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July 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 rates .

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Breaking news - just a click away:

From TOP500 to petaflops - all has been discussed at Supercomputer '99
Two Primeur issues have been published with the latest HPCN news from the Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar.

Read the latest news on the TOP500, an update on all HPC vendors, "Building a Petaflop computer is not that difficult" a lecture by Steven Wallach, and "The new role of supercomputing centers" a lecture by Horst Simon and the latest news on Tera, SUN, HP and the other supercomputing vendors.
June 10, 1999 issue
June 12, 1999 issue

TOP500

Media and visualisation

Camber to buy two Power Hawks worth over euro 200,000

Camber Flight Simulation L.C. purchased two Concurrent Power Hawk systems. Both systems are equipped with PowerWorks Development Environment (IDE) to develop flight simulators for training commercial airline pilots. The total contract value for these systems is more than euro 200,000. After the development phase, Camber plans to purchase an additional three run-time systems per year.

US official Sensenbrenner discussed proposal to double IT-research at University of Illinois

At CDT Friday, June 4, on the campus of the University of Illinois the U.S. House of Representatives Science Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner, discussed his proposed legislation to nearly double federal information technology research by a total of approximately $4.8 billion over the next five years. T

U.S. plans to ease export restrictions of supercomputers to Europe

US Department of Commerce officials are considering making it easier for U.S. companies to sell high-powered computers to Europe and other parts of the world by easing export restrictions on them. It is not clear when the Commerce Department, which has been working with other agencies on this case for about a year, will send the White House a final proposal.

Germany

Aachen University partners with ACE Associated Compiler Experts

ACE Associated Compiler Experts announced a technology partnership with Aachen University of Technology (Aachen, Germany). Aachen's Institute for Integrated Signal Processing Systems (ISS) will use ACE's CoSy-DSP compiler development system to research new ways to optimally generate compilers for DSP-based applications, especially in the area of wireless communications. CoSy-DSP is the first technology of its kind to be adopted by the institute's Industrial Partner Programme.

Resource management for High-performance PC clusters

Researchers of the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing adopted their Coumputing Centre software (CCS), originally designed for managing massive parallel high-performance computers, to modern workstation clusters. According to the scientists it provides partitioning of exclusive and non-exclusive resources, hardware independent scheduling of interactive and batch jobs, open extensible interfaces to other resource management systems and a high degree of reliability.

SAP to launch new decision-support tool

With the merger between SAP America, the U.S. subsidiary of SAP and Campbell Software complete, SAP launched the first deliverable: retail-specific reporting in the SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW). This reporting is based on key labor and sales data from Campbell StaffWorks and Time and Attendance. Available as part of the standard SAP BW Release1.2 this summer, this new decision-support tool for retailers brings together labor, merchandising, financials and human resources for an integrated view of the enterprise.

Israel

Israel 23th country to be connected to TEN-155

The pan-European research network TEN-155 recently expanded its reach with the first production traffic flow between Israel and TEN-155 on 21 May 1999. The Israel Internet-2 network, an extension of the IUCC, the national university network of Israel, will mainly serve Research and Development projects. MACHBA/IUCC is the first Southern Mediterranean university network to join the 22 European national university networks connected to TEN-155.

Italy

IBM to install 480 systems at Banco Populare di Milano

IBM claims it has shipped the largest European order ever for its Netfinity line of Intel-based servers, placing 480 systems with Banca Popolare di Milano, one of the biggest co-operative banks in Italy. The bank will use the Netfinity 7000 -- the line's high end.

Sweden

Researchers parallelized a high resolution operational ocean model

The German Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency (BSH) and The Swedish Meterological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) have developed an operational ocean model. The project is based on data from a High Resolution Operational Model of the Baltic sea (HIROMB) and covers the North Sea and the Baltic Sea region with a horizontal resolution from 3 to 12 nautical miles (nm). This application has been ported from a Cray C90 parallel shared memory vector computer to the distributed memory parallel Cray T3E.

Ukrain

Robot to prevent another Chernobyl disaster

To diminish the chance of another nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, a so-called 'Pioneer' team, composed of U.S. government, academic and industry organizations, presented a new robot powered by SGI. The machine features vision and 3D mapping systems, wich are key to analyzing and ultimately repairing the decaying cement and steel sarcophagus covering the failed reactor.

United Kingdom

SAP implements R/3 for payroll administration at Halifax

Halifax, the UK's largest mortgage lender with over 2 ? million borrowers, has signed up to implement SAP's R/3 to run its payroll systems. The first standalone payroll implementation by SAP in the UK will have a 150 user licence, processing over 30,000 employee records, and is scheduled to go live in July 1999.

Siemens to ship Intel based CELSIUS for the UK market

Siemens has launched a new range of Intel-based workstations for the UK market. The range, called CELSIUS, is specifically targeting users who want to migrate their applications from Unix and Apple environments to a Windows NT-based infrastructure. The three available models all all feature support for PC upscaling and several graphics options, and have been optimised for use with SuSE's Linux operating system.

Boeing buys four MediaHawk's worth euro 2.5 million

The Boeing Company's Aerospace Support business recently purchased four MediaHawk Video Servers from Concurrent. The servers will be used as debrief systems in the United Kingdom's WAH-64 Apache Longbow Helicopter Training Programme. The total purchase order is for euro 2.5 million.

Third TRACS user Groep meeting at 23rd September in Barcelona

The third TRACS user group meeting will take take place on Thursday 23rd September 1999 in Barcelona. Closing date for applications to be considered at the next selection meeting is 18 August 1999. This year's meeting is a joint venture between the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) and the C4 group in Barcelona.

Applications

Fujitsu introduces new version of its WWWsite supercomputer access software

Fujitsu introduced a new version of its remote server access software. The WWSite Series is now also available for Solaris systems. There was already a version for the VPP series of supercomputers. WWSite Series is a set of productivity tools that was developed to enable the ease of use of the Research & Development Computing Environments. This was done through the application of WWW-related Technologies.

HP unveils next wave of EDA applications for HP 9000 technical servers and HP visualize workstations

Hewlett-Packard Company announced that a host of new electronic design automation (EDA) applications are now available for HP-UX 11, HP's mission-critical proven 64-bit operating environment, and/or have been optimized for the parallel execution capabilities of PA-RISC microprocessors used in HP 9000 Technical Servers and HP VISUALIZE workstations.

Building scalable Java server solutions with PerkUp

SCO claims it has lifted the barrier that restricted wide deployment of multi-user, server-side, Java applications has been lifted. The company unveiled a new Java technology, code-named "PerkUp," that solves the server-side Java scalability problem. The technology is available immediately for UnixWare 7, and SCO plans to make it available for the forthcoming Monterey/64 platform.

SGI and SDRC extend mechanical design automation solution for Windows NT

SDRC has certified its I-DEAS software on Silicon Graphics NT visual workstations, and has optimized the software. The new features include improved team collaboration.The Windows NT operating system release of I-DEAS Master Series 7 is optimized to take advantage of the unique graphics capabilities of the Silicon Graphics 320 and 540 visual workstations.

Sun puts Starfire power behind Bloomberg`s ticker tape leading financial information

Bloomberg LP, one of the world's leading financial information providers, has purchased an arsenal of mainframe-class Sun Enterprise 10000 Starfire servers, to collect, sort and deliver critical financial and business data to more than 115,000 trading desks around the world

Ameritrade orders Sun Starfire Servers

Ameritrade Holding has selected several mainframe-class Sun Enterprise 10000 Starfire servers to power its order management, back-office and application-testing operations. Ameritrade's move to the Starfire serverwas a response to the explosion in trading activity seen at its site and throughout the industry in recent months. In its second quarter, ended March 26, 1999, Ameritrade reported experiencing an average of 52,218 trades per day, nearly triple its year-ago average of 17,589 trades per day.

Compaq introduces new Alpha-based parallel servers tuned for high-performance technical computing

Compaq Computer Corporation announced two new AlphaServers, the Compaq HPC160 and Compaq HPC320,, with Tru64 Unix that deliver supercomputer power in a stable, mature architecture. The new servers complement Compaq's strategy of focusing Alpha Tru64 UNIX solutions on markets where high performance and high availability are key.

3rd DRAMA Steering Workshop on Dynamic load-balancing for parallel mesh-based applications

From September 6th till the 8th at the University of Leuven, Belgium, the 3rd DRAMA Steering Workshop will be held. The meeting is about dynamic load-balancing for parallel mesh-based applications. The DRAMA Project (Dynamic Re-Allocation of Meshes for Finite Element Applications) is an ESPRIT LTR project whose central aim is the development of a library to support dynamic load- balancing for parallel message-passing, mesh-based applications.

Sales dropping explainable with IBM RS/6000 and data mining tools

When Hirsch Pipe & Supply Company, a Californian based distributor of plumbing supplies, projected a 40 percent drop in monthly sales for one of its hottest selling products, alarm bells rang. With a new IBM RS/6000 S70 Enterprise server and sophisticated data mining tools, the problem was quickly diagnosed.

SGI upgraded its servers with new MIPS R 12000 RISC processors

SGI launched the new MIPS R12000 RISC processors for its Origin 200, Origin 2000 and Onyx2 lines of ccNUMA-based systems. This is the first of a series of upgrades slated for Origin servers and Onyx2 workstations outlined in the company's recently extended MIPS microprocessor roadmap. The R12000 processor boasts a doubled secondary cache size, binary compatibility with the MIPS R10000 and performance gains of up to 40 percent based on industry benchmarks.

HPC ClusterTools from SUN available on the Web by the end of this year

Sun Microsystems will make the Sun HPC ClusterTools software available on the Web by the end of the year through its recently introduced Sun Community Source Licensing (SCSL) model. This will make Sun the first vendor of high-performance computing (HPC) systems to offer community access to its core HPC software development tools.

Science Coalition concerned about plans to cut in science budget in the USA

The Science Coalition, representing more than 400 US organizations, is concerned about the threat of large cuts in FY2000 federal domestic discretionary spending. The coalition thinks the momentum in job creation and economic growth will be slowed if the FY 2000 US federal budget deliberations result in substantial cuts in domestic discretionary spending affecting science research.

Enhanced SUN HPC ClusterTools 3.0

Sun Microsystems introduced Sun HPC ClusterTools 3.0 software, a suite that provides an environment for creating applications that solve compute intensive problems. The new software supports four times more processors -- up to1,024 -- than previous releases. HPC ClusterTools software is available via the Web as part of the Sun Community Source Licensing (SCSL) model.

SGI sells for euro 25 million to European environmental institutes

Environmental agencies in Europe and abroad have purchased some euro 25 million in SGI supercomputers in recent months for help in everything from creating daily weather forecasts to modeling the behavior of El Nino. The brisk sales activity for the systems reflects the expanding use of supercomputers in the weather and environmental sector. Among the buyers were the UK Meteorological Office, Germany's national weather service, Deutscher Wetterdienst and the U.S. Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory.

Oracle financial in line, but it may get tough

According to analysts, Oracle will likely report fourth-quarter earnings that are in line with estimates, but the rest of 1999 may be tough for the database software company. Analysts surveyed by First Call Corporation -- which tracks company results -- expect the company to have per-share earnings of 32 cents. Estimates range from 29 cents to 35 cents.

SGI released MIPSpro 7.3 compiler

SGI has released its MIPSpro 7.3 compiler suite for creating software that runs on MIPS processors, found in SGI's workstations and servers based on IRIX. The MIPSpro 7.3 suite includes compilers for the C, C++ and Fortran programming languages. MIPSpro Is availble immediately.

Computer hackers to take revange on FBI

In reaction of a FBI investigation, computer hackers vandalized two government sites on the Internet and left a note promising to attack more federal computers. Earlier this month, a grand jury in northern Virginia indicted Eric Burns, 19, on three counts of computer intrusion. Burns is known on the Internet as ``Zyklon'' and is believed to be a member of the group that claimed responsibility for the attacks on the White House and Senate sites.

HPCN industry

Fujitsu and Siemens join forces to create top3 computer company

Fujitsu Limited and Siemens AG have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to create a far-reaching co-operation that significantly expands their joint activities in the worldwide computer market. As part of this, the two companies will merge most of their European computer operations and establish a joint-venture company - Fujitsu Siemens Computers - to develop, manufacture and market a full range of information products. Fujitsu and Siemens aim to jointly capture a top 3 industry position within thecombined worldwide markets for personal computers, Intel architecture and Unix servers and large-scale enterprise systems.

Application servers to become cornerstones of next generation IT infrastructures say analysts

Application server technology will be key to the evolution of application architectures, according to a new report from the independent research and consulting company, Ovum. The initial adoption of application servers will be driven by the "webification" of existing applications and will evolve into the development of platforms for integrating new and existing applications and systems. Ovum predicts that by 2004 the market for application servers will be worth nearly euro 17 billion.

HP and Intel to release open IA-64 Instruction Set Archutecture

Intel and Hewlett-Packard published the details of the IA-64 Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). This disclosure enables software developers to accelerate the development of the next generation of server and workstation applications based on forthcoming IA-64 processors, beginning with Merced in 2000. The complete IA-64 can be downloaded from the Intel and HP websites at http://developer.intel.com/design/ia64/index.htm and www.hp.com/go/ia-64.

SGI finished first stage in upgrading process of Origin and Onyx2

IBM to open euro 28-million deep computing institute

IBM plans to build a Deep Computing Institute, a euro 28-million research initiative that will bring together experts in academia and industry to address business and scientific problems. With "deep computing" IBM refers to supercomputer-scale processing initiatives that combine massive computation and very sophisticated software algorithms to attack problems previously beyond the reach of information technology.

Supercomputers makes a shift to multi-tasking

There are few applications left for the proprietary, dedicated supercomputer. Taking its place in the business world is a new breed of supercomputers- commercial Unix systems that support the growing requirement for high-end technical functions to be incorporated into the business computing model. This has come about as vendors such as HP, which bought Convex Computer in 1995, SGI and Sun which each purchased parts of Cray Computer in 1996, began steadily integrating their acquisitions' supercomputer technology into their own commercial systems.

Compaq to move Alpha production site from Salem to Houston

Compaq Computer Corporation will consolidiate its North American manufacturing operations for high-end, enterprise-class Alpha processor-based systems. Compaq is transferring production of such systems currently taking place at the company's Salem, New Hampshire site to its existing manufacturing facilities in Fremont, California and Houston, Texas. Approximately 900 employees at the Salem manufacturing site will be affected by these actions.

IBM to introduce Cornhusker clustering software

Codenamed 'Cornhusker' IBM provides a sneak preview of its new clustering software that will allow users to link and manage up to eight PC servers. It is the first extension fully compatible with Microsoft Cluster Services (MSCS), wich allows users to connect more than two servers. Cornhusker was demonstrated at Microsoft's TechEd '99 conference and is planned for release later this summer.

Compaq to launch AlphaServers with Tru64 UNIX

Available in July, Compaq introduced two new AlphaServers with Tru64 UNIX that, according to the company, deliver supercomputer power at a fraction of the cost of today's systems. Named the Compaq HPC160 and Compaq HPC320, the new parallel servers are based on the AlphaServer ES40 systems -quad-processor systems powered by new generation 500 MHz Alpha 21264 processors with new cross-bar switch architecture.

NEC to introduce SX-5e to its supercomputer family

NEC added the SX-5e range to the SX-5 Series supercomputer family. The SX-5e responds to an interest in a scalable system tuned for the characteristics of third party applications software packages. SX-5e is scalable from 4 to 512 processors and provides 16 Gflop/s to 2 Tflop/s of peak performance. The SX-5e will begin shipping before the end of this year.

Star Bridge claims changse supercomputing into hypercomputing

As we reported earlier, a Utah, USA company, Star Bridge Systems, wants to enter the world of supercomputers. It now announced its first product. The new company is not the modest one stating that SBS said its supercomputers, called Hypercomputers, because they operate at reconfigurable technology higher speeds than conventional supercomputers, have been operating since September, 1998. The company said its HAL-300GrW1 Hypercomputer is capable of operating at up to 60,000 times the speed of a 350-megahertz personal computer. said its reconfigurable computer technology marks a new chapter in the computer era and represents the future industry standard in information technology and electronics.

Sun gets good results on four different HPCN benchmarks

Sun's Starfire server achieved good performance levels in four HPC benchmarks: the NAS Parallel Benchmark, Linpack N, FASTA and STREAM. According to SUN, in the NAS parallel benchmark Sun surpassed SGI and outperformed Both SGI and IBM in Linpack N Benchmark. In the FASTA Bioinformatics Benchmark the company showed very good scalability and in the STREAM Benhamark Sun surpassed Past HP In Memory Performance. Sun's performance on this benchmark was over three times faster than the results posted by HP and its HP9000 V series of systems.

Java

JavaServer Pages to be downloaded for free

Available immediately Sun's JavaServer Pages technology, allows Web page developers to easily build cross-platform and interactive Web sites. The JavaServer Pages can be downloaded for free An early access reference implementation is available via the Java Developer Connection programme, or, for more information, users can access the web.

Transvirtual tries to unify Java world with Kaffe

Transvirtual Technologies released Kaffe, the first Java environment to support both Microsoft's and Sun's Java technologies in the same implementation. Kaffe is the only Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that enables development for an extensive range of platforms using Sun's or Microsoft's versions of Java. Other JVMs, including Sun's, cannot support programs written with Microsoft's Java extensions.

Linux

Platform to support Redhat Linux

Platform Computing will support the latest version of the popular operating system, Red Hat Linux 6.0. The announcement at the annual Design Automation Conference '99. According to International Data Corp. (IDC), revenue copies of Linux represent 17 per cent of the world's server operating environments as of the end of 1998. Red Hat holds a 49.8 per cent share of the revenue copies of Linux server operating environments.

Exit supercomputing, here is Extreme Linux to meet your HPC demands

The real extreme end of high-performance computing, is a relatively small arena, were parallel computers with in the order of a thousand processors are used. The question, which is as old as parallel computing itself, is, how do your programme and support large parallel systems? No answer has been found yet, but perhaps Linux and Open System development can provide the necessary critical mass to find an answer at last. However, this can only happen when the whole high-end community participates and does not pursue its own more or less proprietary variants of Linux. The Extreme Linux group tries to provide the community basis for the growing number of people interested in high-speed Linux.

Only Extreme Linux can provide affordable Petaflop/s systems

Scientific computing applications, like molecular design, computational neuroscience, nanotechnology and fusion power, need Petaflop/s computing systems. Systems that are a thousand times as fast as the current fastest supercomputers. These extreme machines should be there in ten years time. But the only affordable way to produce them in large enough quantities, seems to rely on Extreme Linux and the Open Source development model. Even the largest supercomputer vendors cannot develop these extreme machines. This was argued by Rick Stevens from Argonne National Laboratory on the Extreme Linux workshop held earlier this month

VIA to replace TCP for cluster computing

TCP/IP, the basis of the Internet, is used to connect the large networks that make up the Internet world-dise, down to system area networks that are also used for cluster computing. For the latter application, TCP is not very well suited, because of the overhead involved in execution the protocol. That is why people are looking for other standard solutions. And, because there was not one, a new standard was invented in 1997: VIA, the Virtual Interface Architecture. Because of the low latency, it is more suited than TCP to build clusters of machines. In the Linux community, a modular high-performance VIA implementation was discussed at the second Extreme Linux workshop.

Beowolf runs very fast for less money

At the 1999 5th Annual Linux Expo, EBIZ Enterprises unveiled its Beowulf Clustered Super Computer project. A basic entry-level system begins at just under euro 3,000 while a fully configured 16 Node Cluster is being offered for under euro 15,000. The new 16-node system being demonstrated at the Linux Expo is performing an industry-recognized test in approximately12 seconds compared to the Cray T3-E's performance of 3 seconds, which has a cost of euro 5,500,000.

SGI to include Linux

SGI will expand its multiple operating system strategy for server products to include Linux, while enhancing IRIX. SGI already supported Unicos and Windows NT. SGI will be improving its high-end IRIX operating system by focusing on four areas: extending scalability and clustering, porting to IRIX-specific supercomputing functions from its Unicos system, enhancing reliability and availability, and developing data center management applications.

IRIS Explorer 4.0 available on Linux

Release 4.0 of IRIS Explorer is now available for beta testing on the Linux platform. IRIS Explorer allows users to create customized applications for displaying and analyzing data interactively. Release 4.0 is the first version to be ported to Linux. The company did chose the Red Hat 5.1 distribution of the operating system together with the egcs compiler for the port.

SGI and Veritas team to develop file system application for Linux

The rapid acceptance of the Linux operating system has invited VERITAS and SGI to cooperate in developing a file system application for Linux. VERITAS software will bring its information availability applications to the Linux user community, while SGI will bring performance and resilience enhancements to the file system.

Media and visualisation

DisneyQuest chooses SGI to power interactive attractions at New Chicago theme park

In the new indoor interactive theme park DisneyQuest Chicago, main interactive attractions are powerd by an Silicon Graphics InfiniteReality2 visual supercomputer.

SGI licenses Sun's Java 3D for IRIX platform

SGI licensed Sun's Java 3D Application Programming Interface (API). This agreement will enable developers working on the SGI IRIX platform to incorporate 3D graphics capabilities into their applications more easily. The agreement, a result of developer demand for the 3D capabilities of the Java platform, allows developers to create and deploy Java 3D API-based applications on the IRIX platform.

SGI to support Magellan 3D controller

SGI plans to support LogiCad3D's Magellan Plus 3D Motion Controller on its complete family of visual workstations. The device is expected to be available from SGI in June for use with the O2 and Octane visual workstations for Unix Support for the Silicon Graphics 320 and 540 visual workstations for Windows NT is scheduled to be added in early summer. It will sell for $500 (U.S. list).

Open source availability of IBM's 3D visualization software

The IBM Deep Computing Institute has given open access to the source code for IBM Visualization Data Explorer, software used to analyze and create visual representations of data. With the release of this source code, developers can collaborate with IBM to make improvements to the software. Data Explorer is available for download at http://www.research.ibm.com/dci/software.html.

TOP500

SGI dominates high-end of Europe in the new TOP500 list

The first nine positions of the 134 entries that Europe has in the TOP500 are for T3E machines from SGI/Cray. The number one and two at UK Met and the UK Centre for Science, are on rank 7 and 10 in the world wide TOP500. Number 10 in Europe, the Fujitsu VPP700 at ECMWF in the only non-SGI/Cray T3E machine in the top ten in Europe. World wide it is in position 40.

IBM posts strong growth among TOP500 supercomputer leaders

IBM announced that it has once again posted double digit growth on the TOP500 list of the world's largest supercomputers and has passed Sun Microsystems to capture the number two overall ranking. Among the elite 100 top supercomputer sites, IBM's presence grew at least 40 percent for the second consecutive time. The RS/6000 SP appears more times on the list than any other supercomputer.

SGI systems represent 48 percent of TOP500 list installed computing power

SGI announced that it is once again the leader in the latest independent ranking of the world's most powerful supercomputers, released at the Supercomputer '99 conference in Mannheim, Germany. The company's SGI Origin, Cray T3E and Cray T90 systems represented 182 of the " Top 500 Supercomputing Sites" on the semi-annual list.

Ursus Telecom Builds E-Business Platform With IBM RS/6000

Ursus Telecom has selected IBM RS/6000 systems to provide the infrastructure supporting its e-business initiative, which will go live on the Web this summer.

NEC delivers optical WDM ring technology to the backbone network

NEC Corporation announced that it has developed an advanced optical WDM ring solution for the backbone networks of long-distance and local exchange telecommunications carriers. The new WDM Ring System(SpectralWaveRing) rounds out NEC's SpectralWave family of products, which now realizes IP over WDM and provides a full range of optical network solutions for carrier networks deploying high-speed wavelength-based services and applications.