With the introduction of the PRIMERGY BX300 mono server blade, Fujitsu Siemens Computers is making outstanding reliability, performance and connectivity available to IT managers for a broad range of application areas. The exceptional performance and value of the BX300 was highlighted by a recent SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark, making it ideal for Web servers, terminal server farms, and particularly in the datacentre. The mono server blade, designed for the BX300 blade server chassis, is now available for prices starting at 1690 euro each in Germany (excl. VAT).

NEC Corporation has announced the worldwide launch and availability of the SX series model "SX-8", the world's most powerful vector supercomputer with a peak processing performance of 65TFLOPS (TFLOPS: one trillion floating point operations per second).

After the announcement of the Cray XD1 the next supercomputer is on the list to be sold as a product, the XT3 based on Sandias Red Storm. The XT3 is the successor of the legendary Cray T3D and Cray T3E and is based on the AMD Opteron. It is starting in the price range of 1 million US$. A 6 cabinets system with 548 processors and 14 service PEs has a peak performance of 2.6 TeraFlop/s, it can be extended to an open end of peak performance.

A team of French researchers from the Central Office for Information Systems Security (DCSSI) and the University of Versailles-Saint Quentin en Yvelines has computed a collision for "SHA-0" code, a hash algorithm developed in the 1990s by the National Security Agency. The computation was performed on TeraNova, a supercomputer clustering Bull NovaScale servers. TeraNova demonstrated its power and reliability by breaking SHA-0 in three weeks and 80,000 CPU hours.

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (Nasdaq NM: CRAY) today reported that it has begun shipping the Cray XT3™ supercomputer, an industry standard massively parallel processing (MPP) system that strongly advances the record-setting scalability and sustained application performance of the renowned Cray T3D™ and Cray T3E systems. U.S. list pricing for the Cray XT3 supercomputer begins at about $2 million.

There’s a new world heavyweight supercomputer coming to town, courtesy of the Department of Energy. BlueGene/L is the latest jewel in DOE's crown of high-performance computers that dates back to the agency's formation during the Cold War. At present, five of the world’s top 10 fastest computers are hard at work at DOE facilities. Delivery of BlueGene/L at the DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory should begin this November.

ClearSpeed Technology has announced details of its first commercial microprocessor, the CSX600. In a presentation at the Fall Processor Forum in San Jose, California, one of the world's key semiconductor industry conferences, the company will be presenting performance data showing the new processor to be the highest performing product of its kind. The new chip, which delivers up to 50 GFLOPS for just 5 watts power consumption, is expected to become available by the end of Q1 2005.

Fujitsu Siemens Computers has released its PRIMERGY S2 rack and tower servers, which will offer IT managers greater flexibility and performance for their server farms, while ensuring 'peace of mind’ by protecting application investment and providing easier server management.

OptimaNumerics, specialized in high performance technical and scientific computing software, has introduced OptimaNumerics Libraries for IBM eServer BladeCenter JS20, providing customers with the highest performance numerical software tools to enable efficient technical and scientific computations.

Brocade Communications Systems a provider of Storage Area Network (SAN) infrastructure solutions, has introduced an expanded set of tools, utilities, and educational offerings designed to help its customers and partners to better design, administer, and manage SANs. Led by Brocade SAN Health, a powerful and innovative new SAN management tool that Brocade is providing free of charge to its customers and partners, these new offerings combine technical depth with practical advice on how to optimize new and existing SANs.

Silicon Graphics has announced results for its first fiscal quarter which ended September 24, 2004. Revenue for the first quarter was $175 million, in line with the preliminary results announced October 5, 2004. Gross margin from continuing operations was 35.8% compared with 40.1% in the same quarter one year ago. SGI's first-quarter operating loss from continuing operations was $27 million, compared with an operating loss of $44 million for the first quarter fiscal 2004. The first-quarter net loss was $28 million or $0.11 per share, compared with a net loss of $48 million or $0.23 per share one year ago.

Cray Inc.'s Board of Directors has elected Stephen C. Richards as a member of the Board. He will serve on the Board's Audit Committee.

Cray and Livermore Software Technology Corporation (LSTC) established a collaboration to exploit the scalable designs of LSTC's LS-DYNA engineering software and Cray's new Cray XD1 supercomputer. Cray and LSTC are aggressively optimizing the Cray communications libraries to enable LS-DYNA to fully exploit the scalability and performance of the Cray XD1 system's innovative interconnect technology.

IBM announced the early success of opening the IBM eServer BladeCenter specification and new models packed with technology breakthroughs to further extend the system's enterprise capabilities. Forty-nine companies have received the BladeCenter open specification since Intel and IBM's joint announcement on September 2.

RAID Incorporated has released the Phoenix line of Enterprise Storage Systems. The Phoenix delivers a highly available, high performance storage solution with embedded Enterprise level management features such as remote replication, snapshot, storage virtualization, mirroring, and storage provisioning. The Phoenix systems also offer flexibility and cost-effectiveness by supporting both Fibre Channel and Serial ATA disk drives, as well as combinations of both technologies within the same storage solution.

Along with Network Appliance and its strategic partner Oracle, Fujitsu Siemens Computers has opened the "Center of Excellence” (CoE) at the German Oracle headquarters in Munich. The CoE will provide customers and partners with Grid computing solutions for their individual data center environments. The centre is also available for testing the latest technologies with specific applications and optimizing them for the Grid environment. The presence of the three partners ensures that each component is subjected to comprehensive scrutiny.

IT vendor Fujitsu Siemens Computers will present the results of a TCO/ROI (Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment) analysis for the FlexFrame for mySAP Business Suite product, which was developed in co-operation with SAP and Network Appliance, at its European IT Forum, VISIT 2004. The independent, Frankfurt-based consulting house BearingPoint was commissioned to perform the analysis in order to allow certified and consistent statements to be made about potential TCO savings. The BearingPoint study illustrates which areas of the solution have led to cost savings of up to 65 percent. For this purpose, BearingPoint not only interviewed FlexFrame customers, but also assessed customer scenarios so that these outstanding results could be placed on a solid footing.

The TeraGrid, the National Science Foundation's multi-year effort to build a distributed national cyberinfrastructure, has now entered full production mode, providing a coordinated set of services for the nation's science and engineering community. TeraGrid's unified user support infrastructure and software environment allow users to access storage and information resources as well as over a dozen major computing systems via a single allocation, either as stand-alone resources or as components of a distributed application using Grid software capabilities.

Valen Technologies, a provider of predictive modelling and decision enabling software for the insurance industry, is working with Sun Microsystems to co-market and deliver Grid computing solutions to insurance customers worldwide. Valen and Sun will jointly provide Valen's decision enabling software running on a proven Jini technology-based Grid computing infrastructure. By building decision models rapidly, these customers will have access to up-to-date data, allowing them to retain a competitive edge and stay aligned with shifting market conditions.

Altair Engineering Inc., a global expert recognized for innovative product development, advanced engineering software and Grid computing technology, has extended and broadened its OEM agreement with Cray Inc. Under the new seven-year agreement, Cray will continue to bundle Altair's PBS Pro Grid computing technology with its current Cray X1 supercomputer product line. In addition, PBS Pro will be bundled with the successor Cray X1E product, Cray's upcoming Red Storm-based product, the Cray XD1 supercomputer and future-generation products.

Chordiant Software Inc. has launched new Grid computing support for its core business process management solutions. Grid computing allows customers to connect virtually to groups of servers, and shift applications and workloads across resources to make better use of existing IT investments. Chordiant's support for Grid computing enables the enterprise customer to tap into under-utilised computing capacity, reducing the need for, and associated cost of, additional computing capacity.

Achieve Healthcare Technologies, the largest U.S. privately owned IT provider to the long-term care industry substantially increased its subscription of Intacct's Web-based enterprise resource planning applications to meet growing customer demand.

Sun Microsystems has launched the Sun Utility Computing for High-end Grid, its next level of utility-priced services targeted at the high-end Grid computing market. The new offering will make affordable and agile pay-for-use services available to customers with high performance, compute-intensive requirements for short- to mid-term needs, as well as spikes in demand.

In this century the wind in the winter will blow from the south more often. Changes in the rainfall across the Indian Ocean because of increasing gases deriving from the hot-house effect will be the cause of this. Weather conditions near Indonesia seem to have influence on the weather in Europe. The European winters will become milder and milder.

ObjectWeb, the international not-for-profit consortium dedicated to open-source infrastructure software, announces that its initiative to federate development of open-source components for Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) solutions is gaining attention from big names in the industry.

In a joint effort with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to make more sophisticated open-source performance tools available to government laboratories, universities and other researchers, Silicon Graphics is developing an open-source version of the SGI SpeedShop performance analysis tool. Aimed at accelerating research efforts on Linux OS-based systems, the NNSA-funded project will provide the evolving open-source community with broad access to SpeedShop that for years has been a staple on IRIX, the world's most technically advanced UNIX high-performance computing environment.

Fujitsu Siemens Computers and Leica Microsystems, Jena, have developed a solution which allows faster processing of chip designs. Leica Microsystems has coupled its lithography systems with the hpcLine Linux clusters from the European IT vendor. This extremely powerful solution not only reduces processing times but also provides better protection of investment as Linux clusters based on the hpcLine allow considerable flexibility with respect to extensions. Leica Microsystems exports its e-beam lithography systems throughout the world.

Turbolinux, a provider of Linux-based solutions, has released Turbolinux 10 Server (10S), a comprehensive and cost-effective server environment that surpasses first-generation edge servers by employing fully integrated database management systems (DBMS) and enhanced, multi-use application server solutions.

Mellanox Technologies has extended the practical range of 10 Gb/s cluster computing using low-cost InfiniBand copper cables from W. L. Gore & Associates. The extended 40 meter reach capability is enabled by combining the superior signal quality of Mellanox InfiniBand channel adapter and switch products with the outstanding electrical characteristics of GORE InfiniBand cables. The combination of Mellanox InfiniBand silicon and Gore cables extends the range of applications that can take advantage of reliable and cost-effective copper cables. This avoids the additional expense of moving to fiber solutions.