Today's supercomputers are built commodity-of-the-shelf (COTS) systems, are they not? Absolutely not, as the example of the new hpcLine system in Paderborn shows. Although the processors and many other components are standard, and can be found in many other computers too, the complete system is custom designed. This is typical of today's cluster supercomputers. The hpcLine in Paderborn was designed by PC2 - the Paderborn Parallel Computing Centre in collaboration with Fujitsu-Siemens Computers. Fujitsu Siemens led a consortium with many other companies that each delivered a part of the system. The hpcLine was inaugurated on June 21st at an event in Paderborn that also included presentations from supercomputing experts from Japan and the US. About one hundred attendees came to the city on one of the hottest days in Germany in June to learn about the cooling especially designed for the Paderborn hpcLine. The next day, at the presentation of the new official TOP500 list, we learned the system entered the list at position 205.

"It is encouraging that the designers of the next generation of supercomputers, expected in 4-7 years, are once again picking up the gauntlet and accepting the challenge of solving problems thrown up by the use of new semiconductor devices. In doing so they push back the frontiers of semiconductor technologies": 'Supercomputers & Their Use', Lazou, 1985. Around 625 participants from 29 countries attended the 20th International Supercomputer Conference and 47 exhibitors displayed their ware in the associated exhibition in Heidelberg. For me, this 20th anniversary is a double celebration as I finished writing my book "Supercomputers And Their Use", in June 1985. (Chris Lazou)

The new hpcLine supercomputer in Paderborn will be part of the high-performance computing equipment in the German state of North Rhein Westphalia (NRW). Paderborn is located in the North of that state. From the western part, Aachen, Christian Bischof, Director of the Supercomputer Centre at the Aachen University of Technology, explained at the hpcLine opening seminar, the ICT cooperation that exists between the academic institutions in the state in what is called the Ressourcenverbund NRW.

At the inauguration in Paderborn of the new hpcLine cluster, PC2 manager Jens Simon explained the design choices made in the cluster and showed some benchmark results. With 1,978 Tflop/s of Linpack performance, the machine ranks at position 205 of the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

The Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing has a long history of providing services and doing research on HPC systems and Grid computing. The combination of the two is what makes the centre special. It is not a classical supercomputing centre, and it is not a tradional research centre, but it combines the two. Hence the systems, like the new hpcLine, are both research machines, exploring new architectures, and providing the basis to do research on new parallel or resource management software. Odej Kao from PC2 presented some new research projects that fit the tradition.

At the inauguration meeting of the hpcLine in Paderborn, Motoi Okudo from the Peta-Scale Computing Research Center at Fujitsu Laboratories in Japan, gave an overview of the Grid activities in Japan and explained the route the country is taking towards petaflops (Pflop/s) supercomputers. Current supercomputers are a thousand times slower: in the Tflop/s range. Japan has not given up the supercomputer race, and the approach is different from the US route.

A new patch enhances TORQUE Resource Manager. TORQUE Resource Manager's user community, in co-operation with Cluster Resources, contributed several fixes in the last month to create TORQUE 1.2.0p5. One important fix stops the problem of qstat hanging while pbs_server is waiting for an update from an offline MOM. The problem occurred when a MOM in the "down, job-exclusive" state was marked offline using the "pbsnodes -o" command.

The Gas Natural Group, a global energy services company, has chosen Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They needed a flexible solution for Grid computing which enabled hardware swappingbased on Oracle RAC.

The Hierarchical Data Format group is spinning off from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) as a non-profit corporation supporting open source software and non-proprietary data formats.

Nallatech, the FPGA high-performance computing solutions expert, has entered into a strategic collaborative arrangement with Silicon Graphics Inc. to develop new business opportunities within the high-performance computing market. The companies plan to offer new products and services based on SGI's reconfigurable system technology and Nallatech's Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) computing technology. Under the arrangement, Nallatech and SGI plan to assess complementary capabilities and integrate, customize and deploy FPGA computing solutions to existing customers and new prospects.

This year, SC 05 will be hosting its sixth annual Bandwidth Challenge in Seattle, Washington on November 12-18, 2005. This contest serves to challenge scientists and networking engineers to create the best and most advanced techniques for utilizing vast amounts of data and showcasing it on advanced networks. The key to this bandwidth challenge is to display the data via a meaningful application.

Psychsoftpc has introduced the new Psychlone Cluster line of Beowulf supercomputers for Node Based Parallel Processing High Performance Computing (HPC) applications.

SANRAD Incorporated and emBoot have launched a joint solution that allows storage administrators to use SANRAD's iSCSI V-Switch in conjunction with emBoot's netBoot/i software to enable servers to boot off the IP SAN using any standard Ethernet network interface, eliminating the need for internal server disk drives. The SANRAD and emBoot solution extends Windows-based network booting using iSCSI into a wide range of storage, including Fibre Channel, FC SAN and SCSI.

Oracle has signed significant customer wins during the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2005. Customers continue to choose Oracle software to integrate and automate business systems, help reduce total cost of ownership and create a single, global view of their business operations. Also, Oracle's focus on strong, strategic customer relationships continues to contribute to the company's growth.

HP has introduced a high-end disk array at an entry-level price for computing environments that need 24 x 7 business continuity with zero downtime. The HP StorageWorks XP10000 Disk Array offers enterprise-class business continuity and advanced virtualization technology to businesses of all sizes. Additionally, new software for the HP StorageWorks XP family streamlines storage management, improves efficiencies and reduces costs.

IBM has launched a new initiative that will provide universities with free access to a range of emerging technologies developed in IBM's Research and Development labs. The goal of the new "Academic License" programme is to help train, educate and accelerate development skills around open standards-based technologies. As a result, university professors can use the technologies to build course curriculum, while providing students a competitive advantage in the workforce. In return, faculty and students will also provide IBM with feedback on how to improve these technologies before inclusion into future IBM products.

Sun Microsystems has made available the new Sun StorEdge 9985 system, a scaled-down version of the Sun StorEdge 9990 system, Sun's leading data-centre-class platform for large-scale consolidation and mission-critical data availability.

Sun Microsystems has selected Ipedo as a key component of its new Sun Connection service. Sun will use Ipedo's software to integrate information from distributed systems and manage an extensive knowledge base that includes configuration information from more than one million systems.

IBM has made available the IBM DB2 Entity Analytic Solutions (EAS) portfolio for the SGI Altix high-performance computing platform. The combination of SGI systems and IBM's analytics software comprises a fully integrated identity recognition platform.

IBM has made available the IBM DB2 Entity Analytic Solutions (EAS) portfolio for the SGI Altix high-performance computing platform. The combination of SGI systems and IBM's analytics software comprises a fully integrated identity recognition platform.

Virtual research collaboration is being taken to a new level with the creation of the very first international, interdisciplinary computer Grid. It has been established by the Worldwide Universities Network - at five sites in three countries more than 5000 miles apart. This major step forward for Grid computing shows that real-world applications can be delivered on an international basis.

Advanced Internet Methods and Emergent Systems (AIMES), a research and technology transfer centre of the University of Liverpool, is leading the deployment of advanced internet technologies, and in particular Grid computing, which will ensure that businesses in the region are at the forefront of computing capability. The official opening celebration will focus on the theme of 'technology to wealth creation’ with input from collaborators, partners and spin-out companies.

An UK e-Science project which is helping chemists to analyse and store the massive quantity of data being produced by modern combinatorial techniques, has been awarded additional funding of GBP 415,000 by the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). CombeChem is one of the most ambitious uses of Semantic Web and Grid computing. Led by the School of Chemistry, the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), and the Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute (S3RI) at the University of Southampton, the project will facilitate the measurement, storage and reuse of information on thousands of chemical compounds.

Wolfram Research announces Mathematica 5.2, the 64-bit multicore release and the latest version of the world-renowned science and technology software system Mathematica. Hot on the heels of Mathematica 5.1, itself released just eight months ago, 5.2 brings 64-bit technology to all supported platforms-an industry first. More than 4.3GB of memory (the 32-bit address limit) can now be addressed, and high-precision or large numbers are processed in 64-bit rather than 32-bit digit chunks for faster computation.

Dassault Systèmes has signed a development partnership with Platform Computing. Platform has joined Dassault Systèmes’ Software Community Programme as a CAA V5 Software Partner and will develop, market, and sell Grid computing solutions based on the Dassault Systèmes Component Application Architecture (CAA V5).

Since 1997, Cybercamps has provided children between the ages of 7-17 the opportunity to learn cutting-edge technology through a unique summer camp programme. This year, Cybercamps has added another layer to its summer programme: distributive computing. Distributive computing enables vastly large computational processing projects to be broken down and spread out amongst a larger set of "idle" computers.

Astronomy is one of the most ancient sciences that humanity has ever pursued. Since the dawn of civilisation, mankind has gazed at the night sky, awed and inspired by its black emptiness, the apparent immutability of the heavens, and wondered. Through the study of the heavens mankind has always sought to discover its place in the scheme of things, its connection to the divine, and its ultimate fate. Mankind has evolved from these early times, we live now in a technological era of high precision instrumentation, of large scale infrastructures to pursue knowledge. Yet we still gaze at the skies, wondering where we come from, and where ultimately we will go. The goal of modern Astronomy is still to answer these ancient, meaningful questions. It is a quest for knowledge that is driven by mankind's endless curiosity, by its need to understand, and it is fuelled by its inventiveness and ingenuity. New technological advances lead to new discoveries, but also to new questions.

The BioSciences Group of Fujitsu Computer Systems has unveiled a new technique for generating enhanced predictions for ADME/Tox research, consisting of a unique docking-based approach combined with off-the-shelf and purpose-built technologies, to develop viable and effective predictive models. The new approach was developed with a commercial collaborator focusing on drug-resistant infectious diseases and cancer.

General Dynamics C4 Systems, a business unit of General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin have held the U.S. Army's preliminary design review (PDR) on the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (WIN-T) programme, the Army's next-generation battlefield communications network. During the PDR, the Army reviewed the "first draft" of the WIN-T system design, including the top-level architecture and key component technologies.

CenterPoint Energy Houston Electric LLC, and IBM are working together to explore broadband over power line (BPL) technology. CenterPoint Energy has opened a BPL technology centre at one of its facilities in Houston to examine uses of BPL technology for consumers as well as utility companies. In addition, CenterPoint Energy has launched a limited pilot programme designed to demonstrate the capabilities of BPL in the home to Houston-area consumers.