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January 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 advertising opportunities
and find out about the friendly
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Breaking news
- just a click away:
The regular January issue of Primeur Monthly starts below the contents of the special issues:
Live issue - HPCN in the New Millenium
Published January 2 1999.
Primeur reports on the RCI European Management Symposium that took place in December 1998 in Bristol.
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Special issue -
Update on results from European R&D projects
November 30, 1998
Each year hundreds of European R&D projects produce important results. In this special issue, co-published by the magazines Primeur and VMW, we give an update from a number of projects in the HPCN and medical sectors that were supported within the Esprit or Telematics programmes from the European Commission.
This issue is published in conjunction with the large IST 1998 event (the former Esprit/Telematics conference) in Vienna.
Technology transfer
Medical
Media
Engineering and simulation
Design and traffic
Next issues are planned in April during ITIS99 (at HPCN Europe) in April and in November during IST 99 in Helsinki.
When you want your project results in one of those issues, please contact the editors of Primeur magazine or Virtual Medical Worlds magazine.
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Live issue - TOP500 analysis
Updated January 2, 1999
On November 5, 1998 the tenth list of most powerful supercomputers in the world was published. This section gives background and analysis articles.
Check in at our analysis section for analysis of the previous lists.
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Scroll down for the articles or select a section:
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Applications
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HPCN industry
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TOP500
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Denmark
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France
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Germany
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Ireland
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Norway
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Switzerland
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The Netherlands
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United Kingdom
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| California Department of Motor Vehicles installs RS/6000 in 172 locations
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The California Department of Motor Vehicles announced today it hassuccessfully installed high-performance IBM RS/6000 computers at department headquarters and throughout its 172 field offices.The system will provide the DMV with more reliable access to driver license, photo identification, vehicle registration and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) database information.
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| US court overturns ITC finding in Japanese supercomputer dumping case
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The Court of International Trade has overturned a finding by the International Trade
Commission
(ITC) that imports of supercomputers made by NEC
and Fujitsu
threaten to injure Cray Research.
The ITC determination, issued
in October 1997, led to the imposition of
high antidumping duties on Japanese supercomputers.
Those duties may be lifted as a result of the
Court's, which means Japanese supercomputers could be exported again to Japan in the future.
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| Fore to build network with 2,200 connections at US NOAA research centre
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The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) selected Fore to provide ATM networking technology and products for NOAA's new Boulder, Colorado, research and administrative center. In all, the network supports more than 2,200 connections-including 1,100 individuals in 698
offices and more than 98 laboratories.
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| University of the Andes and NPACI collaborate to start supercomputing centre
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The Center for Scientific Computation at the University of the Andes (CeCalCULA) in Merida, Venezuela intends to establish a supercomputing centre. In extending the knowledge of researchers the University hosted a conference with help of the San Diego centre NPACI. The conference focused on parallel computing and future trends in computational science and modelling.
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| Finistar, MPI and NCSA team to solve clustering on Windows NT
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Finistar Corporation, MPI Software Technology, and the U.S. National Center for Supercomputing Applications claim to have an answer to the problem of cluster computing on Windows NT using Message Passing Interface (MPI), Virtual Interface (VI), and Fibre Channel technologies. In a demonstration, held at SC '98, cluster computing application scalability up to ten nodes was shown.
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| Sun opens new campus
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Sun broke ground at its newest campus located in Santa Clara at the former site of Agnews Developmental Center. The new campus is well positioned to leverage the Bay Area's highly concentrated engineering workforce and Silicon Valley's economy. Other Sun campuses currently under development include Newark,
Broomfield and Burlington in the United States and Farnborough, England.
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| MIPS opens Danish technology center with former LSI Logic staff
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MIPS Technologies will officially open its MIPS Denmark Development Center (MDDC) in Copenhagen on December 1, 1998. The Danish team is comprised of 24 full time employees, who were formerly part of LSI Logic Corporation.
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| Fifth anniversary of
French national supercomputer centre IDRIS
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November was a celebration month at IDRIS. Last 19th of November, the centre celebrated his fifth anniversary in Paris, in a congress that assembled distinguished personalities in the field of the supercomputing. In total, 170 people were present in the Palace of Congresses in order to analyse the present supercomputing arena and predict the future.
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| Overview of parallel architectures in Internet book on Scientific Supercomputing
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Prof. Willi Schoenauer
has released an addendum to his on-line book on Scientific Supercomputing. It includes descriptions of
architectures llike the NEC SX, the Cray SV1, SUN,
and HP servers.
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| Siemens plans to develop smart card with Java
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Siemens Semiconductors disclosed its plans for developing the high-end controller 88-series of smart cards.
Siemens' 88-series smart cardchips accelerate the execution of the Java Card Instruction Set while addressing the needs of multi-application cards.
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| Compaq first with 5,000 SAP R/3 implementations
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Compaq Computer Corporation has received confirmation from SAP that it is the first to achieve 5,000 SAP R/3 implementations worldwide. The 5,000th implementation was at Petromont, a $450 million petrochemical company located in Montreal, Canada.
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| Broadcasting Archives digitalized over 100,000 recordings with ADMIRA 1.7
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IBMs Global Telecommunications and Media Industries division released the latest version of its ADMIRA electronic archiving system. Developed in Java, ADMIRA 1.7 provides an open platform for electronic archives and allows integration into an existing environment. The German Broadcasting Archives used the new version of ADMIRA to digitalize over 100,000 shellac recordings and historic tapes.
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| Max Planck Society awards developers Cactus
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An ongoing project which culminated in a demonstration of the potentials of long-distance visual supercomputing and networking at SC98 won the Heinz-Billing-Preis, an award given each year by the Max Planck Society for an outstanding work in computational science. The project involves an international team of researchers that looks at new ways to use supercomputing to study the 3D Einstein equations and other problems of astrophysics. The group also developed Cactus. a code developed specifically to study problems such as colliding black holes, neutron stars, the formation of singularities, and other aspects of Einstein's theory that cannot be handled by analytic means.
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| SDRC's Image Surfacer awarded at EuroMold '98
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At the EuroMold '98 International Trade Show, held December 2-5 in Frankfurt,
SDRC (Structural Dynamics Research Corporation). was awarded the top prize for its Imageware Surfacer. The company was selected out of 1,200 exhibitors in the Software and Services category.
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| Informix and Siemens partner in business unit
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Informix and Siemens have formalised their 16-year lasting collaboration by creating a worldwide business unit in Munchen. This organisation will design and develop packages based on the Informix range of databases and the servers produced by Siemens - including the NT servers from the Primergy range and Unix servers from the RM range.
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| Linux-Alpha-Cluster outperforms good old Cray T90-32
with 31 Gflop/s
Linpack-performance
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Computers can be fun and fun computers can be fast. In an effort to enter the Guinessbook of Records, the German
Unix magazine, iX from Heise-Verlag, linked
570 Alpha based Linux systems together, live on German television during the computer
night
and reached 31 Gflop/s speed on the Linpack benchmark. The system, located at the
the Heinz-Nixdorf Museumsforum at the University of Paderborn, als ran some graphical applications like ray tracing.
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| CAE
in automotive industry needs supercomputers
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You cannot build a car without a supercomputer these days.
Computer-Aided Engineering, the process of designing cars, needs high-performance computing from fast work stations to
traditional vector based supercomputers. This was the main conclusion
from the
CAE Forum at Debis, the ITprovider of the Daimler Chrysler Group. This year about 180 engineers from all units of the group participated, automotive, aerospace, aircraft electronics and others.
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| New
John von Neumann for computing supports German researchers with 4 Cray and 3 QSW supercomputers
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The
Research Center Juelich (RCJ) inaugurated
NIC -
the John von Neuman Institute for Computing - a cooperation with DESY (Deusches Elektronen-Synchroton) to support Germany's researchers in academia, research institutes and and industry with supercomputer power. In total there are two Cray T3Es, a T90, two J90s in Juelich and in Zeuthen at DESY three Italian Quadrics SIMD-systems, APE100 from Alenia Spazio. The new center will focus on supercomputer-oriented research,
and will install competence groups and will organise education and training in HPC.
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| Bank of Ireland buys AlphaServers to measure and increase profit
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Bank of Ireland has purchased Compaq AlphaServers to run its new profitability systems. Compaq, along with its partner Profit Management Group (PMG), will provide systems software and consulting for the managers.
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| Statoil, Landmark and SGI to link intercontinental gas and oil facilities
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Norwegian oil and gas supplier Statoil linked up its Silicon Graphics RealityCenter facility in Stavanger with a similar facility at Landmark Graphics Corporation's headquarters in Houston. The technology enables geoscientists at each location to work simultaneously on the same 3D seismic data sets, with changes replicated at both sites in real time.
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| Cadcentre to deliver design and visualisation software to Sulzer
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Cadcentre signed an agreement to deliver visualisation
and design software to Sulzer Turbo, part of the Swiss technology company Sulzer. The contract totals 500.000 Euro.
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| 25th Speedup workshop
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The 25th Speedup workshop on High-Performance Computing in Switzerland will be held March 25-26, 1999 at Cadro-Lugano. The workshop is intended to bring together all those who address challenges in high-performance computing at Swiss universities, research institutions and industry.
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| Dutch universities buy 128 processor Origin 2000
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The universities at Twente and Eindhoven have, together with SARA in Amsterdam, signed a contract on December 8th with SGI. Early next year a 128 processor Origin 2000
supercomputer will be installed at SARA in Amsterdam. The Dutch national science foundation contributed to the machine through its NCF foundation.
The European tender closed
on December 4th. This shows that evaluation for a large system, valued at 8
million
Euro, can be done rather fast. The machine will be the second fastest supercomputer
in the Netherlands.
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| HP breaks 10,000 Baan reference-user mark
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Hewlett-Packard surpassed the 10,000 milestone with 10,254 Baan Reference Users supported on the HP-UX platform, for enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. HP achieved the Baan ERP benchmark on a 16-way HP 9000 V2250
Enterprise Server with a Baan 4.c application running the Oracle 8.04 database management system.
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| Jaguar buys for over $8 million HP systems to support new CAD system
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Car manufacturer Jaguar has purchased more than $8 million in Unix system workstations and servers from HP. The systems support Jaguar's C3P -- a new computer aided design
(CAD) software suite for car design, using virtual prototyping technology.
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| VideoLogic and NEC to sample new PowerVR 250
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London based VideoLogic
and NEC have started sampling the new PowerVR 250, a high-performance 3D graphics processor for the PC.
Evaluation of early PowerVR 250 engineering samples began in November this year. The optimized version of the device is planned to be available in volume for the first quarter of 1999.
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| Fast 155 Mbit/s European network put into service
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The new pan-European research network TEN-155 is operational now TEN-155 interconnects 16 European university networks across Europe at speeds of 155 Mbps. This means an increase in capacity by a factor of at least 7.
The network makes direct use of SDH technology and employs multiple international OC-3 links. As a direct result of the liberalisation of the telecommunications market, international bandwidth will be the same now as bandwidth available on national services.
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| Naval Research Lab implements PV-WAVE to track cyclones
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The U.S. Navy's Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) bought PV-WAVE software from Visual Numerics to track tropical cyclones. Using PV-WAVE with existing NRL scientific applications, TROPX (Tropical Cyclone Processing System), a visualization and analysis tool, was created. With TROPX a database from the 2,000 tropical cyclone images processed since1987 was generated.
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| DEC/Compaq leads in single CPU chemistry bench mark performance
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The Department for Computation and Information of the CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory, UK,
compared the performance of
some hundred
different computer systems using a variety of software from the discipline of computational chemistry. In single CPU performance,
the DEC Alpha 8400/6-575 is expected to be 1.3 times faster than the Compaq XP1000 6/450, 1.6 times faster than the power3-based 200 MHz IBM RS/6000-43P Model 260, 1.8
times faster than the IBM RS/6000-397, and 1.9 times faster than the HP PA-9000/C240 and 250 MHz R10k-based SGI Origin2000. All other CPUs are projected to be less than half the speed.
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| Mathwise v2.1 teaches Math to undergraduates
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The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) launched Mathwise, the computer based learning package for undergraduates of Mathematics in Engineering and the Sciences. The software provides a learning environment for the teaching of Mathematics.
Mathwise runs on PCs running Windows 95.
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| Maxstrat and NEC jointly develop application for petroleum industry
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MAXSTRAT's Gen5 XLE RAID storage servers are selected by Veritas DGC, a seismic data acquisition company servicing the petroleum industry, for installation in their Singapore headquarters. The 3.2 Tbyte Gen5 storage servers will be connected with a NEC SX-4/8A that was also recently installed. The tool provides geologists with a more accurate picture of the earth's subsurface.
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| Application list of VX/VPP Series is updated
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Fujitsu's list of VX/VPP series
of supercomputers of application software has been updated. The list consists of eight topics: structural and crash analysis, computational chemistry, computational fluid dynamics, mathematical libraries, scientific visualization, parallelization environment and tools.
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| HP, BEA and Symantec partner to develop Enterprise Java
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Available the first quarter of 1999 Hewlett-Packard launched phase two of its HP Foundation Programme -- an agreement to distribute a developer license for the BEA WebLogic application server and a trial version of Symantec VisualCafÈ Enterprise Suite worldwide. In offering the Java tools, deployment of Internet applications for HP-UX and Windows NT is enhanced.
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| IBM to sell Beans for Enterprises
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IBM starts selling Enterprise JavaBean support for both its its WebSphere product line and its VisualAge application development products. JavaBean helps users more easily build Web applications. VisualAge for Java with Enterprise JavaBeans support and WebSphere Application server will be available by year-end. Both run
on Sun Solaris, Microsoft Windows NT, IBM AIX and soon for OS/2.
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| IMSL Fortran 90 Library combines two products into one tool
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Visual Numerics released version 4.0 of its IMSL Fortran 90 Library, a set of more than 900 mathematical and statistical analysis routines written in Fortran that can take advantage of multiprocessor environments.
To create the newest version, Visual Numerics combined two of its products - IMSL Fortran 90 Library V3.0 and IMSL Distributed Network Fortran Library. In doing so, the product contains
not only numerical analysis routines, but also support for distributed computing environments.
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| PSE conference
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European Research Conference on Problem-Solving Environments: Infrastructure and Prototypes, 12-17 June 1999, San Feliu de Guixols, Spain. Few PSE are available for more demanding computational science
applications.
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| IBM's AS/400 and AIX set records
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IBM's 12-way AS/400 model 650 set a record for scalability and performance on J.D. Edwards' OneWorld software. On this Enterprise Resource Planning and supply-chain management application, IBM achieved a 0.64-second average response time for 1,800 concurrent users, nearly 50 percent better than HP's 9000 line of servers, which in September reported a 1.26 second response time for 1,400 users. According to another report, IBM's Unix system, AIX, also outpaced systems from Compaq, Sun, Silicon Graphics, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft.
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| SGI plans to adopt DDR SDRAM in future systems
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Silicon Graphics intents to employ double data rate synchronous dynamic random access memory (DDR SDRAM) in future scalable server computer systems. DDR SDRAM, whose unified specification assures compatibility among DRAM vendors, was recently ratified by the Joint Electronic Device Engineering Council.
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| NEC to launch VR 12000-300 microprocessor
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NEC has begun initial sample shipments of the VR12000-300 microprocessor. The company claims the performance places it in the highest class of microprocessors in the world. The VR12000-300, which will be available the first half of 1999, was jointly developed with SGI and is intended for use by major manufacturers such as Siemens Nixdorf, Tandem Computers as well as by NEC and SGI itself.
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| IBM developed Enterprise products for Linux
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IBM's Transarc subsidiary unveiled its first Enterprise File Systems products for Linux. AFS Server and AFS Client are now available for adding Linux into enterprise environments, enabling interoperability between and amongst servers and clients for Linux, Microsoft Windows, and other Unix operating systems. CERN is one of the large
IBM AFS users.
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| HP Visualize C360 sets new record
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According to Hewlett-Packard it's VISUALIZE Model C360 established a new record for power-desktop Unix system workstations. In 3-D benchmarks, the new system scored 1,007 PLBsurf, the industry's first score of higher than 1,000. In addition the company has incorporated the Evans & Sutherland Accel GALAXY graphics subsystem across its HP Kayak PC Workstations.
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| Origin2000 set record in car crashing
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Silicon Graphics reported that its Origin 2000 set a new record when running advanced automobile crash analysis software. The Origin 2000 reached two Gflop/s of sustained performance with LS-DYNA, a program that predicts how production cars and their occupants will respond to real-world events. The exact test results were 1.6 Gflops/s with 30 CPUs, and 2.2 Gflops with 48 CPUs.
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| SGI to resell StorageTek's products
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StorageTek, a provider of network storage, signed a worldwide contract with Silicon Graphics, whereby Silicon Graphics will resell StorageTek's family of automated DLT tape libraries.
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| Korean newspaper selects Sun to build new production system
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The Korean newspaper company Chosun Ilbo, selected the Sun Enterprise on which to build its new newspaper production system. The cluster system includes two Enterprise 10000 servers and two StorEdge A5000 Arrays running Cluster 2.1 software.Founded in 1920 in Seoul, Korea, Chosun Ilbo has since evolved into the largest newspaper in Korea with a daily circulation of more than
2.5 million.
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| HP brings new 128-way high-end server
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Hewlett-Packard Company developed the new HP 9000 V2500 Enterprise Server. The V2500 combines HP's 64-bit HP-UX11 operating environment and PA-8500 RISC architecture. The V2500 is scalable up to a 128-way configuration. The V2500 is scheduled to be available in January and the HP-UX with 128-way scalability is expected to be available in mid-1999.
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| SGI integrates Samba 2.0 for Origin servers
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Silicon Graphics introduced support of Samba 2.0 for its Origin server line, enabling fast data interoperablity among Windows and UNIX platform clients. Silicon Graphics is the first commercial Unix vendor to support Samba software.
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| IBM shipped 1,000th S/390 server
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IBM shipped its 1,000th S/390 Parallel Enterprise Server - Generation 5, a mainframe server with a capacity of 1,069 Mips.
In less than 100 days, the company has shipped 1,000 of these servers. For IBM this is the fastest and most successful first shipment of any S/390. DaimlerChrysler ordered the 1,000th server.
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| SGI may use Platform's LSF Suite in the near future
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Silicon Graphics agreed in principle to adopt Platform Computing's LSF Suite as the workload management standard for Silicon Graphics platforms. Under the terms of the proposed agreement, LSF Suite will replace non-exclusively
Silicon Graphics' own workload management product, Network Queueing Environment (NQE). A definitive agreement between the two companies is expected by the end of this year. Also other software companies will get NQE's specs and API's to include into their workload software.
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| No big changes in
ranking of Spain's TOP500
sites
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The June and November
1998 editions of the TOP500 list are very alike for Spain: the last one contains the same five centres that were also present six months ago. The Spanish centres in the list are, in order of appearance: CEPBA, CIEMAT, INEM, the University of Valencia and CESCA.
CEPBA is on the top of the Spanish centres (275) with a SGI Origin 2000 with 64 processors and 26.24 Glop/s Rmax.
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| Sun shipped 1.6 Pbytes of fibre channel in one year
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Sun Microsystems has shipped 1.6 Pbytes of its StorEdge A5000 array fibre channel storage since the product's introduction one year ago. The company also announced its Sun StorEdge A5000 array is now interoperable with Microsoft Windows NT operating environments.
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| Optical network test bed to connect Seattle and San Diego
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The U.S. Government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected the National Transparent Optical NetworkConsortium (NTONC) to develop a networking test bed as part of the Next Generation Internet (NGI) SuperNet Programme. The National Transparent Optical Network (NTON) high-speed optical network/test bed will connect Seattle and San Diego.
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