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December 1999
Primeur is a monthly Virtual Magazine on High Performance
Computing
and
Networking in Europe. It is produced by an
editorial
team
composed of professionals in publishing and HPCN. You can put the editorial
team to
work as well. Read about our services and
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opportunities
and find out about the friendly
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Breaking news
- just a click away:
Coverage of the TOP500 list in Primeur
The TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers is a record of the
500 fastest
supercomputers in the world, the centres and the countries where they are
located. Primeur has a number
of articles and services supporting this effort. The list was presented at the
large supercomputer conference SC99, also covered by Primeur.
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TOP500
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SC99
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Media and visualisation
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Linux
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HPCN industry
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Cluster computing
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Applications
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United Kingdom
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Portugal
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Italy
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Germany
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France
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| job
advertisement |
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The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH
Zurich) invites applications for a
Professor of Computational Sciences
and
Director of the Swiss Center for Scientific Computing CSCS
in Manno TI. The Director’s duties will include managing CSCS and projects
of the Swiss universities requiring high performance computing resources and
expertise as well as research, teaching and services in collaboration with
universities and industry in Switzerland and abroad.
CSCS is the national center for scientific computing, serving all universities
in Switzerland. As a result of the present reorientation the center will
increase its activities in the areas of research and teaching. CSCS is part of
the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, and is
situated close to Lugano in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland.
Applications are solicited from candidates with excellent scientific records as
well as internationally recognised research and teaching activities in one of
the central fields of application of supercomputing such as computational
chemistry, biology, physics, fluid dynamics or climate modelling. The successful
candidate will have exceptional management skills and experience with high
performance computing systems. An excellent command of the English language is
essential, Italian and German would be an asset.
Please submit your application, curriculum vitae, list of publications and a
table of completed projects to the President of ETH Zurich, Prof. Dr. O.
Kübler, ETH Zentrum, CH-8092 Zurich, no later than January 31, 2000.
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The leads of the articles
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| Experimental technology grid at the University of Tennessee
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The
US National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $2 million dollars over five years to a
group of researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) for the creation of an experimental technology grid on the UTK campus. The purpose of this infrastructure
is to support leading-edge research on technologies and applications for high-performance distributed computing and information systems.
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| SDSC acquires 64-Processor SUN HPC 10000 Supercomputing Platform for NPACI
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The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) recently installed a 64-processor Sun HPC 10000 StarFire supercomputer.
The Sun HPC 10000 will be used for both high-performance computing allocations for the researchers across the USA and strategic collaborations to simulate magnetic recording materials and the behaviour of neurons.
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| European Networking live at SC99 via transatlantic connection
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The High Performance Computing Centre Stuttgart (HLRS) in Germany will demonstrate distributed computing and collaborative working between different European High Performance Computing Centres and the European Networking Demonstrations booth at Supercomputing '99. The world's largest conference on High Performance Networking and Computing
is currently
held in Portland/Oregon .
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| HLRS steps forward in Metacomputing
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The High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) in Stuttgart/Germany together with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) in Pittsburgh/Pennsylvania the Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL) in Tsukuba/Japan and Manchester Computing Centre (MCC) in Manchester/UK have announced the next step forward in metacomputing. Based on the communication software PACX-MPI developed by HLRS and the distributed visualization tool COVISE developed jointly by HLRS and Vircinity, the partners will couple their high end systems into one single resource during Supercomputing '99 at Portland/Oregon. The evolving metacomputer will consist of two Cray T3E-900/512 one Cray T3E-1200/512 and an SR8000/64. Together these machines will provide a peak performance of 2.2 Tflop/s.
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| Project aims to streamline supercomputer data analysis
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Mississippi
State University scientists are exploring ways to get maximum benefits
from computer-generated mathematical simulations of everything from
high technology equipment to developing weather patterns.
MSU's National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center and Troy,
N.Y.-based Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute recently received a $1.27
million NSF grant to develop a prototype system called EVITA to
visualize large-scale datasets.
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| NASA Ames
installs 512-Processor SGI
2800 supercomputer
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NASA Ames has installed
an SGI
large shared memory supercomputer
at the
NASA's
Center of Excellence for Information Technology, for the study of complex
problems through simulations in computational fluid dynamics, global climate
modeling and computational astrobiology.
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| Worcester
Polytechnic Institute install 32 processor SP
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Worcester
Polytechnic Institute has taken delivery of an 32 processor
IBM RS/6000 SP
supercomputer to develop computational models that will help
researchers tackle complex problems ranging from solving the mysteries
behind accidental fires and explosions, to why plaque causes human
arteries to collapse, to improved design of highway traffic barriers.
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| Schlumberger chooses IBM RS/6000 SP for seismic imaging centres
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Schlumberger has selected the IBM RS/6000 SP for its major seismic depth imaging centers in Houston, Texas and Gatwick, UK. The Houston centre has installed a 40-node RS/6000 SP, delivering more than 64 Gflop/s and has plans to add an additional 16 nodes in the future. The Gatwick centre has installed a 16-node RS/6000 SP, with a processing output of more than 25 Gflop/s. Each system employs more than two terabytes of IBM SSA RAID disk.
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| US airforce Wright-Patterson
acquires IBM SP supercomputer
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IBM
announced that the Aeronautical Systems Center (ASC)
Major Shared Resource Center (MSRC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base has installed an IBM RS/6000 SP supercomputer to support its aircraft safety research. This Wright-Patterson system ranks fifty-ninth on the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. The RS/6000 SP enables the ASC MSRC to carry out complex calculations and simulations pertaining to computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry and materials, signal/image processing, computational electronics and nanoelectronics, computational electro-magnetics and acoustics, and computational structural mechanics to improve the safety and security features of airplanes.
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| Alcatel acquires corporate partners
the Internet2 project
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Alcatel has
acquired former Internet2 corporate partners Packet
Engines and Xylan, Alcatel will
continue the work with
Internet2 and broaden its solution offering to include also technology from
newly acquired Assured Access and Internet Devices.
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| First Fujitsu VPP5000 Supercomputer Installed at Météo-France
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Fujitsu Systems (Europe) Limited
announced that the first Fujitsu VPP5000 system, the company's newest supercomputer installed at Météo-France, Toulouse has just passed the acceptance achieving the system availability of more than 99% over a 30 day period (24 hours full operation per day). The system - which consists of 31 of the most powerful vector processors in the world offering peak performance of 297.6 Gflop/s - will contribute to greatly improve the accuracy of the weather forecast.
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| French course on MPI
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IDRIS (Institut du développement et des ressources en informatique scientifique), the national supercomputing centre of CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) in France, has released an MPI-2 training guide. It is written in French and will be used as a basis for advanced training on MPI.
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| Petaflop/s Workshop 2000
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The
European Research Community on Flow Turbulence and Combustion (ERCOFTAC) together with
HLRS and
CLRC will organise on August 16-18, 2000,
a three-day symposium that will look at the impact of future computing technology on research and industrial applications by bringing
together leading hardware designers, algorithmic and software developers, and applications specialists.
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| Computer contract signed for High-Performance Center Bavaria - first TFlop computer in Europe
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On October 29, the contract between Bavarian Academy of Sciences (founded in 1759) - Leibniz Rechenzentrum (LRZ) - and Hitachi was signed in Munich in the rooms of the Academy. Primeur had the chance, to participate in this historic event. A first two node system, used for training, will be delivered this year.
The SR8000 F1 with 112 nodes will be shipped in the first quarter of 2000, the last stage will be realised in 2002 with 168 nodes. The system in its first stage will deliver 1.34 TFlop/s and in 2002, 2 TFlop/s peak performance. LRZ expects, based on benchmark experiences, an application performance of more than 400 GFlop/s and more than 600 GFlop/s in 2002. Some details of the configuration are summarised.
Signing the Contract
On October 29 at 7 p.m. Professor Heinrich Noeth, President of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, Professor H.-G. Hegering, Head of Leibnizrechenzentrum, and Hiroaki Nakanishi, President Hitachi Europe, signed the contract for a Hitachi SR8000 F1 system for LRZ. This is the new workhorse for the High-Performance Computing Center Bavaria (HLRB) which complements the centers in Juelich, John von Neuman Center for Computing, and HLRS, the Stuttgart center. The next German center is scheduled for Northern Germany.
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| CINECA celebrates
30th anniversary
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Italy's largest supercomputer centre CINECA, celebrates on
November 25th and 26th the 30th Anniversary of its foundation with the organization of two special events: "Crossing the Millennium Milestone" and
the Fifth ARCADE (Academic Research Computing Advanced facilities Discussion Group Europe) meeting.
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| Portugal Telecom Signs Information Technology Services Agreement with Case, CGI and IBM
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Portugal Telecom, IBM, CGI and Case agreed creating a systems and information technology partnership worth US$1 billion over 10 years. The largest such contract ever signed in Portugal.
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| DSP-C emulation from ACE
offers design flow breakthrough for new architectures
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ACE Associated Compiler Experts bv is now offering emulation capability for DSP-C applications. Without having access to the processor, simulator and compiler, DSP application developers are able to functionally emulate their applications for the processor at hand using CoSy generated DSP-C emulators. Emulation can be done locally on a PC or workstation to validate that the application algorithms function as desired.
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| HPCN Europe 2000 dead line
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HPCN Europe's
deadline for paper submission is
January 8th
2000. The conference dates have also beeen changed to
May 8 - 10, 2000
Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
The Conference consists of
four themes: Web-based Cooperative Applications; Industrial and end-user Applications of HPCN; Computational Science; and
Computer Science research in HPCN.
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| Dutch IBM division opens Advanced Internet Application Centre for Europe, the Middle East and Africa
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IBM has inaugurated a new centre in The Netherlands, which will particularly focus on the development of applications for the Next Generation Internet, also referred to as Internet 2.
This Advanced Internet Applications Center, located in Zoetermeer, enables IBM to design technologies, that allow customers in Europe, the Middle East as well as Africa, to implement Internet applications for e-business, synchronous instant messaging translation, TV on demand, video portals, and virtual radiology.
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| ICL appoints Dr. John Elmore as director of research
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ICL,
the IT services company, today announced the appointment of Dr. John
Elmore as director of research. Elmore will be responsible for ICL’s
research programmes worldwide. Reporting to Andrew Boswell, chief
technology officer at ICL, Elmore will take up the appointment on 1,
November. Elmore’s predecessor, David Picken, will retire in March 2000.
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| One fifth out of 2519 submitted IST proposals successful in first call
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A total of 2519 proposals have been received by the European Commission in response to the User Friendly Information Society (IST) programme's first call for proposals under the Fifth Framework Programme. Of these 555 proposals were retained for negotiation for a total budget of 930 million euros, with a further 64 proposals kept in reserve.
This represents a success rate of more than one in five proposals, while the successful projects will receive around one-sixth of the total funding applied for.
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| Compaq Offers Tru64 Unix License to Non-Commercial Users
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Compaq announced it will license its Tru64 UNIX V5.0 operating system for technology enthusiasts, educational learning purposes, and other non-commercial users at a nominal cost of $99.00 plus shipping and handling to give users access to the powerful features and functions of Compaq Tru64 UNIX on AlphaServer.
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| Exa Uses GTE Internetworking and SGI to Launch First Engineering ASP for CFD
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Exa
working with GTE
Internetworking (GTEI) and SGI, announces the creation of
e-CFD, the first Internet-based service for
computational fluid dynamics (CFD). This new application service provider (ASP)
venture offers engineers worldwide a secure virtual million-dollar system
loaded with Exa's PowerFLOW software to perform CFD simulations.
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| Compaq enhances Alpha servers and announced
Enterprise Toolkit Version 2.0
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Version 2.0 of the
Compaq Enterprise Toolkit - Unix Edition (Enterprise Toolkit) is now available,
offering a range of new features.
More importantly, Compaq announces major performance enhancements for
AlphaServer GS Series systems. On the
Compaq AlphaServer GS140
an GS60E system, the Alpha EV6 processor speed increased from 525 MHz to 700 MHz.On applications Compaq reports
30 to 40% application performance gain.
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| NEC SX-5 parallel vector processor begins operation at Toyota
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Toyota Auto Body Co., a manufacturer of auto bodies and parts for the Toyota group has inaugurated the operation of their new SX-5S/2 parallel vector supercomputer.
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| NEC SX-5 first to sustain over 1 Gflop/s on Focus
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Paradigm Geophysical Ltd. and NEC
Corporation
announced the immediate availability of the popular FOCUS (V4.3) Seismic
Processing System for NEC SX-4 and SX-5 Series supercomputers.
NEC SX-5 demonstrated excellent job throughput on a standard performance
test used by Paradigm. The test consists of a series of compute and I/O modules used extensively
by the seismic industry.
It is designed to provide a realistic processing model typical of key
day-to-day seismic analysis.
The sustained performance on this historical test exceeded 1 Gflop/s on a
single SX-5 processor.
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| IBM forms large protein folding team
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IBM has formed what is probably the largest protein folding project team ever assembled, to study how proteins fold. This will determine how polymers chains of amino acid residues, freshly made by genes, fold up to achieve their three-dimensional structure as protein molecules, and then
perform their activities as instructed by the genes.
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| Sun shows excellent performs on PAM-Crash
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At Supercomputing 99, Sun
Microsystems,
announced impressive new performance numbers for PAM-CRASH
simulation software from ESI Group on Sun Enterprise 10000 servers running the
Solaris
Operating Environment.
The tests show that running the simulations on
multi-processor E10000 servers provides superlinear improvements in elapsed time
for job completion.
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| Educational discount on IMSL
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Visual Numerics has
a new sales
program for higher-education institutions worldwide. Degree granting
colleges and universities can now buy campus-wide or departmental licenses
of Visual Numerics' entire product line, including JWAVE, PV-WAVE or
the IMSL tools, at a substantial savings over commercial pricing.
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| IBM and Oracle Collaborate to Advance Project Monterey
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IBM and Oracle
announced a comprehensive initiative in support of
AIX and Monterey/64.
As part of this initiative, IBM and Oracle will offer Oracle Internet Directory within AIX and Monterey/64 as a directory option to customers.
Furthermore, Oracle expects to port its database and application suites, currently available on AIX, to Monterey/64.
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| OpenGL Vizserver brings Onyx power tot the Desk top
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SGI 's new OpenGL Vizserve , a technical computing solution designed to deliver
advanced visualization capabilities and performance to the desktop.
Implementing the Silicon Graphics Onyx2
visualization workstation as a
graphics server, the new solution allows users to view and interact with large
data sets from a desktop system at any location in an organization.
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| Audi uses Powerflow on SUN Starfire
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Exa Corporation, manufacturer of PowerFLOW software for computational fluid dynamics (CFD), announces that Audi AG, Germany has chosen to increase its PowerFLOW license usage by 800% and dedicate a new Sun Microsystems 32-processor Enterprise
10000
Starfire
server, exclusively to external aerodynamic analysis of future Audi automotive designs.
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| Sun's Server and Storage Systems Achieve Record Performance on Massive 33 TB Oracle Database
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Sun Microsystems,
announced that the
Sun Enterprise 10000
Starfire
server and Sun StorEdge A5100 and
A5200
fibre channel disk arrays combined with Oracle8i and VERITAS Volume Manager 3.0.2 have achieved record performance on one of the world's largest data warehouse configurations, a massive 33 terabyte
Oracle database. The Sun test configuration performed at a record speed of 251,000 I/Os per second (IOPS) in an I/O-intensive online transaction processing (OLTP) environment and achieved throughput of 3 gigabytes
per second.
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| The Portland Group
and NEC
to deliver High Performance Fortran (HPF) on NEC's SX
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The Portland Group and
NEC Corporation will jointly develop
an optimized HPF compiler for NEC's SX Series of supercomputers.
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| IBM C for AIX, Version 5.0 Adds Support for OpenMP
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C for AIX , Version 5.0 program is designed to support IBM's
AIX Version 4 operating system and latest symmetric multi-processing (SMP) RS/6000 hardware.
This version extends the existing SMP support from C for AIX, Versionš4.4, by supporting the OpenMP industry specification. OpenMP provides a model for parallel programming that allows a program to be portable across shared memory architectures from different vendors by using a common set of APIs.
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| Nissan Selects IBM as Information Technology Provider in North America
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Nissan North America, Inc. (NNA) and IBM today announced a $1 billion, nine and a half year contract under which IBM will provide extensive information technology management and delivery services for Nissan's operations in North America.
In addition, Nissan and IBM will explore the most effective and efficient methods of providing IT service in other parts of the world where Nissan operates.
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| Khoros expands cross platform support to include HP-UX
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Khoral Research
announced extended platform support for Khoros
Pro 2001. With the addition of Hewlett Packard's HP-UX, Khoros Pro 2001 now offers an enterprise- wide software development solution that includes native compiler and gcc interoperability. In addition to the HP-UX platform, Khoros Pro 2001 also supports SUN Solaris, SGI IRIX, Digital Unix, and Linux operating systems. Khoral created an integrated portability infrastructure that provides smooth scalability and portability from desktop PCs to clustered workstations to supercomputers (HPCs).
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| New gridware aims at resource management for clusters and the grid
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Genias Software GmbH, the leading European
supplier of computing resource management software, and Chord Systems, Inc,
the leading US Value Added Reseller of computing resource management
software, will announce their merger next week at SuperComputing99 in
Portland, Oregon. The new company will be based in San Jose, CA, and will
operate under the Gridware, Inc. name.
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| Gridware Supercharges the Compaq AlphaServer SC With GRD Policy Management Software
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Gridware
intends to make available the Gridware load management
software CODINE and policy management software GRD (Global Resource
Director) on the Compaq (CPQ) AlphaServer SC platform.
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| Platform Computing partners with QSW and Compaq
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Platform Computing
announced a collaboration with Compaq Computer Corporation and QSW to provide an alternative to the cost and rigidity of traditional supercomputer systems. The solution, a
combination of scheduling and load management software married with Compaq hardware, enables organizations to effectively manage available computing resources within a clustered environment.
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| Failsafe Linux cluster solution from Fujitsu Siemens for Primergy servers
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Fujitsu Siemens Computers
presented the high-availability solution RMS (Reliant Monitor Software) for the
open operating system Linux. The use of RMS ensures that applications running
on Intel-based Primergy servers under Linux will in future be failsafe.
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| Visual Numerics 'Infrastructure Member' of Cornell's Advanced Cluster Computing Consortium
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Visual Numerics, has
been named an Infrastructure Member of Cornell University's Advanced
Cluster Computing Consortium (AC3), joining Microsoft Corp., Dell Computer
Corp. and Intel Corp., among others. Established in July
1999 by the Cornell Theory Center (Ithaca, New York), AC3 is a research
consortium for business, higher-education and government agencies interested
in the effective planning, implementation and performance of commodity
based systems, software and tools.
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| SGI Demonstrates First Clustering Technology Based on Intel Itanium Processor
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At
the SuperComputing '99 conference SGI
demonstrated the first-ever cluster based on the
Intel
IA-64 Itanium
processor. The
event featured speakers from the National Computational Science Alliance, Intel
Corporation and SGI.This demonstration achieved a number
of public firsts, including the first Itanium processor-based cluster and the
first technical computing application successfully run on the Linux platform.
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| HAL
and GX announce 98-node
seismic and imaging cluster
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HAL Computer Systems
(HAL) and GX Technology Corporation (GXT)
announced the purchase of HAL SL100 rack mount SPARC Solaris
servers by GX Technology to construct a new 98-node cluster at its Houston service centre. The HAL SL100 cluster will run GXT's newest additions to its EarthWave
software, including Primus, for ultra-high performance 3D prestack depth migration, and Kronos, one of the industry's first programs for 3D tomographic inversion systems.
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| Argonne to Open "Chiba City" Linux Cluster to U.S. Research Community
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The Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory announced today that it is working with IBM and VA Linux Systems to build "Chiba City" - the largest supercomputing cluster dedicated to highly scalable open source software development. The 512-CPU Linux cluster will be opened to the U.S. research community, including universities, laboratories and industry.
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| Sun Extends Community Source Licensing to HPC ClusterTools
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Sun's HPC ClusterTools
software is now
available to be downloaded from the Web via the Sun Community Source
Licensing (SCSL) program. "Sun's Community Source Licensing program matches extremely well with
our mission to accelerate the exploitation of parallel computing
throughout academia and industry," said Dr. David Henty, Project
Manager for Training and Research, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre,
University of Edinburgh.
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| Tera post
third Quarter 1999 results
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Tera Computer Company reported results for the third quarter ended September 30, 1999. The company
reported a third quarter net loss of $7.5 million on revenues of $850,000 compared with a net loss of $4.2 million, on $232,000 in the year-ago quarter.
In addition, the company today announced initial positive test results for two types of CMOS asics, an MTA processor chip and memory bank controller, the design of which had been taped-out and sent to the chip fabricator in July, 1999.
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| Sun introduced new Trusted Solaris 7 version
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Sun Microsystems
announced the availability of the
Trusted Solaris
7 Operating
Environment, an enhanced version of Sun's scalable Solaris 7 Operating
Environment that incorporates heightened security features for commercial
and government applications.
Trusted Solaris 7, the follow-on to the
Trusted Solaris 2.5.1 environment, delivers 64-bit capabilities and
supports the full line of SPARC
and Intel architectures, including the
Sun Enterprise
10000
server, providing enhanced performance, capacity
and scalability.
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| Tera's first order for a Tera MTA-16 system
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Tera Computer Company
has received its first purchase order for a Tera MTA-16 system.
This order represents an upgrade to the existing 8-processor Multithreaded Architecture (MTA) supercomputer now in use at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC).
This upgrade, which doubles the size of SDSC's MTA system from 8 processors and 8 gigabytes of shared memory to 16 processors and 16 gigabytes of shared memory, is specially priced at $2.5 million.
Initial purchases of Tera MTA-16 systems are typically priced at $7-10 million, depending upon configuration.
Delivery of the SDSC MTA-16 is expected by year-end 1999.
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| New names for Origin 2000
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SGI announced new names for the
Origin
2000 server line.
The Origin 2000 will now be segmented into four new models that were determined
on the basis of customer buying behavior.
System size ranges from 2 CPU SGI 2200
to a 512 CPU SGI 2800 supercomputer,.
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| Teamserver and Primergy lines merge
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Fujitsu
Siemens Computers, the leading European IT company, today announced
its strategic direction for Intel Architecture (IA) servers. The current
Fujitsu teamserver and the Siemens PRIMERGY product lines will converge
into one product range under the PRIMERGY brand,
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| Two Pentium III Xeon 8-way Servers from Fujitsus Siemens
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Fujitsu
Siemens Computers, the leading European IT company, today announced
two new high-end servers, the PRIMERGY N800 and the PRIMERGY K800 as
the first models of the new joint Intel-based server line. The new models
use Intel's Profusion chipset technology.Machines
are available with up to eight Pentium
III XeonTM processors.
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| IDC Report Ranks HP the Market Leader in Technical Computing
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Hewlett-Packard Company said its high-performance line of HP 9000 Technical Servers has taken over the market lead for the worldwide technical-computing server market, according to the latest report from International Data Corporation (IDC).
HP has jumped from No. 2 to the No. 1 position with 22.1 percent market share, clearly confirming HP's leadership over Compaq/DEC, Silicon Graphics (SGI) and Sun in this market.
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| SGI to sell Cray to Gores Technology Group
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Quoting industry sources, Reuters reports computer maker Silicon Graphics (SGI) is in talks to sell Cray Research, once one of the technological gems of the United States, to a little-known technology acquisition group called Gores Technology Group
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| Compaq introduces AlphaServer SC Series
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Compaq
announced its first supercomputer and the most powerful
AlphaServer offering to date, the AlphaServer SC Series. The new server
delivers new levels of supercomputing power with significant ease of
management benefits, sets a new aggressive price point for
high-performance computing systems, and boasts performance in the
multi-Tflop/s range. Compaq also introduced a new space- saving
AlphaServer DS20E and a dual processor AlphaStation.
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| PGI workstation 3.1 for Linux
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The Portland Group released PGI Workstation 3.1, the latest release of its suite of parallel Fortran, C and C++ and tools for Intel processor-based workstations running Linux, Solaris87 and NT.
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| VN targets business intelligence market
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Visual Numerics
announced a new release of its JWAVE product targeting the business intelligence (BI) market. JWAVE is the company's server based data analysis and visualization environment that lets users rapidly develop applications to view BI data.
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| Sun Targets high-performance computing with multiprocessor graphic workstation
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Sun Microsystems announced a
new premier multiprocessor capable workstation.
The
Ultra
80
workstation, which can be configured with up to four processors and
4 Gbyte
of memory, runs
advanced graphics applications and
larger datasets.
Technical computing users
in the EDA, earth sciences, satellite imagery, MCAD and financial
services industries are target users
of this system.
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| Workshop on Visualisation in December
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The Dutch Platform HPCN will organise a workshop on Visualsation, especially aimed at
applications in design, construction and planning, in The Hague the Netherlands. There will be general lectures on visualisation, and presentations from a number of Dutch HPCN projects, including CAT, VR-on-demand, and VR-Stage.
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| IBM introduces
HotMedia 2.5
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IBM's new HotMedia 2.5 enables companies to synchronize HotMedia streaming audio with images for more interactive Web-based presentations, slide shows and panoramas.
The new release also includes a batch processing feature that gives high-volume, mega-product e-commerce, customer service and auction sites the ability to automate the production of large amounts of rich media content.
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| SGI Servers used
for US
Kosovo missions
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The US
National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) added the
SGI
GroupStation system
to its technology arsenal to deliver information needed to support NATO
military actions in Kosovo. The commercial-off-the-shelf SGI GroupStation
system was taken from evaluation mode on a test project to perform a key role
in this critical operation.
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| HP Showcases High-performance Solutions that Deliver Innovative Design and Performance at SC99
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Hewlett-Packard Company today announced several high-performance computing products and solutions that provide technical customers with the power to innovate, design and deliver powerful solutions for the engineering, design and manufacturing industries.
HP is showcased these solutions and applications
at SC99, the annual high-performance and networking conference.
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| Industry Leaders Speak Out on Future of High-Performance Computing at
SuperComputing '99 Conference
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SGI
hosted a special session at the SuperComputing '99 conference on the future of
high-performance computing and demonstrated the first-ever cluster based on the
Intel IA-64 Itanium
processor. The
event featured speakers from the National Computational Science Alliance, Intel
Corporation and SGI.
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| Synopsys and SGI Accelerate Electronic Design Verification on Linux
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Synopsys
and SGI
have entered into a strategic alliance to accelerate
the performance and availability of electronic design verification tools for
the Linux operating system (OS) running on Intel Architecture-based
computer systems. The companies will focus on performance tuning of Synopsys'
verification tools, including the VCS
Verilog simulator, and will encourage
other electronic design automation (EDA) vendors to provide related tools on
the Linux platform.
The companies are jointly demonstrating the first results
of this effort at the SC99 conference.
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| SGI/Cray no longer dominates the TOP500 - IBM in the lead
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In the November 1999 release of the TOP500, the ASCI red machine at Sandia is
still number one: Intel has replaced a number of processors with newer models,
which was enough to keep the first place. No other Intel machine is in or near
the TOP500. The IBM powered ASCI Blue-Pacific can be found on the second place.
IBM has overtaken SGI/Cray with 141 machines in the list. SGI/Cray is second
with 133.
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| SGI claims leadership in TOP250
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Nice thing about the TOP500 is that anyone on it can be a leader in his own right. SGI claims leadership in performance: the company delivered more processing power than Compaq, IBM and Sun combined.
In total,
SGI ystems represent nearly 20 Tflop/s, or 38.4 percent of the total
installed performance. The company also claims to dominate the upper half of the TOP500 list.
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| TOP500 supercomputer list available in XML
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Primeur, the premier
European HPCN news service,
has teamed up with VMP
- the Virtual Magazine Publisher Software - to make the TOP500 of most powerful supercomputers in the world list available to the community in XML format.
Together with XSL stylesheets, this opens the possibility to everyone to analyse the list in great detail off-line and to integrate the results in other documents.
The list is available at http://www.hoise.com/vmp/examples/top500/ together with a sample stylesheet extracting the European sites and organising the according to country. This shows that Luxembourg, with only a fourhundredthousand inhabitants but four TOP500 supercomputers,
is supercomputer country number 1 in Europe and the world, when counting the number of machines per inhabitant - an impressive one supercomputer for
each 100,000 inhabitants.
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| Japanese Riken develops world's fastest supercomputer
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Japan's Institute of
Physical and Chemical Research (Riken) says it
developed the world's fastest supercomputer.
After testing, Riken confirmed that the machine could execute
calculations four times faster than the ASCI Option Red model at Sandia
National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the fastest computer
to date.
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| Europe's fastest machines are used for weather forecasting and meteorological application
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The European top 10 of fastest supercomputers is dominated by machines that are used for weather
forecasting and other meteorological applications. This can be deducted from the November 1999 list of fastest supercomputers in the world. The fastest machine in Europe is the Cray T3E at the "Deutscher Wetterdienst" in Offenbach, Germany. On the second and third place are machines at the UK Meteorological Office in Bracknell. On place eight, the only non T3E machine in the top 10, the Fujitsu VPP5000 at Meteo France in Toulouse can be found. The other machines in the top 10 are located at German and UK research organisations. The number 1 in Europe is more
powerful than
the numbers 9 & 10 combined.
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| XSLT brings full power of XML to everyone's fingertips
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When XML was introduced, it was said "at last an innovation to give Java something to do" and indeed since the release of XML in February 1998, many XML applications have been developed in Java and in other languages. Applications in different areas, from computing, medical patient records to business-to-business communication, are showing the usability of XML. Great, if you knew how to program and had the time to develop XML applications. However, it did not affect the majority of for instance the Web site builders. The release of the XSLT standard by the World Wide Web Consortium on November 16 has changed this. It brings developing XML applications for the Web within everybody's reach. XSLT allows to transform one XML document into another. During the transformation the parts of a document may be reshuffled or combined with information from other documents. The output is again an XML document. But did we not need some Java application to process XML documents? So what's the big deal about creating an XML document from another? Well, it makes all the difference once you realise there is also a version
of HTML that is valid XML: so you can use XSLT to produce HTML output from XML.
Thus XSLT makes it possible for XML to fullfil its promise as the "language that will change the Web".
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| World`s Fastest System and Storage Area Network Demonstrated for Japanese High Performance Computing Community
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GENROCO provided the key components for a demonstration of the world's fastest
Storage Area Network (SAN) at a colloquium held in Japan last week.
Representatives from Fujitsu, NEC, Hitachi, IBM, Compaq, SGI, and other major
computer vendors attended the demonstration, which was the first of its kind
held in Asia.
GENROCO lead a similar industry event at CERN, the European Center for High
Energy Physics in Geneva, Switzerland, a few days earlier.
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| Adaptec`s Ultra160 SCSI Technology Selected for NEC Servers; Ultra160 Momentum Continues with Latest Adoption of Adaptec`s Technology
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Adaptec announced that its Ultra160 SCSI technology has been
selected by NEC Corporation for use in NEC's latest generation of servers.
Adaptec's Ultra160 designs deliver 160MB/sec. performance per channel and are
well suited for the needs of all classes of servers, as well as workstations
and high-end desktops. NEC is the first Japanese company to incorporate
Adaptec's Ultra160 SCSI technology within its server line and is also the
latest in a series of Adaptec Ultra160 design wins with leading OEMs.
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| Improved connection between European academic and commercial Internet
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AUCS (AT&T Unisource Carrier Services) won a tender for the interconnection of TEN-155 and the European commercial Internet. The interconnection will be rolled-out over the next few months in four TEN-155 PoP locations across Europe.
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