and Serbia and Montenegro.

Hewlett Packard has teamed with the Government of Alberta and the University of Calgary to establish a state-of-the-art facility supporting research into the management of Grid computing. Grid computing is a rapidly emerging field of technology with wide spread applications. Grid computing can be used by health researchers to study diseases such as West Nile and SARS, pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs, the oil industry to study and predict oil reservoirs and scientists to study nanotechnology, chemistry, physics, biology and ecology.

The University of Southern California (USC) has received a $75,000 grant from AT&T to support the creation of a data visualization wall at USC. The new technology will provide faculty and students with an interactive, multimedia research and teaching resource that enables collaboration on complex data and monitoring of large, long-term scientific computations.

Sparkassen Informatik (SI), a German retail banking solution provider for savings banks, will consolidate its IT platform by moving onto 20 IBM eServer zSeries z990s. With this new contract, SI will create an IT infrastructure to meet increasing demand as they extend their service offerings.

Members of the Computational Biology Service Unit (CBSU) of the Cornell Theory Center (CTC) have ported the popular bioinformatics software known as HMMER to the Windows platform. The software can be downloaded for free.

The Cornell Theory Center's Computational Materials Institute (CMI) is a lead academic institution in a project that has been awarded US $14.1 million of a potential $32 million, if all the options are exercised, from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The contract will be used to develop and demonstrate a physics-based approach to predict the state of structural health of individual Department of Defense (DoD) vehicles. The Structural Integrity Prognosis System (SIPS) will discover and track the precursors of structural failure and provide predictions of vehicle structural health under a variety of future usage options.

Locus will use aapplication for computerized drug design technology originally developed by Sarnoff for use in developing new therapies for various disease states including AIDS, cancer, and rheumatoid arthritis.

Entelos, specialised in the emerging field of systems biology for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, has successfully developed a new software engine capable of tripling the speed at which simulation results can be generated from its high-throughput PhysioLab systems biology platforms. The simulation engine has already been successfully placed in PhysioLab platforms at one of Entelos' pharmaceutical partners.

Bull and ORGA Systems will be co-operating on billing solutions that are easy to use and manage and reduce overall cost of ownership.ORGA Solutions will be available on the Bull platforms i.e. NovaScale Intel based servers running different operating systems including Linux and Escala running AIX.

ESI Group and CFD Research Corporation (CFDRC) establish a strategic partnership to deliver a virtual engineering software portfolio to the market. This partnership includes the acquisition of CFDRC's six software products and associated personnel, as well as a long-term agreement for collaborative developments with CFDRC's research team.

The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC), along with three state medical centres, has received $350,000 for paediatric cancer research as part of the federal FY2004 Omnibus Appropriations bill. This grant will be used to apply new techniques developed at the National Cancer Institute's Advanced Biomedical Computing Center (NCI-ABCC) to the study of children's diseases. Research results will accelerate the insight and understanding of cancer, leading to improved diagnostics, treatments and even new prevention options.

Sun Microsystems has announced the beta programme for the Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 1.5 - J2SE 1.5. Code named Project Tiger, the beta release of J2SE 1.5 includes new Java programming language updates focusing on ease-of-development, new application monitoring and management features, continued focus on rich client support for the PC desktop and greater performance.

The US Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Programme (HPCMP), has purchased a 2,132-processor Evolocity II (E2) cluster from Linux Networx for the Army Research Laboratory Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC). When the system is fully deployed in mid-2004, it will be the HPCMP’s largest deployment of an Intel processor-based Linux cluster, and the solution will adopt Intel 64-bit extension technology.

During the 'Solutions Linux' exhibition in Paris, Bull announced it has strengthened its Linux solutions for business-critical applications enabling the deployment of complete and robust application chains on Linux, from "front" to "back office". These solutions particularly fit multi-tier architectures with, for instance, a Web server in front-office, an application server in middle-office, and a database in back-office.

Today ZAM (Central Institute for Applied Mathematics) at the Research Center inaugurates its new IBM p690 based cluster. The new machine will have an aggregated peak performance of 8.9 TeraFlop/s. The main memory sums up to 5.2 TeraBytes. All nodes are connected via a fast interconnect "High Performance Switch". In the past it was named by IBM the Federation Switch. Additionally ZAM presents the successor of Professor Friedel Hossfeld. It is Priv.-Doz. Dr. Dr. Thomas Lippert, who will give a talk on perspectives of High Performance Computing. He is well known in the HPC community. He and his colleagues at Physics Department, University Wuppertal, built and operated the ALiCE Cluster in Wuppertal, which is based on Compaq Alpha processors. (Uwe Harms)