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May 1999
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Media and visualisation
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HPCN industry
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Applications
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United Kingdom
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The Netherlands
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Russia
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Ireland
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Germany
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Austria
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| Europe lagging behind US in IT
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The latest data from European IT Observatory (EITO 1999) shows a growing gap
between Europe and the USA in IT
investments.
Western Europe has 55 business PCs for every 100 white-collar workers while
the USA has 105. Consumer investment shows an even larger gap - for every
100 people Europe has just 18 PCs against the USA's 47. The data shows the
gap is widening. The USA now invests more than 4.5% of its gross domestic
product in IT,
while Europe spends less than 2.5%.
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| CCRE updated computer regulations to protect
U.S. internal market
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The Computer Coalition for Responsible Exports (CCRE) has urged President Clinton to update computer export control thresholds to so-called Tier II and Tier III countries, because of the technological advances that occured the last three years. Under current export control regulations, the government must approve the export of commercial computers that perform above 2,000 million theoretical operations per second (MTOPS) to some 50 designated Tier III countries.
Licenses are required for exports of computers that perform more than 10,000 MTOPS to 106 Tier II countries.
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| Asian server market schrunk13 percent in 1998
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Due to the financial crisis in Asia, the region's computer server market shrunk by13 percent during 1998 over the previous year. This is the conclusion of a report from the market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC).
The loss totaled US$490 million. However, China's revenues rose 13 percent and the top markets continued to grow, with IBM still at first place.
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| New industry group formed to lobby for supercomputer export curbs
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A new 10-company group, the Computer Coalition for Responsible Exports, has been formed to lobby Congress and the Clinton administration to raise supercomputer export curbs that could bar shipments of Intel Pentium III-based PCs to more than 54 countries. Pentium III Xeon servers now exceed the 2,000-MTOPS supercomputer limit, and next year the 800-MHz Pentium III single-chip PCs will top that limit. The coalition fears that the political brouhaha over Chinese espionage will not only make it harder to lift control limits, but may actually result in tighter restrictions.
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| University of North Carolina bought Onyx2 InfiniteReality
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The University of North Carolina (UNC) has purchased a Silicon Graphics Onyx2 multi-pipe InfiniteReality2 workstation. Partial funding was provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). The workstation has been installed in UNC's Department of Computer Science to support six ongoing research projects and will be used by faculty, staff and graduate students.
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| Bell Labs Ken Thompson awarded by IEEE for co-developing Unix
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The Computer Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
has chosen Bell Labs researcher Ken Thompson to receive the first Tsutomu Kanai Award. The award, endowed with a 20-million yen grant from Hitachi in 1995, was established in honor of Dr. Kanai, who joined Hitachi as a researcher in 1958 and retires as president this month. The award recognizes contributions in the area of distributed computing systems. Thomson played an important role in creating Unix.
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| NCSA to add Roadrunner Linux based supercomputer
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The National Computational Science Alliance will introduce its first 128 processor workstation supercluster running the Linux operating system as the latest addition to the National Technology Grid, its arsenal of powerful computational resources. The supercluster, called Roadrunner, was unveiled at an April 8 dedication of the Supercluster Computing Facility of the Albuquerque High Performance Computing Center (AHPCC), at the campus of the University of New Mexico (UNM)
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| MIT installed
AlphaServer 8400 SMP for nuclear science laboratory
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The Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology purchased a Compaq AlphaServer 8400 5/625 system with eight 622 MHz Alpha 21164 CPUs, 2 GB RAM, a 176 cartridge DLT Robot, and 100 GB of disk storage space. The researchers are using C, C++, and Compaq's DIGITAL Fortran for scientific computing and development of new computer codes.
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| Florida State University signs agreement with JAWS
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Florida State University's Department of Computer Science has signed an educational agreement with JAWS Technologies to work co-operatively in the computer and information security fields. The scope of the agreement involves training in Information Security as well as the joint development and testing of security technologies and practices. The first initiative of this joint venture is a special topics credit course in security practices by JAWS Technologies at FSU in May, 1999.
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| Sanders to deliver euro 5.7 million computer technology for improved space traveling
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NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) selected Sanders, a Lockheed Martin Company, for Phase-II of its Remote Exploration and Experimentation supercomputing technology project. The euro 5.7 million contract will result in a demonstration of a low-power, scalable, high-performance computer with on-board processing capabilities that will enable NASA to conduct a new class of space science missions.
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| NSF puts more money in network connectivity
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The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded 16 grants, worth a total of $6.3 million (approx 6 million euro), to allow1 9 universities to connect to the advanced high-performance computer networks that will constitute the Internet of the future. The new two-year grants bring to 150 the number of high performance connection grants awarded by NSF's Advanced Networking Infrastructure (ANI) programme. This exceeds by 50 NSF's original goal for this part of President Clinton's Next Generation Internet initiative.
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| Donaldson's Silent Partner to silence noisy brakes
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The Donaldson Company introduced the Silent Partner to prevent engine braking noise from heavy vehicles, using engine compression brakes. After the design, engineers used CAE and supercomputer modeling. Then, prototypes were evaluated with dynamometers, at acoustic labs, and in over a million miles of road and track testing, before the noise reduced by 25%.
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| Lawson appoints Patton to increase international growth
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Lawson Software appointed Dr. Peter C. Patton, Lawson's chief technology officer (CTO), as senior
vice president of International Business Development. The appointment accompanies a restructuring of Lawson's international operations targeted at growing Lawson's international revenue - currently 10 percent of the company's revenue - to 25 percent by the end of 2002. Patton
was founding director of Minnesota Supercomputer Institute.
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| Vienna University of
Technology install 64 processor SGI Origin
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The Vienna University of Technology has
installed a new system, which is mainly
used for major
production projects that require large amounts of both bandwidth and parallel
computing power,
based on a 64-processor
SGI
Origin
2000 server with 22 Gbyte of memory.
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| NEC European Supercomputer Systems opens renewed web site
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NEC European Supercomputer Systems (ESS) has completely renewed its web site. It provides up to date information with news on NEC supercomputing in Europe, a newsroom archive wiith press releases, product information and links to other information sources. Also the magazine "ESS Update" is available on the web site.
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| IBM offers satisfaction garantuee of SAP R/3 on RS/6000
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IBM started a two-year, no-charge protection programme for users installing SAP R/3 applications on newly purchased RS/6000 high-availability servers. With the programme IBM ensures that the RS/6000 system will meet agreed upon ERP workload expectations or IBM will upgrade the customer's processor, memory or both at no charge. ERP is software that llinks aspects of business operations together.
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| Deutsche Telekom certifies N.E.T. Promina for ATM
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Deutsche Telekom has certified Network Equipment Technologies' Promina 800 Series Multiservice Access Platform for ATM internetworking. N.E.T. is one of the first vendors to have customer premise equipment certified for use with Deutsche Telekom's T-NET ATM services offered throughout Germany. Costumers can make use of the offer immediately.
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| Fujitsu unveils new server strategy
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Entitled 'Perpetual Computing' Fujitsu outlines it's new server strategy at the CeBIT conference in Hannover. Main goal of the strategy is neutralising downtime for server users. Other areas include vendor stability and longevity, continued compatibility with other vendors, product quality, replicated server roll-outs, and the reduction of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
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| Amdahl and Sun installed Unix computer centre at Commerzbank
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Amdahl and Sun created a Unix computer centre at Commerzbank worth tens of millions of euro's What used to be over 400 distributed CFP workstations and server systems are to be consolidated to facilitate streamlined computer centre operations at mainframes. The companies claim to have installed the largest Unix computer center in Europe.
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| Digital Mock Up: no need to produce physical prototypes anymore
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The Automotive industry doesn't have to build real test models anymore. The real models currently required for automobile development are being dispensed with new Digital Mock-Up (DMU) methods, which combine all digital data from CAD, CAE and CAM, including the results
from simulations and animations, The potential of DMU was shown on Silicon Graphics' booth at CeBIT.
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| Siemens purchases Internet company Redstone
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Siemens Information and Broadband division acquired Redstone Communications, an Internet compapny based in Westford, Massachusetts. Both parties agreed not to divulge the purchase price Recently acquired Argon Networks and Castle Networks, and purchased a stake in Accelerated Networks. These actions are part of the restructuration of Siemens.
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| PFD and Fluent developed chemical reactions on the Internet
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Performance Fluid Dynamics (PFD), an engineering consultancy and software company and Fluent, a provider of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software, have teamed to develop 3-D simulation of chemical reactors on the Internet. The Internet-based simulation tool, Net.Re@ction, gives engineers access to pre-solved CFD flow simulations. PFD offers the service through an IBM SP-2 supercomputer provided by the Centre for Supercomputing in Ireland.
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| Russia and U.S. conclude agreement and plan to build supercomputer centre
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A large number of nuclear agreements between Russia and the U.S.A. are concluded during the eleventh session of the Intergovernmental Commission for Economic and Technological Cooperation, held in Washington from March 23-25. The two countries now plan to build a supercompouter
centre in Sarov,
Armanas.
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| 25th SPEEDUP Workshop on Trends in High-Performance Computing
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The Swiss Scientific Computing Centre (CSCS) will evolve from
from service center to science center. This means that more scientists will be located at Manno. There will be a close cooperation with the new University of Swizerra Italiana in Ticino. This was announced at the 5th SPEEDUP workshop that was held last month in Lugano. About 60 scientists participated in this workshop in Lugano, Switzerland on March 25 and 26. This year's programme was an interesting mixture on what is going on in HPC in the US for example at Sandia and NCSA, industrial usage in Switzerland and Germany and trends pushed by the German Wissenschaftsrat for example.
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| Unite consortium opens new Cray Origin 2000
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On the 24th of March the new Cray Origin 2000 from the Unite consortium was officialy opened at the Amsterdam Academic
supercomputer centre. Among others, partcipants are the Universities of Eindhoven, Twente and Amsterdam. The system features 128
processors , 56 GByte of central memory, 512 GByte disc capacity and runs IRIX Operating System version 6.5.
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| ACM international collegiate programming battle for first time in Europe
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This year's ACM World Finals competition was held for the first time in Europe at the Technical University of Eindhoven (TUE), The Netherlands. In former years this battle, wich tests logic, programming skills and mental endurance was held in the U.S.
The University of Waterloo, Canada ended first in the contest. Close to 6,000 programmers, representing universities in 59 countries, competed in the regional (preliminary) contests last fall.
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| Parallel Computer Systems launched
fast clone of PVM
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Parallel Computer Systems developed HP-PVM, a clone of the industry standard PVM. HP-PVM is a message queuing communications system, which supports large scalable heterogeneous networks. Improvements and extensions include commercial support and bespoke customisation,
fast automatic shared memory on multi-processor PCs, 35 times the speed of WPVM.
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| Roger Hockney - In Memoriam
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On Wednesday, April 14 Roger Hockney passed away in Oxford. Having suffered from cancer during the past three years, he had been hospitalised most of the time since February. An In Memoriam by
Vladimir Getov.
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| Special issue with an update on results from European R&D projects
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Primeur Magazine and VMW Magzine have copublished a second Special Issue in Europen R&D projects. This issue is published in conjunction with the ITIS/ITAB 99 event at HPCN Europe in Amsterdam. A selection of the articles is presented.
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| AEROnet takes off
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The TTN aersospace group AEROnet has opened its renewed web site.
AEROnet presents itself as a new Technology Transfer Network service
for innovative technologies in aerospace. The AEROnet network is born from the initiative of the
European "Esprit" Programme. The initiative was launched with the aim to transfer High Performance
Computing Networking (HPCN) technologies into European Industry via the establishment of
specialized Technology Transfer Nodes (TTNs) across Europe.
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| EuroTools repository open for non-European tools
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The EuroTools consortium has opened its repository of tools in HPCN tools for non-European tool providers too. Until now only European code developers were allowed to list their tool in the repository.
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| Southampton Workshop and Tutorial on
Distributed and Meta-Computing
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On Friday 25 June 1999, a
the Southampton Workshop and Tutorial on
Distributed and Meta-Computing. The purpose of this workshop is to examine the state-of-the-art in large-scale distributed and metacomputing applications and supporting
technology, the different approaches taken to its development in
Europe and the U.S., and the outstanding technical and business
issues in this area, e.g. access, security, performance management, applications, and integration with other distributed environments.
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| HPCN Europe attracts 400 people
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Some 400 people registered to the HPCN Europe event, last week in Amsterdam.
There was a large attendence from research Industrial participation lagged behind.
The medical applications related events, the ITIS/ITAB 99 miniconference, the Healthcare for the Future workshop and the medical applications track in the main conference attracted interest from about 150
people, showing the growing interest in this topic.
Metacomputing
and distributed computing related topics attracted much attention.
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| SuParCup '99 Award for outstanding contribution in
parallel computing - closing date May 7
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To promote Parallel Computing the Mannheim
Supercomputer '99 weminar announced the "Mannheim SuParCup '99
which will be awarded in the Mannheim during the conference, June 10-12, 1999. The Award, with a first price of
euro 2500, should appeal to anyone with experience in the use of parallel computers - including MPP, SMP, PVP systems and PC/WS clusters - for the solution of real problems.
The deadline for the contributions is May 7.
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| SAAB chooses Codine for managing parallel simulation work load
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Swedish car manufacturer
SAAB Automobile AB has inked an agreement with
Genias Software for
installing the resource management system Codine
on 100
of its SUN workstations, with a possible extension next year to 200. The
system will be used to manage the large number of STAR-HPC jobs that are
needed in the car design process.
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| MSC.NASTRAN to be ported to
Tera MTA
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Tera Computer Company announced an agreement with The MacNeal-Schwendler Corporation to port MSC.NASTRAN to Tera's MultiThreaded Architecture (MTA) systems.
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| MC/ServiceGuard and LSF bundled for HP 9000
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Hewlett-Packard Company and Platform Computing
will bundle
MC/ServiceGuard and LSF forthe
HP 9000 Enterprise Servers with
HP-UX 11 operating environment for the technical-computing marketplace.
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| HP-UX 64-bit technology integrated with SAS Institute's scalable
performance data server
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Hewlett-Packard Company and SAS Institute
announced the
first 64-bit SAS Scalable Performance Data (SPD) Server, available only on
HP platforms, including the V2500 server. Applications are data warehousing, information-delivery software and
customer-management solutions. One of Europe's largest telecommunications providers is a first customer of the new service.
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| New Java 2 SDK for Solaris Sets VolanoMark Benchmark Record
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Sun introduced the
Java
2 Software Development Kit (SDK), including an enhanced Java Virtual Machine, for the Solaris
operating environment which improves Java performance by as much as 500 percent. The Java 2 SDK for Solaris performance records were set for large-scale applications when compared to ten other Java Development Kits, according to VolanoMark Benchmark results. This release of the Java 2 SDK is the only Java platform to take advantage of the inherent 64-CPU scalability of Solaris,
allowing Java performance to increase as additional CPUs are added to the
system.
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| Formula I racing car wheel design speeded up with weeks due to CAD/CFD integration at Cambridge
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Racing cars are very expensive to design and produce. Never thought everyone really was interested in the effeciency of these processes. But W. Kellar from the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) Labaratory at Cambridge University does. At HPCN Europe in Amsterdam, he showed a method to speed-up the design process for a Formula 1 car front wheel flowfield.
Problem solved at Cambridge was how to use
output from the CAD software that was used for the basic design as input to the computational fluid dynamics programme used to the calculate the flow around the wheel.
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| Two level scheduling
strategy keeps bearing simulation rolling
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Everbody is using them each day, without paying attention. Without them, the world as we know it would come to a hold. Rolling bearings are everywhere. One of the companies specialised in producing them is SFK. Patrick Nordling from SKF Engineering and Research, explained
at HPCN Europe a new scheduling technique for the many computations needed in computer simulations of rolling bearings. With the new Adaptive Scheduling Strategy
Optimizer (ASSO), clever use is made of the knowledge
of the structure of a bearing. This naturally leads to a two-level scheduling algorithm to be used.
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| Vampir at National Supercomputer Centre in Sweden
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NSC, the National Supercomputer Centre in Sweden has installed VAMPIR in its T3E system. VAMPIR, developed in Germany,
provides an interactive graphical interface for the investigation ofpost mortem traces generated by parallel MPI programs. VAMPIR also found its way to the big research labs on the other side of the Atlantic: Los Alamos and Livermore.
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| Indian government to present 12 educational institutes a PARAM 10000
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The Indian Department of Electronics (DOE) has approved a scheme to present PARAM 10000 Supercomputers to 12 premier educational institutions in the country including all IITs. The PARAM 10000 fabricated by the Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is the most powerful computer in the whole of Asia, barring Japan.
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| NAG's LAPACK software adapted by Intel
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For its Math Kernel Library (MKL), Release 3.1, Intel adapted LAPACK software from the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG). According to the companies, the new routines solve medium to large size problems up to 3.8 times as fast on 4 processors as on a single processor.
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| IDC: Spending in high-end application service provider market will be
euro 1.8 billion by 2003
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According to a new International Data Corporation (IDC) bulletin, Worldwide Application Service Provider Forecast, 1998-2003, spending in the high-end application service provider (ASP) market will reach euro 1.8 billion by 2003. This represents a 91% four-year compound annual growth rate. IDCs definition of ASP is, that ASPs are service firms that provide a contractual service offering to deploy, host, manage, and lease what is typically packaged application software from a centrally managed facility.
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| ANSYS to acquire Centric
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ANSYS, a provider of computer aided engineering (CAE) software, has completed the acquisition of the software company, Centric Engineering Systems. ANSYS announced an agreement in principle to acquire Centric on February 2, 1999.
Spectrum, Centric's main product is a tightly coupled multiphysics code.
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| Tokyo institute to rent supercomputer
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The Tokyo Institute of Technology will rent a supercomputer from
5, January, 2000 through 31, March, 2000. Tenders have to be submitted before May 27, 1999.
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| Franklin Street/Fairview capital invests euro 4.8 million in Raindrop Geomagic
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Franklin Street/ Fairview Capital invested euro 4.8 million in 3 D modelling software company Raindrop Geomagic.
A condition of the investment is that Paul Rizzo, who is Chairman of Franklin Street Partners and a General Partner of Franklin Street/ Fairview Capital, is to represent the fund on Raindrop Geomagic's Board of
Directors.
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| New NEC SX-5 entry level systems
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NEC announced enhancements to the SX-5
Series supercomputer family.
New entry-level models have been added to
the product range, aimed at completely
replacing the
SX-4 Series.
Further, I/O enhancements have been added.
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| Data General to power up AViiON servers with Intel 500MHz Pentium III Xeon processors
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Data General
Corporation announced
that its high-end and mid-range AViiON
servers will be available with Intel's new 500-MHz Pentium III Xeon
processors. This includes the AV 25000 NUMA server .
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| Fujitsu opens door to realization
2 GHz chips
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Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. has succeeded in developing
a technology for molecular design of a low-k material that can be used to realize future 0.1-micron process technology.
The pathbreaking "nanocavity"
technology, which makes it possible to control the shape of nanometer-scale cavities, enabled Fujitsu researchers to create a material that has a super-low dielectric constant of 2, and which combines resistance to water and alkali with excellent layer strength, thereby opening the way to the realization of LSI chips that will run at a frequency of 2 GHz.
The design was performed useing supercomputer simulations.
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| Exit Silicon Graphics
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After 17 years, Silicon Graphics decided it was time for a new brandname and logo.
From now on the company will call itself SGI. Especially the weak recoginition in the supercomputer and server arena lead to this change.
Under the new brandname system, products like Cray
supercomputers
will be marketed as one of three primary sub-brands under the SGI master brand umbrella.
The three sub-brands include SGI
servers and services, Silicon Graphics
visual workstations, and Cray
supercomputers.
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| IBM enhances AIX-Windows interoperability
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At Cebit in Hannover, IBM announced
new PC interoperability products and Internet security capabilities for
AIX Version 4.3.2.
The new features are geared towards mixed Unix, Windows, and OS/2 environments, particularly e-business customers, and Internet Service Providers.
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| New high-end supercomputer from Fujitsu: VPP5000 Series
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Fujitsu introduced a new series of multi-processor vector supercomputers: the VPP5000 Series. Each PE has
a scalar unit and a 4-pipe vector
unit with
a peak of
9.6 Gflop/s. Total system can have up
to 512 PEs or a peak of
4.9 Tflop/s.
The new supercomputer series will also be marketed by Siemens AG of Munich, Germany. Fujitsu expects to sell 150 systems within the next three years.
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| An overview of all the current commercial supercomputers
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What is a CPP Gamma II? How many processors has an Avalon A12? What is the peak performance of an Origin2000?
An answer to these quations can be found in the ninth edition of the publication "Overview of recent supercomputers" by Aad van der Steen. It lists all commercial available supercomputers today, or within the next few months. In
the introdution Van der Steen explains the architectural
structure of today's supercomputers.
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| New Fujitsu supercomputer to be expected in Spring
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In his report Overview of recent supercomputers,
Aad van der Steen also describes systems on the drawing table, that are to be expected on the market in the near future. Fom Fujitsu, Van der Steen expects to see a succesor to the VPP 700, with a traditonal architecture: vector processors connected by a multi-level crossbar. Compaq/Digital is working on the 30 Tflop/s machine they must deliver under the ASCI programme in 2001, and HP will move to SMP-clusters also connected by a multi-level crossbar. Van der Steen is also commenting IBM and SGI developments in his report.
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| Most computing vendors announced multi-processor
Pentium III
servers
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Most computer vendors have now announced and demonstrated
workstations with Intel Pentium III support with support for 4 or 8 way processing. Among them are NEC, SGI and HP. Some details.
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| C-DAC helps you building your own supercomputer
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India's state-owned Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) plans to develop supercomputer technologies using personal computer elements which would enable organisations to build their own supercomputer of the size and performance needed. The mission, to be ready within three-and-half years, aims to develop hardware and software by which research institutions can build their own scalable super computer.
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| Call for participation in new Top 500 list
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The next release of the TOP500 Supercomputer List, will be presented at Supercomputer Seminar'99, June 10-12 in Mannheim, Germany. The deadline for submitting entries is April 15, 1999.
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| Kingston to offer memory for Silicon Graphics 320 and 540 workstations
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Kingston Technology has developed memory that supports the recently announced Silicon Graphics 320 and 540 Visual Workstations. The Kingston memory kits provide broader availability of the memory designed for systems based on the Integrated Visual Computing architecture and Cobalt graphics chipset. Kingston is supporting Silicon Graphics' entry into the Windows NT market
by providing memory DIMM kits, ranging from 128 to 512 MB.
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| NEC to launch 0.18/0.15-micron ASIC products
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NEC has developed the CB-11 family of application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) products utilizing 0.18/0.15-micron (drawn) CMOS process technology. The CB-11 features use of modular process technology that will enable both large density memory and high-speed logic on the same chip. Designs for CB-11 will be accepted from June 1999 while sampling is set to begin from December 1999 going to volume production from Q1 2000.
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| Tera raised additional working capital during the1st quarter
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Tera Computer Company made progress in manufacturing and financial developments for the first quarter of 1999. Tera built and begun testing its first network capable of supporting an eight processor Tera MTA system. The company believes it is now on track to double the size of systems it can build about every six months . Additionally, Tera raised over euro 7,000,000 of working capital this quarter.
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| Stockholders of MIPS approve recapitalization
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The public stockholders of MIPS Technologies approved a recapitalization of the company's capital stock. Pursuant to the terms of the recapitalization, each outstanding share of MIPS common stock will be redesignated as one share of newly issued Class A common stock. Immediately thereafter, SGI will exchange each share of Class A common stock it owns for one share of newly issued Class B common stock.
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| Disappointing financial figures for SGI
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Silicon Graphics, announced that, based on a preliminary analysis of its results to date for the
quarter ending March 31, 1999, it expects to report revenue in the low to mid $600 million range. Based upon this revenue forecast, the company now expects to report a net loss that is $0.20 to $0.25 larger than Wall Street expectations.
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| Siemens to introduce new Primergy server
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Siemens launched its new Primergy 170 workgroup server. The Primergy 170 features an Intel-Prozessor Pentium III with 500 MHz (optional is a Pentium II 350/400/ 450 MHz), with up to 768 MByte Error Correction Code. In connection with a
Ultra2-LVD-SCSI-Raid-Controller the server can reach a bandwith of 80 MByte/s. The Primergy170 is certified by Windows NT, Novell Netware/Intranetware, OS/2, SCO UnixWare/OpenServer, Sun Solaris and Linux 6.0. Prices start at 2250 euro.
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| IBM, SCO and Sequent: prototype UNIX for IA-64 up and running
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IBM, SCO and Sequent have completed initial tests of the Project Monterey operating system running on the Merced simulator for the Intel IA-64 architecture. Project Monterey is a high-volume, enterprise-class, commercial UNIX operating system initiative launched last October. The participants declared that in less than five months the prototype for the Unix operating system for IA-64 is up and running.
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| Fujitsu and HP to support Linux
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Fujitsu subsidiary PFU Limited, will begin offering Linux operating system support services for users of Fujitsu's GRANPOWER5000 Series IA (Intel Architecture) servers in Japan from late May, 1999.
Hewlett-Packard also has optimized it's Kayak PC Workstations for Linux.
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| SGI introduces 270 MHz R12000 processor to Octane
workstations
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SGI introduced three
new Silicon Graphics
Octane visual workstation configurations based on the
270 MHz MIPS RISC R12000
processor.
The new Octane systems will be sold for the same price as earlier models based
on a slower processor.
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| Occidental Oil and Gas Corporation to open second Computing Center
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Occidental Oil and Gas Corporation plans to open a second Visual Computing Centre in Bakersfield, California, which will collaborate with its Houston Center. This centre, operational since July 1998, is helping Occidental produce faster exploration decisions. To power the Houston plant,
an Onyx2 system from Silicon Graphics is used.
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| Abilene cooprates with Pittsburgh Supercomputer Centre
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The National Center for Network
Engineering (NCNE), a resource group of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing
Center (PSC), will provide engineering services for Abilene, the large US national research network.
Under the agreement, which is effective
immediately, NCNE will coordinate with technical staff at more than 70
universities nationwide to provide operational support, documentation,
training, and testing of new network technologies.
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| Euronet aquires ATMs worth euro 6.1 million from Service Bank
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The Hungarian Euronet Services signed a major agreement with Service Bank to acquire 252 installed ATMs in Germany and 35 ATMs in inventory. The purchase price was euro 6.1 million
(USD 6.7 million).
Under the agreement Euronet receives monthly fees based on revenues
realized from the ATMs, less certain expenses and management fees payable to Service Bank.
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| InfoLibria's Dynacache best performing at Internet bake-off test
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At the industry's first independent head-to-head competition on Internet-strength, InfoLibria's DynaCache network caching application
for hih-performance networking came out to be best performing. The test, wich was held at the University of California, showed that DynaCache had the highest operating capacity ever recorded in an independent test.
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| NEC extends ATM with networking device
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NEC Corporation has begun sampling of a 2.4 gigabit per second (Gbit/s) SONET1/SDH2 framer, the µPD98414, a new addition to its
ATM3 products, including PHYs4, SARs5 and switches. The SONET framer enables telecommunications carriers and Internet service providers to offer high-speed wide area network and local area network backbone communication systems.
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| IBM starts Internet projects with partners in Illinois and the Netherlands
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IBM launched new Advanced Internet Projects. These projects are the newest in a broad range of projects for networking and e-business in which IBM is involved. IBM already signed contracts with the U.S. Northwestern University and other partners to create advanced Internet applications. Another project will be the establishment of a European Advanced Internet Application Center in the Netherlands in partnership with the Telematics Institute and SURFnet.
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