Contents Primeur -- October 1996

Industry news

Industrial applications

• Churchill Insurance adopts HPCN
  Chris Lazou
  Churchill is a UK insurance company with a yearly turnover of over 360 million pounds (430 MEcu) has installed Cray parallel superservers to handle the data generated by phonecall enquiries. Without a parallel system, the massive amounts of data could not be handled in time. Churchill's main operation is enabling customers to buy motorcar, household and other insurance over the phone. It relies heavily on television advertisements to attract customers, thousands of telephone lines, the calls from potential customers are free, and a corresponding number of staff linked via PCs onto a massive database.

• Telecooperation in open networks
  Uwe Harms
  Distributed working structures in networked virtual enterprises, techniques and applications of telecooperation, aspects of legal binding and security in business processes via open networks are important topics in the information age. An overview of the state-of-the-art, especially for CAE usage, was given by Professor Dr. Heinz Thielmann from the GMD Research Center in Darmstadt, at the Daimler-Benze CAE workshop beginning of October. .Thielmann said he expects that two or three proven security techniques will become quasi-standards.

  Obituary

• Obituary - Seymour Cray, Father of supercomputing
  Chris Lazou
  Seymour Cray, died on October 5th, at the age of 71 after a car crash two weeks earlier. He was one of the most single minded computer engineers of his time. He is rightfully recognized as the father of supercomputing and his computer creations have been the most influential engines for change in science and technology in the last forty years.

  HPCN industry

• Fujitsu invests 2.5 MEcu in European IT Research Centre
  Chris Lazou
  The Fujitsu European Centre for Information Technology, (FECIT) in Stockley Park, Uxbridge, near London Airport, UK, was formally opened on October 17. According to Dr. Uchida, its Managing Director, the initial capital budget is 2.5 MEcu a year. The centre will employ around 20 researchers of which 10 are already in place, and coming not only from Europe, but also from the USA and Japan

• HP, IBM and SGI new hardware releases
  Anna Solana
  Barcelona, 24-10-1996 New machines from HP/Convex , IBM and SGI/Cray, are expected to find their way to European customers. A short update on these systems.

• Daresbury Laboratory evaluates workstations
  Chris Lazou
  The annual Daresbury Machine Evaluation Workshop was held last September at Daresbury Laboratory, near Warrington, Cheshire in the UK. This workshop is the leading national technical event for distributed high performance scientific computing. It is now an important part of the Distributed Computing Support Programme (DisCo) of the EPSRC and is operated by the Central Laboratory at Daresbury. This year's important topic was the evaluation of workstations.

• SUN Starfire well suited for SAP
  Uwe Harms
  The former Cray Business Systems presented their new products and software developments under the flag of their new mother SUN in Munich on September 23. The new racehorse will be the Starfire, and it will be targeted to the commercial market.

European news

• CAESAR demonstrates aerospace applications At October 31, the Esprit project CAESAR organises a dissemination day at Silicon Graphics' Reality Centre in Reading, UK. Focus will be on application of HPCN within the aerospace industry. The results demonstrated are expected be relevant to the other industrial sectors too.

• JAMES: European high-speed backbone at your service
  Anna Markou
  On 30 September 1996 the Joint ATM Experiment on European Services (JAMES) an experimental Pan-European ATM network was officially launched at an opening ceremony in Sophia-Antipolis, France. With JAMES, European operators are moving from a technology trial to a pre-competitive market trial involving providers and users of broadband networks and pilot projects. The project is co-funded by the EC and the network operators.

• Esprit PCI-PACOS projects show great results
  Anna Solana
  The final meeting of the Esprit project PCI-PACOS was held last September in the Polytechnical University of Catalonia (UPC). PACOS focused on HPC applications and on Spanish and Italian industry. Diverse company teams, in charge of different subprojects, made presentations of their progress of programmes developed thanks to the PACOS initiative. Tom B. Clausen, the EC Officer responsible for PCI Management, assisted the meeting as a guest and made an optimistic assessment of the results which Spanish Small and Medium Enterprises have obtained through parallel computing.

Country/Region news

Germany

• Virtual reality is the main topic of Daimler-Benz CAE gathering
  Uwe Harms
  The CAE engineers of the Daimler-Benz Group met on October 7 and 8 for the fourth time to discuss and exchange their experiences in different engineering fields. This is one of the platforms in the Daimler-Benz Group, where synergy really takes place. It was organised and sponsored by debis Systemhaus Computer Communication Services (CCS). This year the number of participants grew to about 160, including engineers from the Daimler-Benz Research, automotive (Mercedes-Benz), aerospace (DASA and DASA Airbus), software houses and partners/sub-contractors of Daimler-Benz in the CAE environment. They discussed Virtual techniques, CAE hardware and software developments. Some key presentations are covered elsewhere in this issue.

• Daimler-Benz virtual reality competence centre in Ulm
  Uwe Harms
  In September Daimler-Benz opened a Virtual Reality Competence Centre at its research centre in Ulm. Virtual reality has been recognised as a key technology for product development. With the combination of CAD/CAE and virtual reality you can can "Look at, inspect, fly and sell an airplane before the first screw has been ordered." explained Dr. Fligge of DASA.

• Third GMD - NEC Workshop on Scientific Parallel Computing
  Uwe Harms
  The third GMD - NEC Workshop on Scientific Parallel Computing in St. Augustin on September 6-7, concentrated, as Professor Ulrich Trottenberg, GMD, explained, on new topics in computational fluid dynamics and structural mechanics. The meeting brought these different engineering fields together. It is a question of the future as to whether we can integrate two application areas which have already demonstrated the benefits of HPC for solving problems. The workshop gave an overview on the advances made in these fields by the move to parallel and distributed computing. In the final plenary discussion the use and benefits of HPC were discussed from an industrial and research perspective.

Poland

• Development of the Infrastructure for information Technology in Poland - a Strategic Project
  Magorzata Kozlowska
  The State Committee for Scientific Research (KBN) is the body responsible for steering the development of scientific research in Poland and for financing research projects. Development of the infrastructure for information technology and computing facilities within the scientific communities ranks very high among the KBN's priorities and is constantly receiving much attention from the Committee. This includes means of information exchange, accessibility of information resources and specialized software, as well as powerful computers. Through such a policy the quality of scientific research can be improved in the fields considered important for the state economy.

• High Performance Computing in Poland and IBM SP2 systems
  Jacek Kitowski
  In this article computer resources in Poland and their applications in research in different fields of High Performance Computing are presented with special interest given to IBM SP2 systems.

Italy

• High Performance Fortran Gives Boost to Seismic Migration Project
  Ernesto Bonomi, Carlo Nardone
  Although High Performance Fortran (HPF) has been following the tradition set by Fortran 77 and Fortran 90 in that the market has been slow to adopt it, today there are many users experiencing great success with HPF. CRS4, a Sardinian Research Center in Italy, working with a commercial oil exploration and production company is one of these successes. HPF is currently being used on the CRS4 seismic migration project known as the Geophysical Computing (GeoComp) Project and has helped to increase hardware efficiency and data accuracy.