| News digest June 2006 |
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| Industry
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HPCN industry |
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| Interview with Dr. Evan Smyth, DreamWorks Animation |
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When the idea that feature-length animated films could be created using computers first emerged, a common reaction was that nothing could replace the richness of images produced by dedicated artists toiling over their drawing boards, that the days of animated epics would be over. In fact, computer-generated films have created a resurgence in animated features - two of the 10 highest-grossing films in history are animated features released within the past three years. Computer-generated images have also contributed to the success of the most successful films of the past decade.
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| Sun Microsystems powers Asia's fastest supercomputer at Tokyo Institute of Technology |
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The Tokyo Institute of Technology has installed the fastest supercomputer outside the United States. Tokyo Tech's supercomputer, called TSUBAME after the University's symbol bird swallow, is powered by Dual-core AMD Opteron processor-based Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers. This successful installation and benchmark completion marks Sun's largest high performance computing (HPC) win to date, and TSUBAME is expected to be one of the ten largest supercomputers in the world, when the next Top500 list is released in June 2006.
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| NCF launches European tender procedure for new Dutch supercomputer |
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In the beginning of May 2006, the Dutch Association for National Computer Facilities (NCF) has started a European tender procedure in order to purchase a new national supercomputer. The current SGI supercomputer dates back from 2000 (Teras - Origin3800) and 2003 (Aster - Altix3700), and is due for replacement. The national supercomputer provides computational power to benefit public scientific research. The NCF offers access to the national supercomputer based on a peer review system.
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| IBM invests US$2.2 million to expand Linux Technology Center in Brazil |
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IBM will invest US$2.2 million in 2006 to expand its Linux Technology Center (LTC) in Brazil. Developers at IBM's Linux Technology Center in Brazil will work to make Linux better as part of the open source community specializing in developing Linux with cell, power and virtualization technologies.
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| Massively Parallel Technologies announces multi-operating system support |
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Massively Parallel Technologies Inc., a provider of on-demand high-performance computing (HPC), has added Red Hat Linux, SuSE Linux, Microsoft Server 2003, Microsoft Server 2003 x64 and Mac OS X to their list of supported operating systems.
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| NCSA adds Dell Blade cluster to cyber-resources |
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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.
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| Hydro Oil and Energy leverages Scali software to manage Norway's most powerful Linux cluster |
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Scali Manage has been selected by Hydro Oil and Energy to manage Norway's most powerful Linux cluster. The cluster consists of five hundred Dell PowerEdge 1855 blade servers, with a total of 1000 Pentium Xeon CPUs, and four Dell PowerEdge 2850 servers. With 7.6 Teraflops processing power (7.6 trillion floating point operations per second) this is the most powerful cluster in Norway.
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| Swiss National Supercomputing Center will expand Cray XT3 system in response to high demand for computational sciences |
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The Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS), which placed Europe's first Cray XT3 massively parallel processing (MPP) supercomputer into production in January 2006, will soon expand the already-powerful system by 50 percent to meet increasing demand from Switzerland's scientific user community. CSCS reported at the Cray User Group meeting in Lugano, Switzerland last week that it released an order to increase the size of its Cray supercomputer from 5.7 teraflops (trillions of calculation per second) to more than 8.6 teraflops by the end of August 2006.
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| Fifthwave forms Grid partnership with Aspeed |
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FIFTHWAVE Solutions formed a partnership with ASPEED Software aimed at helping European banks and financial institutions capitalise on their infrastructure investments. With a growing trend towards infrastructure virtualisation, many banks are exploring how they can create a grid computing environment in order to maximise their IT assets fully. The partnership with ASPEED will allow FIFTHWAVE to support these banks through the introduction of a new software innovation designed to grid-enable legacy and other applications in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
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| ATK Launch Systems selects Linux Networx supercomputer |
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ATK Launch Systems, a leading provider of advanced weapons and space systems, has ordered Linux Networx'ssupercomputer. The system is expected to increase ATK Launch Systems’ compute capability to over 2.24 Tflop/s. Linux Networx will tune the system to drive the performance of structures, fluid dynamics, and other aerodynamics and shock physics applications, optimizing Total Application Throughput and time-to-results for a mix of these sophisticated scientific simulation codes.
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| Gridscape II - a Grid portal with Google maps integration |
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The GRIDS Lab and the Gridbus Project at the University of Melbourne did release the Gridscape II software which manages the gathering of information from arbitrary, heterogeneous and distributed sources and presents them together seamlessly within a single interface. It also leverages the Google Maps API in order to provide a highly interactive user interface. Gridscape II is simple and easy to use, providing a solution to those users who don't wish to invest heavily in developing their own monitoring portal from scratch, and also for those users who want something that is easy to customise and extend for their specific needs.
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| New Supercomputing Center to advance the science of nanotechnology |
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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), in collaboration with IBM and New York state, has signed a $100 million partnership to create the world's most powerful university-based supercomputing centre, and a top 10 supercomputing centre of any kind in the world. The Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI), based on the Rensselaer campus and at its Rensselaer Technology Park in Troy, New York, is designed both to help continue the impressive advances in shrinking device dimensions seen by electronics manufacturers, and to extend this model to a wide array of industries that could benefit from nanotechnology, according to the partners.
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| OpenFabrics Alliance to host Workshop June 22-23, 2006 in Paris |
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The OpenFabrics Alliance (formerly OpenIB Alliance), an industry group that develops open-source software for InfiniBand and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Ethernet technologies (iWARP), is organizing an OpenFabrics Workshop in Paris June 22-23, 2006 at Hotel Le Meridien Montparnasse.
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| ISC2006 to offer largest ever HPC Exhibition, early registration ends May 26 |
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When the 2006 International Supercomputer Conference convenes in the Congress Center Dresden on June 27-30, the exhibition hall will be filled with more than 60 booths exhibiting the latest systems, services and applications in supercomputing. The exhibition, which will be greatly enhanced this year with the conference's move to Dresden, will be Europe's largest exhibition devoted to high-performance computing.
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| Fujitsu Siemens Computers is introducing new PRIMERGY servers based on Intel's latest dual-socket processors |
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Fujitsu Siemens Computers has introduced four new PRIMERGY dual-socket S3 generation servers: the RX200 S3 and RX300 S3 rack servers, the TX200 S3 tower server as well as the BX620 S3 blade server. The new PRIMERGY models are based on the new Intel Bensley platform that has been unveiled by Intel, and are equipped with the new Dual-Core Intel Xeon 5000 sequence processors. These stand for improved performance and workload in combination with lower power consumption.
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| HP boosts server lines with dual core-based platforms |
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HP's next-generation of HP ProLiant and HP BladeSystem server line-ups will include models powered by Intel's latest dual-core technologies - the Intel Xeon 5100 and 5000 processor series. The new x86 processor-based HP ProLiant and HP BladeSystem servers address customer needs of power, cooling and virtualization through a balanced architecture design, simplified platform transitions and improved IT efficiency.
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| IBM unveils breakthrough business class mainframe and targets growth of SOA transactions and data |
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IBM has launched a new System z9 Business Class mainframe with pricing starting at around $100,000 and designed to tackle the critical computing challenges of our time: the coming wave of automated Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), new heightened expectations for data security and the rapid expansion of emerging markets. The aggressively positioned system features a new specialty engine and capabilities.
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| NEC & Microsoft expand strategic collaboration into IT/network convergence area |
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NEC and Microsoft have signed an agreement to expand their collaborative relationship for IT/network convergence, including new projects in the enterprise networking area and existing collaborative efforts for server business into next-generation high reliability servers and HPC (High Performance Computing) servers. In addition, the two companies announced the conclusion of a patent cross-licensing agreement.
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| NASA Goddard Space Flight Center selects Linux Networx supercomputers for Earth and Space sciences research |
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Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) has ordered a Linux Networx Custom Supersystem for the NASA Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at the Goddard Space Flight Center. The new system is designed to dramatically increase throughput for applications ranging from studying weather and climate variability to simulating astrophysical phenomena. The system will supplement the NCCS architecture with improved price/performance and is designed to scale to 40 Tflop/s) in its full configuration.
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| Cray selects DRC Computer Corporation for reconfigurable coprocessing |
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DRC has been selected by Cray to provide a new Coprocessor Module as a massively parallel reconfigurable option for future Cray supercomputers. DRC makes a coprocessor module that plugs into a standard multi-processor AMD Opteron system, providing direct access to adjacent DDR memory and Opteron processors at HyperTransport speed and nanosecond latency.
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| Massively Parallel Technologies and Fulcrum strategic partners for biometric solution performance |
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Massively Parallel Technologies Inc., a provider of on-demand high-performance computing (HPC), has signed a new partnership with Fulcrum Strategic Partners Inc. (FSP), a US-based biometric consulting company.
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| Agilysys and InfoSystems ship the largest IBM eServer Cluster 1350 through the channel |
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Agilysys Inc., a provider of enterprise computer technology solutions, and its partner InfoSystems Inc., one of Tennessee's fastest growing systems integration companies and a long-time Agilysys KeyLink Systems Group (KSG) reseller, recently shipped the largest IBM eServer Cluster 1350 with Cluster Systems Management (CSM) through the channel. The solution was shipped to COLSA, a federal agency private contractor specializing in missile flight simulation testing.
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| Celoxica releases programming environment for SGI RASC RC100 blades |
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Celoxica has launched software programming support for the SGI RASC RC100 blade from Silicon Graphics. Based on SGI's groundbreaking RASC (Reconfigurable Application-Specific Computing) technology, the RC100 computation blade packs the power of dozens of supercomputer nodes into a single blade by leveraging the parallelism of dual Xilinx Virtex 4 FPGAs. Using Celoxica's DK Design Suite and libraries, the RC100 blades can be programmed directly by the end user to accelerate custom C software algorithms, overcoming the traditional barrier to FPGA-based computing.
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| HPC-Europa Transnational Access' next closing day on May 15 |
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The Transnational Access activity enables researchers working in almost any country in Europe to carry out a collaborative international research visit of up to three months duration in one of the participating countries, and to gain access to some of the most powerful High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities in Europe. Next closing day for application is May 15, 2006.
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| IBM unveils new Blade computing offerings for small and mid-size businesses |
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IBM has introduced new BladeCenter offerings that deliver easier, more affordable management capabilities to small- and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). By integrating servers, networks, storage and applications in one system, IBM BladeCenter simplifies computing environments significantly and helps lower IT costs by providing businesses of all sizes access to highly efficient computing capabilities at an affordable price point.
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| Mitsubishi, NEC and Tokyo University realize successful interconnection of quantum encryption networks for first time in Japan |
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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.
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| SGI introduces 4-gigabit Fibre Channel storage to the mid-range market |
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Silicon Graphics has launched the industry's first 4-gigabit Fibre Channel-based storage system designed for the mid-range market: the SGI InfiniteStorage 4000. The SGI InfiniteStorage 4000 continues the tradition of industry-leading storage technology from SGI's InfiniteStorage product line. Delivering cost-effective, scalable storage, the SGI InfiniteStorage 4000 features a combination of capacity and adaptable performance that will help IT organisations meet the current and future needs of highly technical computing and business applications.
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| Sun Fire servers with CoolThreads technology outstanding in latest SPEC Java benchmark performance results |
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Sun Fire T1000 and T2000 servers running open source UltraSPARC T1 processors and the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) set world-records for performance and blew away competitive systems from Dell/Microsoft and IBM/AIX in recent SPEC Java Business benchmark (SPECjbb2005) testing. Sun also extended its lead in performance per watt and SWaP ratings, further demonstrating CoolThreads systems as the most efficient platform ever for delivery of web and application services.
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| First-ever simulation of functioning organism spawned by ingenuity of Illinois researchers and power of SGI Altix |
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In another achievement for scientists breaking new ground on SGI Altix systems, researchers in Illinois have created the first atomic-level simulation of a complete, functioning organism. Researchers hope the breakthrough will speed development of new drugs to combat viruses in plants, animals and even people. A research team led by Professor Klaus Schulten at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign simulated a plant virus with as many as 1 million moving atoms. The achievement is historic due to the sheer complexity of the problem: Had the researchers relied on today's desktop computer systems, they wouldn't have finished until 2041.
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| SGI receives court approval of first day motions |
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