data link for November 1999

SC99!: The remarkable impact that high-end technology has had on the rest of the computing world is the focus of the conference this year. Take a look at the program that has HPC researchers and technology innovators heading to Portland, Oregon, in the third week of the month. §
Top 500 List Issued at SC99: The latest version of the Top 500 Supercomputers List will be issued during SC99 November 17th at a late-afternoon BOF. Take a look after that date and see where the resources you use are on the list.
Cactus Software Embracing New Fields: Cactus lets traditional single processor codes be easily extended to full blown parallel applications that can run on all supercomputers, but still be developed on a simple laptop. It provides a framework for numerically solving any system of partial differential equations and could be used for applications in any of the physical sciences or engineering disciplines. §
Looking Back On Three Decades Of Internet History: Thirty years ago in late October, the inaugural message was sent over the first thin reed of what was to become the Internet. It was just the simple word "login." §
Mixed Programming Models for Parallelism: Load imbalances between distributed processes can be a serious impediment to parallel performance. NCSA researchers Danesh Tafti and Weicheng Huang have developed a way to employ "computational power balancing" that calls on other processors for help rather than redistribute the load. §
NCSA's First Million-Hour Month: A National Science Foundation-supported high-performance computer delivered over 1 million normalized CPU hours in one month this August. NCSA's 1,536-processor SGI Origin2000 supercomputer provided the hours to 736 national users, triple the usage from August 1998. §
NCSA NT Supercluster Goes to Production Status: The plans to move the NTSC to production status have been indefinitely postponed. §
New Version of HDF Released: The new release of the Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) software from NCSA is available from their server. The HDF Newsletter has all the details, including the list of new features and changes. §
BU High-Performance Computing Workshop: Staff at Boston University's Center for Computational Science are offering a free, two-day workshop on high-performance computing in early December. Topics include parallel processing with MPI, parallel processing with OpenMP, Fortran 90, performance tuning, and debugging. Participants -- who can be from academia or industry -- will work on BU's SGI Power Challenge or Origin2000. §
UK Best Practices and Technology Application Resource: The United Kingdom's JISC Technology Applications Programme (JTAP) assists the higher education community in leveraging its investment in information technology, in part by reporting on best practices. JTAP also funds projects that demonstrate the application of technology as well as four clearinghouses (support staff and students with disabilities; new instructional management standards on educational software; use of smartcards; and videoconferencing). §
PACS Use Access Grid Technology: PACS representatives took part in a bit of Access Grid history in October when they participated in the first uses of the Access Grid for an administrative meeting, further demonstrating the effectiveness of this technology. §
Visitor from the Netherlands: A researcher from Dutch Academic Computing Services Amsterdam (SARA) is working at NCSA this fall and winter. §
Deep Blue RS/6000 Installed at Maui HPCC: The IBM RS/6000 SP located at the Maui High Performance Computing Center (MHPCC) is twice as powerful following an upgrade scheduled for late October. The upgrade added 50 nodes of IBM's Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) POWER3 SP technology to MHPCC's supercomputing suite, providing 178 Gigaflops of additional peak computing power. The POWER3 nodes will be combined with MHPCC's existing IBM POWER2 Super Chip nodes to create a single system that will offer approximately 300 Gigaflops of high-performance computational capability. §