A wide range of business, government, and academic research initiatives that had previously been limited by the effectiveness of commercially available data mining software can now build practical and highly functional data mining applications using the newly released version 2.0 of NAG Data Mining and Cleaning Components (DMC 2.0). DMC 2.0 is the first commercially available data mining application development toolkit that uses results from a three-year European Union funded project, EUREDIT, among other advances in data mining techniques developed by the Numerical Algorithms Group, a global collaborative network of 300+ computer scientists and mathematical experts that work together to solve complex mathematical problems.

Gen-i and Weta Digital Ltd have signed a Teaming Agreement and officially opened the New Zealand Supercomputing Centre (NZSC), located in Wellington, making the Intel-based supercomputer cluster commercially available to high performance computer users throughout the world.

On Thursday, 30 September 2004, Streamline Computing is organising an Independent High Performance Computing Seminar at the National Space Centre in Leicester, United Kingdom. Streamline Computing has organised a panel of industry experts from around the world and will be inviting your feedback at an independent HPC seminar, aimed at removing uncertainty, and involving and informing the UK HPC community.

Verari Systems, has completed a Series B equity financing round totaling $13.275 million. The round was led by Carlyle Venture Partners, a fund managed by The Carlyle Group, one of the largest private equity groups in the world with $19 billion under management and offices throughout North America, Europe, and Asia, including Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul and Bangalore. The round was oversubscribed and included participation from existing Verari Systems investors Sierra Ventures, Voyager Capital and Celerity Partners. The new funds increase the company’s total capital raised to $34.156 million to date.

Meiosys has signed a reseller agreement with HP to provide higher levels of availability and management flexibility of high performance computational clusters. Under the agreement, Meiosys' MetaCluster HPC will be integrated with HP's Linux Cluster Software Solutions Stack.

In November 2004, starting on the 15th, a number of pan-European evenements around e-infrastructure, gridtechnology and e-Science will take place in The Hague, The Netherlands. The list of events includes an open workshop of the European eInfrastructure Reflection Group (eIRG) and conferences of four large Grid projects in the Sixth Framework program (DEISA, DILIGENT, EGEE and SEE-GRID). Another main event is the Grid Summit, a plenary event that will bring together all those involved in the field of European e-Infrastructure (companies, knowledge institutes, researchers, NREN's, policy makers).

Today, the incubation of the world's first virtual city supercomputer was announced with the AlmereGrid project kick-off in the city of Almere, The Netherlands. This event took place at the last day in a week of intense Grid activity and announcements in Europe, that started with the Europan Grid technology day in Brussels last week and was followed by the Global Grid Forum 12 conference in the same city.

Grids provide key elements for the new ICT infrastructure that is needed to achieve the European Union's (EU) ambition of becoming the world's most competitive knowledge driven economy. That was the message that Peter Zangl, deputy general for the Directorate General for IST (Information Society technology) brought to an audience of hundreds of Grid experts, researchers and representatives of companies at the Grid Technology Day organised by the European Commission on September 15 in Brussels.

This week, UK particle physicists will demonstrate the world's largest, working computing Grid. With over 6000 computers at 78 sites internationally, the Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (LCG) is the first permanent, worldwide Grid for doing real science. The UK is a major part of LCG, providing more than 1000 computers in 12 sites. At the 2004 UK e-Science All Hands Meeting in Nottingham, particle physicists representing a collaboration of 20 UK institutions will explain to biologists, chemists and computer scientists how they reached this milestone.

Sun uses its N1 Grid programme for providing the capability for customers to access Grids of secure computing power as easily as buying utility services such as phone, power or water. Using a pay-for-use pricing model starting at $1/CPU, per hour, Grid cycles can be purchased in packs of hours through Sun.

A Euro 52 million package of twelve EU-funded research projects, that together aim to bring “Grid” networked computing out of research labs and into industry, has been launched by the European Commission. We already did report on most projects in earlier issues od EnterTheGrid - Primeur magazine. The European Commission will present the new projects coming Wednesday in Brussels.

The Atlantic Computational Excellence Network (ACEnet), the NRC's Canadian Bioinformatics Resource, the University of Alberta, C3.ca, and partners have performed the Third Canadian Internetworked Scientific Supercomputer (CISS-3) experiment. The experiment completed 20 years of computation in 48 hours. Two chemo-biological problems, both requiring high-performance computational power, were tackled: protein folding and biological membranes.

The Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) in Gatersleben, Germany, is using an IBM technology based Grid solution to speed up the analysis of plant genomes. IPK works on the analysis of selected plant genomes. The analysis of the function and effect of single genes under certain conditions, in regard to non-genetically-manipulated plant growth and breeding processes, are especially of interest for the IPK. The bioinformatics group of the IPK and the Bioinformatics Center Gatersleben-Halle support the biologists of the IPK in the winning and analysis of the data, generated from their experiments.

IBM has announced major new Grid computing projects, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has completed a pilot using Grid computing and Linux to help EPA and state agencies demonstrate how Grid can improve air quality modelling and better predict the environmental risks of exposure to air pollution. In addition to EPA, IBM announced five new commercial Grid projects, including Siemens mobile, NTT Com, and Sinopec, as well as ten new application software companies that have readied their products for Grid computing.

HP has outlined its strategy and roadmap to transform the network storage industry by unlocking the value of information in real time, regardless of how it was created or where it is stored. Created in HP Labs, the company's central research facility, the HP StorageWorks Grid strategy is designed to allow customers to better focus on how they use data, not how they store it.