Primeur magazine

Edition: weekly - Issue: 2011-05-23

EuroFlash

Cray Inc. has signed a contract with the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) to upgrade its current Cray XT5 system, nicknamed "Monte Rosa" to a Cray XE6 supercomputer. The Monte Rosa system at CSCS will be upgraded with Cray's Gemini system interconnect and the new AMD Opteron 6200 Series processors - code-named "Interlagos". Read further...

The Joint European DCI Summer School 2011, which will be held 11-16 July 2011, in Budapest, Hungary, will be organised around the topics of traditional Grids, desktop Grids and Clouds. The summer school will be held in Budapest and the organisers are looking for participants who are interested in the pan-European computing infrastructure. The summer school is also a good opportunity to get an insight of the work performed by the various European Grid and Cloud projects. The registration deadline is 30th June, 2011. Read further...

On the occasion of its yearly Summit event assembling American and European customers, Bull has launched the latest generation of its StoreWay Virtuo VTL. With organisations evermore dependent on core-business applications to support growth and continuity of key business functions, their data requires corresponding high levels of protection and long-term availability. Read further...

Dassault Systèmes, a global expert in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, has introduced new non-linear structural optimization, coupled multiphysics, and high-performance computing technology available in Abaqus 6.11, the leading unified FEA product suite from SIMULIA. Read further...

IBM and SARA have signed a joint research collaboration agreement focused on petascale computing. The agreement allows for joint research in a number of areas to enable applications to run on next generation petaflop supercomputers. The collaboration builds upon a long-standing relationship between SARA and IBM in the field of high-performance computing. Read further...

IBM and ETH Zurich, a premiere European science and engineering university, hosted more than 600 guests from industry, academia and government, to open the Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Center located on the campus of IBM Research - Zurich. The facility is the centerpiece of a 10-year strategic partnership in nanoscience between IBM and ETH Zurich where scientists will research novel nanoscale structures and devices to advance energy and information technologies. Read further...

Dassault Systèmes' Abaqus 6.11 - the new release of the leading unified finite element analysis (FEA) product suite from Dassault's SIMULIA brand - leverages NVIDIA Quadro and Tesla GPUs, coupled with CPUs, to run computer-aided engineering (CAE) simulations twice as fast as with CPUs alone. Read further...

The Computation-based Science and Technology Research Center (CaSToRC) of the Cyprus Institute (CyI), together with the Greek Research and Technology Network (GRNET), organized the 2011 Programming Winter School for the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) at the CyI Athalassa Campus in Nicosia, Cyprus, between 24-27 January 2011. The school was co-organized with the LinkSCEEM-2 project 2011 Advanced Training Workshop. Read further...

Equalizer is the standard framework to create and deploy parallel, scalable OpenGL applications. Collage is the cluster back-end for Equalizer and a standalone, cross-platform C++ library for building heterogenous, distributed applications. Both development toolkits are available for free for commercial and non-commercial use under the LGPL open source license. Read further...

The University of Colorado at Boulder is using VASCO Data Security International Inc.'s DIGIPASS GO 6 and IDENTIKEY Server to provide secure access to its supercomputer and its network. Read further...

LightNet, an association of educational and research institutions in Italy's Trieste territory, has deployed the ADVA FSP 3000 to enable the launch of a powerful, flexible and reliable telecommunications infrastructure that delivers its users unprecedented collaboration, medical and scientific capabilities. ADVA Optical Networking's carrier-class, 40Gbit/s Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) provides high-speed connectivity and dynamic bandwidth allocation within and among LightNet's diverse roster of 10 member institutions, as well as to Italy's and neighbouring countries' national research and education networks (NRENs) and the commercial Internet. Read further...

Lonestar Education and Research Network (LEARN) has deployed the ADVA FSP 3000 Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) platform to extend its metro solutions in Dallas, San Antonio and Houston, Texas, and has named the FSP 3000 as its platform-of-choice for future network expansion. LEARN is a consortium of K-12, colleges, universities, research, healthcare and public-service institutions in the state of Texas. Read further...

USFlash

BOINC Monitor, a desktop gadget for Windows Vista/7 that shows the status of running tasks, has been released. Read further...

The next version of BOINC is now ready for public use. Read further...

Version 1.00 of BoincTasks - a Windows programme for managing BOINC clients - has been released after 2 years of hard work and with the help of many volunteers. Read further...

Convey Computer has introduced the Convey GraphConstructor (CGC), a new software and hardware solution that speeds up some of the world's most popular bioinformatics algorithms and helps scientists better manage and analyze escalating amounts of research data. Read further...

Appro, a provider of supercomputing solutions, has performed the final installation of a new 12,512-processor core Appro Xtreme-X supercomputer at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL). The system is known as 'Fission'. The acquisition of Fission enables INL researchers to build more complete scientific models and better predict outcomes for a variety of nuclear and energy-related issues. For example, an INL team is using Fission to simulate what happens to the metal cladding that surrounds uranium fuel in a nuclear reactor. Fission helped create a 3D fuel rod model that simulates how heat, pressure and other conditions affect cladding during its first 18 months in a reactor - a first for the team. Read further...

Appro has made available NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPU computing capability for the Appro Tetra and GreenBlade server platforms and Appro Xtreme-X and HyperPower Supercomputing solutions. Based on the CUDA architecture codenamed "Fermi", the NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPU Computing Module delivers approximately 10X higher HPC application performance than the latest multi-core CPUs. The Tesla M2090 GPU features many 'must have' HPC capabilities including 512 computing cores per GPU at 665 gigaflops of double precision performance with ECC memory for uncompromised accuracy and reliability and an L1/L2 cache for improved bandwidth and data sharing. Read further...

NVIDIA has unveiled the Tesla M2090 GPU, the world's fastest parallel processor for high performance computing. In addition, the Tesla M2090 GPU achieved the fastest-ever performance in a key measure of scientific computation. Equipped with 512 CUDA parallel processing cores, the Tesla M2090 GPU delivers 665 gigaflops of peak double-precision performance, enabling application acceleration by up to 10x compared to using a CPU alone. Read further...

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications has begun installation of a 153 teraflop supercomputer, dubbed Forge. Forge is a hybrid system that combines both CPUs and general purpose graphics-processing units (GPUs); it will replace NCSA's previous hybrid system, known as Lincoln, and is expected to enter production by July 1. Read further...

BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, IBM, Intel, Red Hat Inc. and SUSE have formed the Open Virtualization Alliance, a consortium committed to fostering the adoption of open virtualization technologies including Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). The consortium will promote examples of customer successes, encourage interoperability and accelerate the expansion of the ecosystem of third party solutions around KVM, providing businesses improved choice, performance and price for virtualization. Read further...

LCPA, a large performing arts centre, has moved its website LincolnCenter.org to a private Cloud hosted by Logicworks. Lincoln Center is well known for its contributions to New York City's cultural and intellectual life, with an internationally recognized reputation for artistic excellence. Lincoln Center serves as a dynamic economic engine for the region, hosting some five million New York City visitors annually and reaching a global audience via the Web. In seeking a Cloud computing vendor, the fact that Logicworks was founded in Manhattan over eighteen years ago made it an obvious fit. However, doing business with another New York original wasn't the only factor in the decision. Read further...

A Toledo, Ohio, physicist has implemented a new mathematical approach that accelerates some complex computer calculations used to simulate the formation of micro-thin materials. Jacques Amar, Ph.D., professor of physics at the University of Toledo (UT), studies the modelling and growth of materials at the atomic level. He uses Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) resources and Kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) methods to simulate the molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) process, where metals are heated until they transition into a gaseous state and then reform as thin films by condensing on a wafer in single-crystal thick layers. Read further...

James Myers, director of the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations (CCNI) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has accepted an invitation to join the High Performance Computing (HPC) Advisory Committee of the U.S. Council on Competitiveness. Read further...

TELUS will construct a new $65 million Tier III Intelligent Internet Data Centre in Rimouski. This new green facility, the first TELUS Internet Data Centre built to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold Standards, will significantly enhance TELUS' IT management services to businesses in Quebec, Canada and internationally. The project affirms TELUS' position as Canada's leading provider of managed hosting solutions, according to a recent report by NBI/Michael Sone Associates. Read further...

A Georgia State University (GSU) scientist has found a new way to simulate data in examining processes during photosynthesis, a method which will lead to a better understanding of how plants work. Gary Hastings, professor of physics, has developed a way to better interpret measurements that investigate the molecular interactions involved in photosynthesis. By using the data provided through Gary Hastings' method, scientists will be able to more accurately develop a mathematical model of photosynthetic processes in plants. Read further...

VMware Inc., a global expert in virtualization and Cloud infrastructure, has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Shavlik Technologies, a provider of easy-to-use, effective cloud-based IT management solutions for small and medium businesses (SMBs). Shavlik Technologies provides a portfolio of on-premise and SaaS-based management solutions that enable SMBs to more effectively manage, monitor and secure their IT environments while addressing their unique needs when moving to virtual and Cloud computing IT deployments. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The acquisition is expected to be completed later this quarter, subject to satisfaction of customary closing conditions. Read further...