Janne Kanner, Director of the Funet Network at CSC - IT Center for Science, Finland has been appointed as President of TERENA, the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association. Janne Kanner was elected by the TERENA General Assembly during a meeting in Malaga, Spain, on 12 June, 2009. Janne Kanner will chair TERENA for at least the next two years, 2009-2011. He succeeds Dorte Olesen (UNI•C, Denmark) who had completed the maximum period of six years in office. Janne Kanner has also been chair of the Nordic academic network NORDUnet A/S since 2008.

Astronomers Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas at Austin and Jens Thomas of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have used new computer modelling techniques to discover that the black hole at the heart of M87, one the largest nearby giant galaxies, is two to three times more massive than previously thought.

University of Nevada, Reno mathematics researcher and faculty member Pavel Solin can help make a nuclear reactor run more efficiently, and he will be using scientific computing to prove it as part of a national effort to develop the next generation of nuclear technologies. Pavel Solin will be receiving a $587,000 grant from the Department of Energy as part of their investment in cutting-edge nuclear energy research and development under the new Nuclear Energy University Programme.

A simulation of electrical current moving through a futuristic electronic transistor has been modelled atom-by-atom in less than 15 minutes by Purdue University researchers. The work demonstrates that future electronic devices can be quickly simulated on advanced computers, opening the door to new nanoscale semiconductor components that are more powerful and use less energy. The simulation was run on Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Jaguar supercomputer, the world's second fastest and one of just two computers capable of petascale performance.

IBM and the Bulgarian government are planning to co-operate in the area of nanoscience and a deal for IBM to support the creation of what will be the first Bulgarian nanotechnology centre. The co-operation between IBM and the Bulgarian government includes enabling industry, universities and the Bulgarian Academy of Science to work together in the emerging field of nanoscience. The government's three-year programme is aimed at creating different nanoproducts, micromachines and microsystems.

Parabon has released Parabon Crush, a massively scalable, statistical data mining and predictive modelling application that draws its power from Parabon's Frontier Grid Platform. Now enhanced with a search algorithm developed for NASA, Crush uses the idle capacity of thousands of computers on a Frontier Grid to discover optimal statistical models within high-dimensional datasets that are too computationally challenging for traditional approaches.

GridFTP, a protocol developed by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, has been used to transfer unprecedented amounts of data over the Department of Energy's (DOE) Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), which provides a reliable, high-performance communications infrastructure to facilitate large-scale, collaborative science endeavours. The Argonne-developed system proved key to enabling research groups at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in California to move large data sets between the facilities at a rate of 200 megabytes per second.

Not using your computer at the moment? You can now donate your computer's idle time to cutting-edge biomedical research aimed at finding a cure for HIV, Parkinson's, arthritis, and breast cancer. Through the University of Delaware's "Docking@Home" project, led by Michela Taufer, assistant professor of computer and information sciences, and supported by the National Science Foundation, more than 6000 volunteers worldwide are donating their computer's idle time to perform scientific calculations that will aid in creating new and improved medicines to thwart these major diseases.

Platform Computing, a global expert in High Performance Computing (HPC) management software, has made available Platform HPC Workgroup Manager, a new channel-specific solution developed for organisations with workgroup and departmental sized compute clusters. Designed with performance and ease of use in mind, Platform HPC Workgroup Manager is a powerful, turn-key solution, featuring an intuitive web-based management interface and delivering sophisticated workload management capabilities. It includes all the cluster management tools an organisation will need to meet the most demanding requirements for application performance and workload management. Platform HPC Workgroup Manager dramatically reduces the engineering effort required to develop and deliver Intel Cluster Ready certified systems, because it provides an Intel Cluster Ready compatible environment out of the box.

Logicworks has launched its Private Cloud service that delivers a more efficient way to manage, allocate and deploy enterprise IT assets, and is the next evolution in the company's mission to be the industry leader in keeping large, complex, and diverse applications up and running 100% of the time.

DIGIBIZ 2009 is the key international conference where industry and academia focus on innovative e-business and e-commerce technologies for the Future Internet. BEinGRID, as the project driving the implementation and deployment of Grid solutions in industry, could not miss this event. One of the solutions highlighted at DIGIBIZ was GRIA: the Grid middleware used in many of BEinGRID's most successful pilot projects.

Voltaire Ltd.'s 40 Gb/s InfiniBand solutions are available for HP ProLiant SL6000 Scalable System, part of the new HP Extreme Scale-Out (ExSO) portfolio introduced this month. The solution is ideal for scale-out data centres that enable high performance computing (HPC) - as well as Cloud-based services and Web 2.0 businesses.

Voltaire Ltd., a provider of scale-out data centre fabrics, has launched a new low latency 10 Gigabit Ethernet-based messaging solution in collaboration with NYSE Technologies. This combination dramatically accelerates the performance of automated trading and market data applications achieving average latencies of 25 microseconds at rates of 1 million 200 byte messages per second per core.