The Grids@work: Second Grid Plugtests will take place 10-14 October 2005 at the ETSI Headquarters in Sophia Antipolis, France. The theme of the event is "Participating Grid Middlewares and Infrastructures". The organisers will also host the First Unicore Summit, 11-12 October 2005 at the same venue.

Sun Microsystems and the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) are working together in the Research and Development area of Grid technologies for numerical data-intensive storage for Earth system research. The common engagement has been signed for a two-year period. The partnership is concentrating in first instance on the reserach and the introduction of innovative, efficient, platform-independent, and process-oriented Grid technologies for scientific application of modelling experiments.

A powerful Alliance which includes some of the world's leading technology experts has joined together to build a 'supercomputer' 200 times faster than a normal PC. The High Performance Computing Alliance, made up of top academics, Scottish Enterprise, Scottish SME's and global computing experts will work together to build the supercomputer which is capable of processing one trillion instructions per second.

The Virgo consortium, an international group of astrophysicists from the UK, Germany, Japan, Canada and the USA has released first results from the largest and most realistic simulation ever of the growth of cosmic structure and the formation of galaxies and quasars. In a paper published in "Nature", the Virgo Consortium shows how comparing such simulated data to large observational surveys can reveal the physical processes underlying the build-up of real galaxies and black holes.

The University's new supercomputer will foster UK involvement in "truly world class science", according to the chief executive of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Professor John O'Reilly was the guest of honour at the official launch of the £5 million High Performance Computing (HPC) facility, where he met Vice-Chancellor Sir Colin Campbell, Pro-vice chancellor for research Professor Don Grierson, and other senior University figures.

Some sixty experts, from five continents, but mostly from European countries and Japan, attended the NEC User Group, NUG-XVII meeting, hosted by the UK Met Office at their new site in Exeter, United Kingdom. This get-together, enabled experts in computing, meteorology and other technical engineering fields, to share their latest research results, crystallise future hardware and software needs and collectively leverage NEC to take these onboard in their development plans for new systems. These needs are not only for faster more powerful (future petaflop/s) systems for the scientific and technical market, but increasingly also in data management and storage handling of petabytes size file systems. In short an infrastructure to deliver a timely total solution to the user application. (Chris Lazou)

IBM and Bycast Inc. have launched new solutions designed to help deliver improved patient care through a Grid-powered storage system that enables Picture Archive and Communication System (PACS) applications and other systems to more readily access fixed-content data including medical files, documents and images. IBM Healthcare and Life Scienceís Grid Medical Archive Solution (GMAS), based on IBMís TotalStorage and eServer and Bycast Inc.ís StorageGRID software, provides flexible and scalable virtualized storage solutions for medium to large health care organisations and hospital networks.

Voltaire, specialised in interconnect solutions for high performance Grid computing, has closed $15 million in financing. Baker Capital, Pitango Venture Capital and Vertex Venture Capital led the oversubscribed round. Existing investors Platinum Venture Capital, Tamir Fishman Ventures, and The Challenge Fund also participated. Among the new investors is Paul Bonderson, co-founder and former Vice President, Engineering of Brocade, who also contributed to the round.