Under the "Red Storm" contract, Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia), part of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), will expand its Cray-built supercomputer to peak performance of more than 50 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second) from its current 40-Tflop/s capacity in 2006.

Cray Chief Scientist Burton Smith will leave the company to assume a new role at Microsoft Corporation. Burton Smith was designer of the MTA parallel machine of Tera. Although the development of this machine was not a commercial success, Tera did acquire Cray from SGI in 2000. Tera was renamed to Cray. Before founding Tera, Burton Smith was involved in the company Denelcor, where he did design the first multithreaded machine: the HEP. The idea of multithreading is now common in several computer architectures.

LiquidIQ will feature the AMD Opteron processor. LiquidIQ delivers a set of managed computing and communications resources that can be configured with software commands into one or several cluster configurations, shared memory or cache coherent server regions. Combining the AMD Opteron processor, the world's leading x86 CPU, with Liquid Computing's superior Interconnect Driven Server architecture has created a computing system that can exceed the performance and scalability levels of legacy machines and standard commodity clusters.

AMD and Cray Inc. have signed an agreement that extends their successful relationship through the end of the decade. Cray will continue to use AMD Opteron processors for the microprocessor-based supercomputer products Cray develops during this period. In addition, the two firms will actively collaborate on Cray's mid-2006 proposal for Phase 3 of the federal government's DARPA HPCS (High Productivity Computing Systems) programme.

Norsk Hydro ASA SGI technology to expand its national and international oil exploration efforts as well as for a number of research projects. To perform seismic acoustic tomography and migration velocity analysis to determine optimal oil well drilling sites, Norsk Hydro's facility in Bergen, Norway, selected a large, shared-memory SGI Altix system. For its research centre in the port city of Porsgrunn, Norsk Hydro acquired an SGI Altix for computational fluid dynamics applications and a Silicon Graphics Prism visualization system.

To accelerate materials science research at atomic and molecular levels, the Donostia Foundation International Physics Center (DIPC), a Spanish organisation devoted to the promotion of scientific research in basic and applied physics, has chosen Silicon Graphics to upgrade its technical computing equipment.

Fujitsu Siemens Computers and Oracle have launched FlexFrame for Oracle, the first end-to-end infrastructure for Oracle Grid Computing. This offering is designed to automate all tasks across the Grid and to gain a single view of the entire server environment - which means all servers can be managed as if they were one - while saving valuable IT resources through optimized utilization of the infrastructure.

US National LambdaRail Inc.'s (NLR) unique leading-edge infrastructure is providing more bandwidth than any other nationwide network for the SC|05 conference in Seattle, Washington beginning on November 13. NLR is a major initiative of U.S. research universities and private sector technology companies. SC|05, the premier international conference on high performance computing, networking and storage, will showcase how these technologies lead to advances in research, education and commerce.