TeamHPC Inc. has successfully finalized the structure of a new corporate entity focused solely on Open Source development, customized software applications and High Performance Computing. In setting up the new corporate structure, TeamHPC Inc. has assembled a group of Linux engineers and sales and marketing professionals. Corporate focus will continue with software support to existing industry customers that have purchased Beowulf Type computational machines as well as a long list of some of the nation's major researchers.

Cray will collaborate with theUS Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to provide the world's most powerful supercomputer. The leadership-class system will be used for advanced scientific research.

IBM has opened the first Deep Computing Capacity on Demand centre in Europe. The new facility, located in Montpellier, France, is the second of its kind in the world, and will provide IBM customers access via the Internet, to powerful, highly secure supercomputers.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham announced that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will grant Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and its development partners, Cray , IBM and Silicon Graphics, $25 million in funding to begin to build a 50 Tflop/s science research supercomputer. The department selected ORNL from four proposals received from its non-weapon national labs.

Cray has received an order for a Cray X1 supercomputer system from GMRI. Under the contract terms, the Cray X1 system was recently installed at the NASA Ames Research Center facility in Moffett Field, California. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Cray and Best Systems have signed a non-exclusive agreement designating Best Systems as a Cray business partner in Japan. Best Systems and Cray Japan will work closely together to address the increasing interest in Cray's high-performance computing systems in the Japanese marketplace.

Verari Systems, previously RackSaver has acquired MPI Software Technology., an independent provider of high-performance software products and related services for managing parallel and cluster computers.

Cray has reported that a Canadian organisation has placed an advance order for the company's upcoming product based on the Sandia Red Storm supercomputer. The Red Storm-based system is scheduled to be installed at the customer's facility in late 2004. Further terms were not disclosed.

Citrix has made available MetaFrame Presentation Server 3.0 for Windows, the newest release of the company's flagship product.

Fujitsu Siemens Computers is now offering two new models in its FibreCAT networked storage family. The new FibreCAT AX100 models, tailored to the small & mid-sized enterprise (SMEs) segment, were designed to combine networked storage functionality with simplicity and are a perfect match for the European IT vendor's Intel-based PRIMERGY servers. Available from channel partners starting in June, the FibreCAT AX100 – ideal for companies with over 500 employees – will offer 1 Terabyte (TB) of storage capacity for under 6000 euro excl. VAT.

The world's smallest computer - around a trillion can fit in a drop of water - might one day go on record again as the tiniest medical kit. Made entirely of biological molecules, this computer was successfully programmed to identify, in a test tube, changes in the balance of molecules in the body that indicate the presence of certain cancers, to diagnose the type of cancer, and to react by producing a drug molecule to fight the cancer cells.

Japan-based JM-net I will ship a high performance and power efficient blade server in Japan and Asia based on Transmeta's Efficeon processor. JM-net's EC86S blade server, for data centre and Grid computing environments, utilizes Transmeta's Efficeon to provide a compact system design with minimal heat dissipation.

Xilinx has made available its QPRO Virtex-II radiation-tolerant reconfigurable Platform FPGA family. Offering densities of up to six million system gates and high performance system features such as high performance embedded block RAM, embedded multipliers, Digital Clock Manager, and integrated I/O termination (XCITE), the QPRO Virtex-II family leads the industry in offering high density, high performance reconfigurable solutions specifically designed for mission-critical applications in aerospace and defense.

HP has secured the no. 1 ranking in customer satisfaction among vendors of Intel-based servers in the first quarter of 2004, according to newly released results from Technology Business Research Inc.'s ongoing IT customer satisfaction study.

The Fujitsu group of companies, including Fujitsu (Japan/Asia Pacific), Fujitsu Computer Systems (North America), Fujitsu Services (EMEA) and Fujitsu Siemens Computers (EMEA), has outlined its global strategy for development and deployment of products, solutions and services to help users optimize their IT infrastructure. The TRIOLE strategy is designed to help customers reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) and will strengthen the group's abilities to generate innovative offerings, allowing customers to enhance business efficiency, business agility and business continuity. TRIOLE is also part of Fujitsu Siemens Computers' long-term Business Critical Computing focus and will embrace the European IT vendor's wide range of server, mainframe, storage and middleware product lines.

With the Danube Cluster another computing cluster for high performance tasks went operational at GUP Grid and Cluster Computing Lab (G2C2), which is located at the Johannes Kepler University Linz. Consisting of single PCs and a high-speed network, the system allows researchers to cope with tasks that could not be tackled with a single personal computer. With the resulting price/performance ratio this solution is especially interesting for organisations with less extensive budgets.

The Lustre cluster file system providing high-performance file system access on 4 of the world's top 5 Linux supercomputers, has passed another milestone with the release of version 1.2.

GridIron Software, a developer of Grid computing solutions, has made available its X-Factor extension for Adobe After Effects Professional 6.5. Adobe After Effects Professional creates motion graphics and effects for film, video, DVD and the Web, and uses the X-Factor extension to allow digital professionals to use Grid computing technology to rapidly increase the speed of preview and rendering capabilities in an easy-to-use and non-intrusive manner.

TurboWorx has signed an agreement with Avnet Hall-Mark's IBM Division, a value-added distributor of IBM enterprise computing products, software and services to use Avnet's Enablement Services Partnership (ESP) programme to help them deliver turnkey IBM solutions. By leveraging Avnet ESP, TurboWorx will be able to provide the market with a fully integrated, end-to-end IBM solution for creating, managing and accelerating compute and data intensive applications/work flows in heterogeneous distributed computing environments and Grids. TurboWorx has also established partner alliances and delivery capacity to address the financial services, process manufacturing, automotive, energy exploration and production, aerospace, and information-based medicine markets.

Seems like one of the first consulting companies active in Grid Computing, Grid Technology Partners is bankrupt. The company is unable to pay bills for almost two years. The Gridblog, maintained by the company's director has not seen updates from the Grid Technology Partners since the beginning of this year as has the companyy's main web site. It is also not possible to establish contact with the company anymore for the past six months.

Cactus 4.0 beta 14 has just been released. The Cactus team expects to release 4.0 beta 15 in June, and a release candidate in July.

The Globus Alliance has made available for download a technology preview of the Globus C SOAP Engine. Technology previews represent works-in-progress that have not yet been tightly integrated into the toolkit, but are highly relevant to future development.

Vita Nuova has supplied its Inferno Grid technology to Evotec OAI AG, a partner for integrated high value-added drug discovery and development solutions to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Evotec OAI is using the Inferno Grid to further speed up the drug discovery process. Around 250 of the company's PCs are connected to the Grid so that their spare computing cycles can be put to profitable use; a further 150 computers will be added in the near future.

IBM has previewed for the first time advanced cross-platform technology meant to vastly improve the economics and industrial-strength operations of IT. IBM plans to begin shipping this new Virtualization Engine technology in IBM servers and storage this year, including a capability to simplify the management of mixed environments of IBM and non-IBM systems.

Sun announced the Sun Infrastructure Solution for N1 Grid for SAP Solutions, a mix of products, technologies and services expertise to help SAP customers derive significant cost savings by further optimizing the infrastructure of its SAP solutions-based environment.

Topspin Communications, specialized in switched computing, has formed a VFrame Developers Programme intended to foster the delivery, documentation, and testing of integrated solutions for server virtualization. Many industry- software partners have already joined the programme, including Opsware, Oracle, Platform Computing, Qlusters and VMware. Others are invited to join as well.

Bull Germany extends the scope of its ranges of Express5800, NovaScale and Escala open servers with security packages issued by the Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI), the German National Office for Information Technology Security.

Elasis, Fiat's research centre in Southern Italy, has selected AutoSEA2 from ESI Group to improve automotive acoustic design. Noise, Vibration and Harshness (NVH) are today an important part of virtual product development. AutoSEA2 addresses automakers' critical need for the control of broadband airborne and structure-borne noise. The product relies on the Statistical Energy Analysis (SEA) method which is well suited to broadband and high frequency noise predictions.

Research and Markets has added the "Addressing Pharma's R&D Productivity Crisis: Technological and Strategic Initiatives to Improve Core Drug Discovery Capabilities" report to their offering. External pressures make it difficult to maintain the growth enjoyed by the pharmaceutical industry over the past two decades. Expenditure on R&D is increasing but is not accompanied by corresponding growth in the number of new drugs reaching the market. Companies must fundamentally review R&D business models and exploit new strategies for re-establishing core drug discovery expertise.

HP has launched the new HP Workstation c8000, which is designed to address technical workloads in automotive, aerospace and electronic design enterprises.

BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee (BCBST) has purchased IBM's storage virtualization software to help manage a large number of health care claims and simplify their business process.

Madison Research Corporation has purchased an SGI Origin 3900 supercomputer with 64 processors and 64 GB of system memory for the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC) in Huntsville, Alabama. Financial and other terms were not disclosed.

In an exclusive interview to EnterTheGrid/Primeur, Bill Camp, in charge of Sandia's efforts to build an 30 Tlop/s supercomputer dubbed "Thor's Hammer" based on the Red Storm architecture, explains the implementation is well on schedule, with a number of basic technologies already available to Sandia, and tested. If you are interested in hearing Bill Camp in person, join the European supercomputer community in Heidelberg, in June. Bill Camp will present a keynote at the ISC2004 conference on the new +30 Tflop/s supercomputer.

Linux cluster vendor California Digital, Quadrics, and Intel have successfully deployed the most powerful Linux supercomputer ever built, a 4,096 Itanium2 processor based Linux cluster code named "Thunder" at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Fakespace Systems has completed the world's first reconfigurable immersive visualization system that includes the use of both active and passive stereoscopic technology. Designed specifically to meet the requirements for Purdue University's new Envision Center for Data Perceptualization, the custom solution was developed utilizing Fakespace's reconfigurable FLEX platform.

National LambdaRail Inc. (NLR), a consortium of U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies, has successfully lit the optical-network path between Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, Georgia, giving the D.C., Raleigh, N.C., and Atlanta regions access to the national NLR network infrastructure. The path completes the route between Atlanta, D.C., Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Chicago.

MEMSCAP, a provider of innovative solutions based on MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems) technology, has been chosen by Glimmerglass, a pioneer of transparent connectivity, as a key supplier of production-level MEMS components.