The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is installing a new cyber-resource for the nation's scientists and engineers - a cluster of 450 Dell PowerEdge 1855 blade servers. The cluster, named Lincoln, will serve strategic campus and state initiatives and will be used by the centre's private sector partners. Lincoln's peak performance will approach 6 teraflops (6 trillion calculations per second), bringing NCSA's total compute power to nearly 50 Tflop/s.

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, NEC Corporation, and Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo have successfully interconnected quantum cryptography systems developed by Mitsubishi Electric and NEC, the first time such an experiment has been successful in Japan. The Institute of Industrial Science at University of Tokyo evaluated the system's security. Quantum cryptography guarantees absolute security, underwritten by the laws of quantum physics.

At the Cisco EXPO in Berlin, Fujitsu Siemens Computers and Cisco Systems have signed a technology collaboration agreement, which gives a boost to the ongoing enterprise trend of integration between networking and data centre management. The two companies agreed to work together on delivering combined data centre products. Through bringing together core network, server, applications and storage components, the agreement is designed to offer customers, who increasingly expect their infrastructure to deliver value as a whole, simplified integrated solutions and additional economic efficiency within the Dynamic Data Center environment. The global technology collaboration is effective immediately.

Dell has introduced 4-gigabit Dell/EMC CX midrange storage systems with global services and build-to-order capabilities designed to reduce deployment time and cost. These new products are tested and validated on Dell enterprise systems for applications such as Oracle databases, Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange Server.

ClusterVision has been awarded the contract to build the DAS-3 Grid (Distributed ASCI Supercomputer). The DAS-3 Grid will comprise five Linux supercomputer clusters, to be hosted at four leading Dutch universities using SURFnet's state-of-the-art dynamic multi-colour optical network and Myricom's Myri-10G interconnect.

The second phase of CERN openlab, a partnership between CERN and leading IT companies, was officially launched at a ceremony at CERN. The industrial partners in this second phase are HP, Intel and Oracle. The second phase of CERN openlab builds on experience from the last three years, where the partnership produced many excellent technical results in the field of cluster and Grid computing. Activities for the start-up of the second phase of CERN openlab are based around a Platform Competence Centre, a Grid Interoperability Centre, and an IT security initiative.