Liste Newsletter

Index Performances
EPITEX, EPITA’S INDEX, Dec. 1, 2004: 82.13 (EPITEX set at 100 on Aug. 31, 2001)

News

MARKET FOCUS

U.S. stocks staged a robust rally on Wednesday on an upbeat manufacturing report and a pull back in crude oil prices below $46 a barrel.

The ISM national manufacturing index climbed to 57.8 in November from 56.8 in October, above forecasts. This followed a strong reading by the Chicago PMI regional manufacturing index.

But the U.S. dollar remained at record lows against the euro, having dipped to $1.3335 against the European currency.

Microsoft was a gainer after announcing a special dividend that will give investors a total of $32 billion, helping fuel the rally.

OUTLOOK

The market will next brace for the November employment report on Friday, when forecasters anticipate the addition of about 200,000 jobs following a gain of 337,000 in October, while the jobless rate should slip to 5.4 percent from 5.5 percent.

THE NUMBERS

The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 162 points, or 1.5 percent, to 10,590. The Nasdaq composite index added 41 points, or 2.0 percent, to 2,138 while the Nasdaq-100 index of large capitalization tech and biotech stocks ended up 2.2 percent at 1,601.

Profile

NEC has delivered four vector supercomputer SX-6 systems to the University of Victoria in Canada and has received orders for two vector supercomputer systems of SX-6/5A from Ouranos Consortium in Montreal.

Both transactions were through Cray.

The delivered systems are NEC’s “SX-6/8A” with a peak vector performance of 72 GFLOP/s - 72 billion floating-point operations per second, main memory capacity: 32 GB.

These SX-6 systems will be installed at University of Victoria's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences and will be utilized for climate and paleo-climate research conducted in Western Canada. The SX-6 will also be used to study the changes in the earth’s climate changes over the past 13,000 years as well as climates’ influences on human beings.

The required time for the analysis of climatic simulations of the past 20,000 years on current computing systems is six months. However, the new SX-6 systems are expected to complete the same analysis in just one week, twenty times faster than conventional systems.

In addition, Ouranos Consortium has ordered two systems, with a third SX-6/8A to be added in February 2005. Ouranos was established in 2002 to deal with problems brought about by the climate’s changes in North America and to explore its related conditions.

Vector computing machines feature high CPU performance and high data transfer speed between memory and CPU, thus offering high sustained performance in large-scale computations. The “SX-6” has achieved high sustained performance by employing state-of-the-art high performance DRAM and a high-speed memory network crossbar switch.