The global publication of record for High Performance Computing / June 27, 2003: Vol. 12, No. 25

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Features:

NEW LIST OF FASTEST COMPUTERS - TOP500: The University of Mannheim, University of Tennessee, and NERSC/LBNL have released the latest version of the Top 500 supercomputers, based upon the LINPACK benchmark.
MSC INTERVIEW: HANDHELD CLUSTER ADMINISTRATION: by Alan Beck, Editor-in-Chief
HPCwire interviewed MSC.Software's David Lombard, Director of R&D, concerning the topic of MSC.Software's creation of handheld remote cluster administration.
IBM TO PROVIDE "DEEP COMPUTING" FOR THE MASSES: IBM Corp. plans to bring "Deep Computing" to the masses, effectively loaning out the usage of its supercomputers via a secure VPN connection over the Internet.
MICROSOFT TO REORGANIZE SERVER DIVISIONS: Microsoft announced a reorganisation of its divisions that deal with servers and other back-end business systems, a move analysts characterised as a routine step to clarify the company's business strategy.
FBI TO FOCUS ON CYBER-TERRORISM: A unique partnership called the Infragard program has developed between the FBI and 8,300 companies to share information about both cyber and physical threats. Experts from around the country were expected to gather for the program's first national conference.
SDSC RELEASES STORAGE RESOURCE BROKER UPGRADE: The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UCSD has released version 2.1 of the popular SDSC Storage Resource Broker (SRB) middleware package, which enables scientists to create, manage, and collaborate with flexible, unified "virtual data collections".
CRYSTAL STRUCTURES LIGHT THE WAY TO OPTICAL MICROCHIP: A new class of microscopic crystal structures developed at the University of Toronto is bringing high bandwidth optical microchips one step closer to efficient, large-scale fabrication.
SEIZING THE MOMENT: IMPROVING CONTROL OF QUANTUM DOTS: Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Renewal Energy Laboratory (NREL) report a way to measure accurately the amount of laser light needed to shift the electrons in a particular type of quantum dot between two discrete states.
MAGNETIC AND SEMICONDUCTING NANOPARTICLES ASSEMBLED: Scientists from Columbia University, IBM and the University of New Orleans announced a new, three-dimensional designer material assembled from two different types of particles only billionths of a meter across.
NEXT GENERATION INTERNET SETS NEW LAND SPEED RECORDS: An international team set new Internet2 Land Speed Records using next generation Internet Protocols (IPv6) by achieving 983 megabits-per- second with a single IPv6 stream for more than an hour across a distance of 7,067 kilometers.

Cluster Computing:

SGI SUPERCLUSTER EXTENDS SEISMIC PROCESSING CAPABILITIES: SGI has sold a 256-processor SGI Altix 3000 supercluster to the exploration and production department at Total, the major French oil and gas company.
NEC HPCE INSTALL CLUSTERS AT UK E-SCIENCE CENTER: NEC High Performance Computing Europe (HPCE) and ClusterVision have completed a large compute and storage cluster installation at the Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC)'s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire (UK).
LINUX NETWORX CLUSTER CLIMBS TO 3RD FASTEST SUPERCOMPUTER: A cluster supercomputer Linux Networx built for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 2002 advanced two rankings to become the third fastest supercomputer in the world on the 21st TOP500 supercomputing list.
HPC CLUSTER SYMPOSIUM ANNOUNCEMENT: The Army Research Lab (ARL MSRC), Raytheon, and the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) are sponsoring a symposium to study the challenges associated with the use of commodity clusters for large-scale scientific applications.
INFINICON SYSTEMS AND APPRO DEMO AMD/INTEL-BASED CLUSTER: InfiniCon Systems and Appro, announced they are demonstrating at the ClusterWorld Conference and Expo the first InfiniBand-based High Performance Computing (HPC) server cluster to incorporate both Dual AMD Opteron and Dual Intel Xeon processor technology.
UNIVERSITY BUILDS LINUX CLUSTER FOR QUANTUM COMPUTING: The University of Queensland's Centre for Computational Molecular Science will build a grid computing cluster running Linux to study areas as diverse as hypersonic flight, quantum computing and life sciences.
DELL DEPLOYS NEW HIGH-PERFORMANCE CLUSTER SOLUTIONS: Dell has installed its largest high performance computing cluster in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) to date at Saudi Aramco, the world's leading oil producer/exporter and a top producer of natural gas.
INDIANA UNIVERSITY CLUSTERS ACHIEVE MILESTONES: Indiana University's AVIDD (Analysis and Visualization of Instrument- Driven Data) facility has achieved a calculation rate of 1.02 Teraflops, or just over one trillion mathematical operations per second.
CLUSTERVISION INSTALLS SUPERCOMPUTER BASED ON INFINIBAND: ClusterVision, specialist in Linux supercomputer clusters, has received an order from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands for the installation of a 66 processor Linux supercomputer cluster using InfiniBand technology from Fabric Networks.
DELL INTRODUCES 64-BIT SERVER FOR HPC MARKET: Dell announced the PowerEdge 3250 server, a high-performance 64-bit system designed to address sophisticated computing requirements such as advanced graphical rendering in special effects, complex financial modeling and genomic research.
CORNELL BOASTS FASTEST WINDOWS-BASED SUPERCLUSTER: A Dell Windows 2000 cluster at Cornell University's Theory Center in Ithaca, N.Y. was ranked among the world's top 10% of supercomputers for speed and power.

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Vendor Spotlight:

INTEL HELPS PUSH HPC MAINSTREAM: More than one-third of the world's most powerful computers with Intel processors inside of them are in commercial use, signaling that high performance computing (HPC) is evolving from its academic origins and into mainstream business.
SUN FIRE 15K SERVER SETS NEW BENCHMARK RECORD: Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced its flagship high-end server, the Sun Fire 15K, has delivered the industry's best peak performance results on the SPECOMPL2001 benchmark.
IBM SERVER COMPLETES OVER 24,000 TRANSACTIONS PER SECOND: IBM announced that, in a supervised, live exchange performance test, it has been successful in setting a new world record at more than twice the throughput of any previous test. In the test a peak throughput of 24,000 transactions per second was achieved.
HP POWERS MORE TOP500 SUPERCOMPUTERS: For the third consecutive time, HP ranks as the No. 1 supercomputing provider on the TOP500 Supercomputer list, which categorizes the 500 most powerful installed technical and commercial computer systems worldwide.
SGI ALTIX LEADS COMPETITION ON HPC BENCHMARKS: SGI announced that its SGI Altix 3000 servers and superclusters continue to deliver record performance on the next-generation Intel Itanium 2 processors.
IBM TECHNOLOGY DRIVES NEW APPLE DESKTOP: IBM's high-performance PowerPC 970 64-bit microprocessor is the driving technology behind Apple's new G5 PowerMac desktop system announced at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in the Moscone Center here.
SUN AND SYBASE COMBINATION OUTPERFORMS COMPETING SYSTEMS: Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced three record-breaking benchmarks for its Sun Fire systems, further validating its superior price-performance and storage efficiency on the TPC-H benchmark.
IBM POWERS OVER 34 PERCENT OF THE TOP 500 SUPERCOMPUTERS: An independent study found that IBM is the leading provider of supercomputing power with a total of 130 Teraflops of power on the TOP500 List of Supercomputers, representing more than 34 percent of the total processing power on the list.
INTEL INTRODUCES FASTER PENTIUM 4 PROCESSOR: Intel Corp announced a faster Pentium 4 microprocessor with performance-enhancing hyper-threading technology, as the world's largest chipmaker rolls out ever-faster chips.
APCON ANNOUNCES $3.7M SALE TO IBM GLOBAL SERVICES: APCON, Inc., a leading provider of network solutions and intelligent physical layer switches for Fibre Channel, Ethernet, and SONET, announced the fulfillment of a $3.7 million sale to IBM Global Services.
INTEL, SIB AND HP OPEN LIFE SCIENCES CENTER: Intel Corporation announced an agreement to collaborate with the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) and HP on an international life sciences program.
MSC.SOFTWARE ANNOUNCES RELEASE OF MSC.NASTRAN 2004: MSC.Software Corp., a leading global provider of virtual product development (VPD) products including simulation software, services and systems, announced the availability of MSC.Nastran 2004.

HP EXPANDS NETWORK STORAGE SERVICES PORTFOLIO: HP announced five new services to help companies optimize and more effectively manage their complex, heterogeneous storage environments.
NEC DEPLOYS LATEST IMSL FORTRAN LIBRARY FOR THE NEC SX-6: Visual Numerics and NEC Corporation, announced the general availability of Visual Numerics' latest IMSL Fortran Library version 5.0 for the NEC SX-6 Supercomputer, the first comprehensive mathematical library available for the world's fastest supercomputer.
MICROSOFT AWARDS ACADEMIC GRANTS FOR CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH: Microsoft Corp. demonstrated its commitment to fostering academic innovation by awarding grants to colleges and universities around the world.
MSC.SOFTWARE TO SUPPORT SUN ONE GRID ENGINE SOFTWARE: Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced that MSC.Software plans to integrate Sun's industry-leading Sun ONE Grid Engine software into its enterprise systems and high performance computing product portfolio.
SUN ANNOUNCES STRONG DEMAND FOR SUN ONE WEB SERVER: Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced increased demand for the Sun ONE Web Server as customers and partners rely on Sun ONE for building secure and highly reliable Web infrastructures.
SGI SOLUTION TO SOLVE CHALLENGES OF MASSIVE COMPUTATIONS: SGI announced that the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis (CBS), a division of the Technical University of Denmark, has selected SGI storage and supercomputing technologies to solve the massive data computation challenges associated with biological modeling.
PLATFORM DEPLOYS NEW SOFTWARE FOR GLOBUS TOOLKIT: Platform Computing and the Globus Project announced that Platform's new "Community Scheduler Framework" (CSF) will be contributed for inclusion in future releases of the Globus Toolkit, a set of software and services that is central to Grid computing. The target for inclusion is Fall 2003.
NIH AWARD FUNDS TERANODE DEPLOYMENT OF DESIGN TOOLS: Teranode Corporation announced that it has been awarded a $1.8M grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop languages and tools for communication and collaboration that are required for large- scale biology.
SUSE LINUX ENTERPRISE SERVER SELECTED BY CRAY: SuSE Linux announced that it has been chosen by Cray Inc. to drive key aspects of the Department of Energy's new massively parallel processing (MPP) supercomputer called Red Storm at Sandia National Laboratories.
VOLTAIRE TAKES iSCSI TO THE HIGH-END: Voltaire is the first to leverage iSCSI and InfiniBand together in one solution, to provide a high performance connectivity to Fibre Channel (FC) and IP storage area networks (SANs).
THINK COMPUTER TO EXHIBIT AMD PROCESSOR-BASED SERVERS: Think Computer Products will be exhibiting the latest in high performance server, cluster and storage technologies including the ThinkTank IQ AMD Opteron Processor based Servers at the 2nd Annual Information Sharing & Homeland Security Conference.
MSC.SOFTWARE COMPLETES SERVICES ENGAGEMENT FOR HYUNDAI: MSC.Software Corp., a leading global provider of virtual product development (VPD) products including simulation software, services and systems, announced the completion of a multi-year professional services engagement with Hyundai Motor Corp (HMC).
COMPANIES MOBILIZE INTEL-BASED SOLUTION FOR OIL SECTOR: Telispark and Deloitte Consulting announced the two companies will bring to market a mobile pipeline inspection solution deployed on Intel architecture that is designed specifically for oil and gas pipeline- operating companies.

INTERVIEW WITH EYAL WALDMAN, CEO MELLANOX TECHNOLOGIES
by Alan Beck, Editor-in-Chief

Quote of the Week:

"IBM has committed our deep technology and research capabilities to become the leader in supercomputing. Leveraging our strengths in technology and research with the sophisticated software and deep industry knowledge help customers solve real life business problems."

Dave Turek,
vice president, IBM Deep Computing

News Briefs:

Hardware

Software

Networking

Storage

General

Short Takes:

Product Watch:: Metrowerks Offers Tools For Mac OS.
LSI Logic Deploys New Design System.
Apple Debuts Power Mac G5.
Financial Update:: AMD Sees 2nd Quarter Sales Shortfall.
Cloakware Closes $4.2M In Financing.
Court Gives Status Quo In Mathworks Case.
Corporate Liaisons:: IBM Appoints Benz Infotech As partner.
Fakespace And Christie Europe Team Up.
Agere Teams With Laurel Networks.
People and Positions:: Linux Networx CEO Joins Top Committee.
Noted Astrophysicist Joins NSF.
MS Hires New Privacy Strategist.

Conferences & Events

HPCwire notes events and highlights a complete listing of industry-related conferences, exhibitions, meetings, etc.

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