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.