Concurrent Computer Corporation has delivered the first of multiple iHawk systems to Major Projects Victoria for the Australian Synchrotron Project (ASP). iHawk, powered by Concurrent's RedHawk real-time Linux, was selected for its highly deterministic response and high performance capabilities to respond to ASP's data acquisition and I/O control (IOC) system requirements. These high performance and distributed IOCs will provide the foundation control system for the synchrotron light beam storage ring.

Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors will be available as an option on Cray XD1 supercomputers in July 2005, and on Cray XT3 supercomputers later in 2005. AMD's cutting-edge 32- and 64-bit dual-core technology fits two processor cores on a single die, giving users of these Cray systems double the processing capacity in the same amount of space with minimal increases in power consumption and heat levels.

The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Linton F. Brooks announced that a supercomputer developed through the Advanced Simulation and Computing programme for NNSA's Stockpile Stewardship efforts has performed 135.3 trillion floating point operations per second (teraFLOP/s) on the industry standard LINPACK benchmark, making it the fastest supercomputer in the world. By performing computations at these rates, BlueGene/L helps maintain the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile without nuclear testing.

The Met Office has begun to produce weather forecasts from its newest and fastest supercomputer at its Exeter headquarters. The NEC SX-8 system doubles the computing power of each of the two existing 120-processor NEC SX-6 systems, operational since April 2003. NEC was named as the supplier of Met Office supercomputers in June 2002, following an EU tender worth £27.5 million.

The U.S. Department of Energy's new state-of-the art research supercomputer has completed a two-year acceptance process by the agency's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). The product of an intensive collaboration between HP and PNNL, the 11.8-teraflop, Linux-based supercomputer was designed specifically for computational biology and chemistry research, and is one of the fastest in the world for those applications.

IBM has been selected by Volvo Car Corporation to build a powerful supercomputer to perform critical automobile crash simulations. IBM will provide both hardware and services to help increase the "design-for-safety" approach.

Aston University, in the heart of England's industrial midlands, has selected the new Cray XD1 supercomputer to advance scientific and engineering research across a broad spectrum of disciplines. The system is one of the largest ordered by a European customer since the Cray XD1 supercomputer began shipping to Europe in November 2004.

The US ational Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), in collaboration with the University of Colorado, has acquired an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer to simulate ocean, weather, and climate phenomena that impact agricultural output, heating oil prices and global warming.

PathScale has optimized its EKOPath Compiler Suite and InfiniPath low-latency interconnect to provide enhanced support for the new Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has implemented IBRIX Fusion, an enterprise-class, fully-integrated parallel file system solution, on its 256-node Radium mini-cluster which supports the Palomar-Quest (PQ) project. Since deploying IBRIX Fusion, NCSA has seen a marked improvement in overall storage infrastructure utilization. The flexibility and purely software-based nature of IBRIX Fusion has allowed NCSA to deploy commodity hardware components resulting in significant reduction in capital expenditures. Previously, the Radium cluster had no local storage, with the exception of internal drives for temporary space. Following the deployment of IBRIX Fusion, applications were able to share a large data store across the entire cluster with good performance.

A hallmark of the International Supercomputer Conference series is the high caliber of keynote speakers and the 20th anniversary conference will feature one of the strongest line-ups of speakers yet. Here is an overview of the three keynote addresses and presenters: Horst Simon, Mark Seager and Wolfgang Gentzsch.

University of California scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory working with a researcher from Chonnam National University in South Korea have found that magnetic fluctuations appear to be responsible for superconductivity in a compound called plutonium-cobalt-pentagallium (PuCoGa5). The discovery of this "unconventional superconductivity" may lead scientists to a whole new class of superconducting materials and toward the goal of eventually synthesizing "room-temperature" superconductors.

HP has introduced two new HP ProLiant servers. Using the latest 64-bit Intel Xeon processor MP, the systems can boost enterprise application performance by up to 40 percent. The new servers - the HP ProLiant DL580 G3 and the HP ProLiant ML570 G3 - build on the company's lead in the x86 multiprocessor (MP) server market.

Sun Microsystems has distributed more than one million registered licenses for the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) since January 31, when the software became available on Sun's Web site. Sun also announced that the Solaris 10 OS has set fourteen world-record benchmarks in this same timeframe and demonstrated application performance improvements greater than 50 times that of previous versions of Solaris.

EMC Corporation, specialized in information storage and management, will offer CentricStor from Fujitsu Siemens Computers throughout Europe as part of the EMC Select programme. EMC will target CentricStor at mainframe customers who will be able purchase the technology-leading Virtual Tape Appliance directly from EMC sales representatives and distribution partners beginning in May. The agreement gives customers with large data centres the ability to conveniently acquire best-in-class technology to more effectively and efficiently back-up their data to tape.

NEC Corporation and Sun Microsystems have signed an agreement to expand the strategic alliance between the two firms. This expanded alliance plans to create new system solutions, incorporating technology and products from both companies that are scheduled to be made available in Japan and globally.

Pirelli Labs, the excellence research and development centre of Italy's Pirelli & C. S.p.A., will use SGI server and storage technologies as tools for its advanced activities in the field of photonics, sending communications on particles of light. One of the world's leading makers of tires and advanced solutions for telecommunications, Pirelli will drive its leading-edge design and analysis efforts with a milestone system: the 1500th SGI Altix server sold worldwide.

Oracle was cited as a leader among the select companies that Forrester invited to participate in its March 30, 2005, Forrester Wave: Application Server Platforms, Q1 2005. The new report, written by Forrester Vice President John Rymer, assesses the state of the application server platform market and evaluates how the vendors stack up against each other. Oracle was one of only two companies that received leader status, delivering a leading industry application server platform for building and deploying composite applications.

Fujitsu Siemens Computers has unveiled the new PRIMEQUEST server line based on the Intel Itanium 2 processor. The PRIMEQUEST server line combines data centre class fault immunity and high system scalability for industry standard environments running Linux and Windows Server 2003 for Itanium-based systems. This makes it an ideal choice for organisations wishing to realize the economic benefits and flexibility of industry standard solutions without compromising their business continuity. The new line is being launched globally today through Fujitsu Limited in the Asia/Pacific region as well as Fujitsu Computer Systems in North America and Fujitsu Siemens Computers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) consulting and software firm CD-adapco has purchased a six-chassis (72-processor) Cray XD1 supercomputer to meet the increasing computational demands of a broad range of CFD problems. Running its own STAR-CD and STAR-CCM+ CFD simulation codes, CD-adapco provides computer-aided engineering (CAE) solutions for the design and manufacture of products in the automotive, aerospace, biomedical, building, environmental, chemical process, marine, oil and gas, power generation and turbomachinery industries.

The National Geographic Society and IBM today launched a groundbreaking research initiative that will trace the migratory history of the human species. The Genographic Project, a five-year research partnership, will use sophisticated laboratory and computer analysis of DNA contributed by hundreds of thousands of people, including indigenous peoples and members of the general public, to map how the Earth was populated. Led by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Spencer Wells, Ph.D., a team of international scientists and IBM researchers will collect genetic samples, analyze results and report on the genetic roots of modern humans.

HP has introduced new HP StorageWorks Reference Information Storage System (RISS) open Application Programming Interface (API) that integrates storage, archiving, filing, search, databases and servers.

IBM will offer new design services to help companies integrate the microprocessor technology known as Cell into a wide range of electronics products, especially where image-hungry applications are critical, such as the aerospace, defense, industrial or medical segments.

Meiosys, a provider of high availability and on-demand computing middleware for enterprise data centres, has successfully completed a major milestone of its research to deliver true fault tolerance (transparent continuity of service) to business-critical applications on multi-processor Linux and Unix platforms in an application-agnostic fashion. Specifically, Meiosys has demonstrated a software platform, which provides deterministic record and replay of applications on both single and multi-processor server environments. Industry experts in fault tolerance previously considered the non-determinism problem for shared memory (multi-processor) environments one of the largest hurdles to providing scalable fault tolerance environments for multi-processor machines that do not require proprietary hardware or a customized software application.

IBM surpassed 1000 customers for its data virtualization software. Customers such as IKON Office Solutions Inc., Oakwood Healthcare System and the City of Saskatoon in Canada have helped increase their system utilization rates with IBM Virtualization Engine technology for storage.

Fujitsu Siemens Computers has achieved a final financial revenue for the Fiscal Year 2004 (ending March 31, 2005) that topped the six billion Euro figure. This is the highest recorded revenue in the company’s five year history. President and CEO Bernd Bischoff announced that the company achieved 6.018 billion euro in revenue, an increase of fourteen percent over the previous fiscal year. Profit before tax (PBT) also reached an all time high at 95 million euro, an improvement of 53 percent or 33 million euro over the previous fiscal year.

Laser Pacific Media Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of Eastman Kodak Company, invested in expertise and a technology infrastructure from Silicon Graphics to create a flexible, high-performance SAN in Hollywood. SGI Professional Services is now installing Autodesk Stone Shared storage, which incorporates SGI InfiniteStorage RM660 storage and SGI CXFS shared filesystem. This integration will result in easier handling of multiple 2K resolution streams for digital intermediates (DI).

Silicon Graphics has announced results for its third fiscal quarter which ended March 25, 2005. Revenue for the third quarter was $159 million, in line with the preliminary results announced April 7, 2005. Gross margin was 34.5% compared with 37.5% in the second quarter. SGI's third-quarter operating loss was $45 million, compared with an operating loss of $9 million in the second quarter. The third-quarter net loss was $45 million or $0.17 per share, compared with a net loss of $11 million or $0.04 per share in the second quarter.

Fujitsu Group companies Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. and Fujitsu Laboratories of America Inc. (FLA) have established and started operations of a Grid-based large-scale computing research environment that enables more efficient mutual use of computing resources at Fujitsu R&D facilities in Japan and the U.S. In conjunction with the inauguration of the new environment, the two companies augmented the computer resources for the Grid, upgrading the simulation environment currently available to Fujitsu for in-house use by about three-fold, to over 2000 nodes.

The Distributed European Infrastructure for supercomputing applications (DEISA) Consortium will hold a symposium on high performance computing in Paris, France, on 9 and 10 May.

Fujitsu Siemens Computers is the proud recipient of the Novell Technology Partner of the Year Award for operational excellence and its innovative FlexFrame for mySAP Business Suite solution based on the Linux operating system. The first IT Infrastructure realization of SAP’s Adaptive Computing capabilities as part of SAP NetWeaver, FlexFrame for mySAP Business Suite is an early incarnation of Grid technology on IT infrastructure. Customers who have implemented FlexFrame for mySAP have achieved up to 60 percent reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

IBM has expanded Grid computing projects at corporations across the automotive and transportation industries that illustrate the advantages of Grid computing as a major driver behind on demand computing. Land Rover and ZJ Transportation, with assistance from IBM Business Consulting Services, are utilizing new Grid computing-based solutions built on IBM's engineering and design collaboration offering that are designed to increase competitive advantage, speed time-to-market and reduce operating costs.

DataSynapse, the fastest-growing provider of Grid computing solutions for the virtual enterprise, has announced compatibility with the 64-bit Intel Xeon processor-based platforms. Supporting large data sets and both 32-bit and 64-bit applications, enterprise workloads deploying Intel server technology and DataSynapse GridServer software benefit from a powerful, highly scalable, IT infrastructure with greater memory capacity, faster application processing capabilities and guaranteed 24/7 server uptime for the highest levels of performance, productivity and service available.

ExaGrid Systems has raised an additional $13.5 million from existing investors Highland Capital Partners and Sigma Partners. This new round of funding will help expand the company's sales channels and further enhance ExaGrid's integrated storage and data protection solution.

Oracle has unveiled the results of its latest Oracle Grid Index research, which is dedicated to mapping the world's journey to Grid computing. The new research builds on last year's successful European pilot by providing a global snapshot along with European trend information on organisations' attitudes to, and adoption of, Grid computing.

New York-based JPMorgan, specialized in financial services, has chosen to work with Sun on a range of advanced IT projects, including Grid computing, data archiving and virtualized data centre solutions. Sun and JPMorgan will jointly develop several of these projects.

The 5th Annual Access Grid (AG) Retreat will be held April 26-29 at the Westin San Francisco Airport in Millbrae, California, USA. This year's meeting will be co-hosted by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Registration deadline is April 15, 2005.

A case study on the development of Acxiom Corporation's Customer Information Infrastructure (CII) Grid-computing technology has been chosen to be included in the prestigious Computerworld Honors Collection. Acxiom received the Medal of Achievement during an induction ceremony at San Francisco City Hall.

MIT has teamed up with Quanta Computer on a five-year, $20 million joint research project designed to change the way people interact with technology. Project TParty will address the complexity of today's computing landscape. Whereas people currently have to maintain a wide array of "smart" devices - from cell phones to computers to personal digital assistants - on their own, TParty is intended to move such work into the background, making such computing tasks as upgrades and back-ups more or less invisible to the user.

Sandia National Labs, Kitware Inc., and NVIDIA Corporation have achieved a breakthrough in large data scientific visualization, attaining rendering rates of over 1.5 billion polygons per second.

Cambridge Consultants has developed a WiMAX simulation testbench to support the launch of Aspex Semiconductor's innovative reference code for implementing multi-antenna basestations. The software simulates subscriber transmissions, providing an independent testing facility that can be used by developers alongside Aspex's radical 802.16d/e PHY baseband architecture in a familiar, PC-based software development environment.

Jean-François Leprince-Ringuet joins Bull as Managing Director of the International Telco Business Unit. Jean-François Leprince-Ringuet, 48, is a graduate of Ecole des Mines de Paris.

As Earth Day 2005 approaches, more scientists than ever are working to understand our environment and mankind's impact on it. Scientists at three respected institutions have joined the ranks of researchers worldwide who rely on SGI computing, visualization and storage solutions to study and preserve the planet's resources and ecosystems.

Bank of Baroda, one of India's largest banks with a presence in 20 countries, has chosen HP as its strategic IT partner for the bank's Technology Enabled Business Transformation project. The project will better position Bank of Baroda to provide its Indian and international customers and partners with world-class products and services on a 24x7 basis. Upon completion of the project, HP anticipates that the bank's 25 million customers will have access to banking and financial services anytime, anywhere throughout the world via multiple delivery channels, from Internet banking to call centres, ATMs and transaction kiosks.

Unveiled at the NAB Booth, a new Silicon Graphics Prism platform for Media employs the same architecture as one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, the SGI Altix system at NASA Ames. It also leverages SGI's 20+ years heritage in visualization and management of massive, complex data. Unlike previous generation proprietary systems, the new Silicon Graphics Prism platform delivers the power and performance of multi-pipe visualization using open-source standards and scalable, commodity graphics.

Ken North Computing LLC has released a report titled "Web Presence: A Report Card for Technology, Research and Media Organization Web Sites". The 31-page white paper provides rankings for web sites belonging to computer and software companies, media organisations, and companies that provide information technology (IT) research.

Carleton University in Ottawa has selected HP to design, implement and manage a $10 million campus-wide upgrade of its network infrastructure. The network will deliver 10 gigabit-per-second Ethernet performance and bandwidth to support diverse academic research projects, collaboration and communications, and business and administrative applications, including a student information system.

Mellanox Technologies has launched the world’s first dual-port 10Gb/s Server I/O Module (SIOM) Adapter. Based on high performance PCI Express interconnect technology, Mellanox's SIOM supports closed-chassis, hot-plug, I/O-adapter removal and insertion. This capability expands the flexibility and serviceability of InfiniBand server clusters.

HP has won a multi-million dollar, multi-year contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop technologies to improve the performance of mission-critical computer networks used during combat and other vital operations. HP's Public Sector organization collaborated on the winning proposal with HP Labs, the company's central research facility, and HP's consulting and integration business unit.

The United States should deploy widespread wired and wireless gigabit networks as a national priority, according to a white paper from the IEEE-USA Committee on Communications and Information Policy (CCIP).