Representatives of MATAV and Cisco Systems officially inaugurated the national backbone network that now provides high-speed Internet access for the Budapest headquarters of the Hungarian National Research Education Network (Hungarian NREN). It will also support seven universities, which operate as regional network centres, and several other research and educational institutions. The new network will help ensure reliable access to the GEANT2 computer network - the pan-European research network supported by the European Union - for nearly 600,000 users of the Hungarian NREN in almost 700 institutions.

Fujitsu Siemens Computers has announced the new PRIMERGY TX300 S2 dual processor tower server, which has already beaten its own world record performance benchmark for Microsoft Exchange Server 2003.

ClusterVision, specialist in Linux supercomputer clusters, has announced another top year as a supplier of Linux supercomputer clusters in the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. The year 2004 saw a near doubling of sales revenue and a further increase of market share as a result of new customer wins as well as considerable repeat business from existing customers.

ModViz I has made available its Virtual Graphics Platform (VGP) Release 1.0, a standards-based software solution that virtualizes 3D graphics intensive applications across clusters of commodity-based computers. VGP provides to customers, independent software vendors, cluster computing manufacturers and application developers a common OpenGL-based computing platform that delivers supercomputing level visualization with extreme data size and scalability on clusters of 3D graphics Linux computing nodes.

Cluster File Systems, specialized in high-performance parallel file systems, has released a major update to the Lustre file system on its public download site. Used on many of the world's largest Linux clusters, Lustre 1.2.4 represents a significant advancement in the development of a world-class open-source file system. This release further demonstrates Cluster File Systems' ongoing commitment to make new versions of Lustre available to the free software community on a regular basis.

HP has introduced a suite of storage resource management software that bridges the islands of server and storage management prevalent in data centres today. The first storage offering in the company's roadmap for a unified server and storage management architecture, HP Storage Essentials enables customers to simplify IT infrastructure administration and drive collaboration without compromising control.

A virtual reality drama by University at Buffalo (UB) researchers, aimed at transforming the movie-going experience, is driving the development of increasingly "self-aware" computational agents that are able to improvise responses to the spontaneous actions of human users.

HP has introduced two solutions that help health care organisations efficiently and cost-effectively access and manage patient information in order to improve quality of care. The HP Medical Archiving Solution and the HP Forms Automation System 1.2 were being showcased at the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Conference, recently held in Dallas.

Linux Networx received more funding in 2004 than any other company in Utah, USA, according to PricewaterhouseCooper's (PWC) MoneyTree survey, a quarterly study of investment activity in the United States. In November 2004, Linux Networx received $40 million from Oak Investment Partners and Tudor Ventures, making it the largest single investment in a Utah company last year.

HP is enabling faster, more collaborative biomedical research for the Harvard Medical School - Partners HealthCare Center for Genetics and Genomics (HPCGG), one of the United States' premier biomedical research organisations, with the delivery of a high-performance HP server cluster based on Linux. HP will develop a computational infrastructure capable of facilitating the use of genetic, genomic and proteomic technologies in both research and clinical medicine.