If you're using the Lustre FS on your HPC system, you might be able to improve your performance with LSI Corporation's new Engenio 2600-HD, a high-density storage system that delivers a reported 40GB/s of throughput and scaling to 1.8 PB of capacity in a single standard rack. LSI says that Engenio's 2600-HD's highly scalable, dense architecture helps HPC organizations maximize productivity and achieve a quicker time to results, while minimizing data-center floor space and overall energy consumption. The system consists of two LSI 6Gb/s SAS-based controllers integrated into the new Engenio DE6600 high-density SAS drive enclosure. The system is capable of sustaining up to 4GB/s of throughput and housing up to 60 SAS drives in a 4U space.
The latest open gear from Opengear is the company's new ACM5004-G mobile 3G cellular router for secure high-speed wireless connectivity to remote sites and devices. The compact, industrial-grade device, which delivers real-time access, monitoring and control regardless of location, has an open-source Linux core and offers local custom scripting. Key features include ubiquitous routing, secure remote control, extensive monitoring and alerts, remote power management, support for custom apps and external USB.
Mathematica from Wolfram Research, a favorite tool of Linux-geek number-crunchers everywhere, recently crossed the magic threshold of version 8. The new version 8 of this powerful computation, development and deployment platform adds free-form linguistic input via its novel Wolfram|Alpha technology, which enables users to input plain English and get immediate results without the need for syntax. Among the other 500 new additions are improved capabilities for statistical distributions and data visualization, built-in GPU programming support, SymbolicC support, integrated control systems, wavelets functions, option pricing solvers and feature detection in image processing. Mathematica 8 is available for Linux x86, Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista/7.
With a title like Badass LEGO Guns, how can you not judge a book by its cover? This fun new book by Martin Hüdepohl and published by No Starch Press illustrates how to build five eclectic weapons entirely from LEGO Technic parts that can shoot plastic LEGO bricks at high speed with a high level of accuracy. The builder adds only rubber bands, some sanding and a touch of Krazy Glue to build these functional fusils, each with its own kick-butt nickname: the Warbeast submachine gun, the Thriller and Mini-Thriller crossbows, the Parabella mini-marvel and the Lilliputt semi-automatic pistol with a nine-brick magazine. The models range from sophisticated to simple, and “builders of all ages will find something enjoyable”, notes the publisher.
Robert Bruce Thompson and Barbara Fritchman Thompson, authors of the new 3rd edition of Building the Perfect PC, say you don't even need to be a geek to build your own PC. Well, we are geeks and we want to build our own PCs too. As talented as we are though, we may want to pick up the Thompson team's updated book to make sure we don't blow it. The payoff is a PC that is of higher quality and lower cost than off-the-shelf models. The authors explain what components you'll need as well as where to find them. They also explain how to build for your OS of choice and take advantage of the latest multicore CPUs. Instructions cover how to build numerous types of PCs, including a general-purpose computer, an extreme gaming machine, a media center, an appliance, a low-cost PC or a home server.
Four new lines of server platform are now available from TYAN, all of which are designed to take full advantage of AMD FireStream GPU compute accelerators. These compute accelerators deliver what TYAN labels “shocking floating-point performance that is exponentially faster than x86 CPUs in some applications”. The solutions—models B7015, S7025, S8225 and S8236—range from one AMD FireStream compute accelerator in a 1U server up to eight compute accelerators in a 4U platform. These platforms feature double-wide PCIe 2.0 x16 slots, and they meet the special mechanical requirements as well as the power and airflow needs to support AMD FireStream 9170, 9250, 9270, 9350 and 9370 GPU compute accelerators.
As the old adage goes, you can't manage what you don't measure. And if managing resource (such as electricity, water and so on) use or production is your goal, QA Graphics' Energy Efficiency Education Dashboard (EEED), just upgraded to version 2.0, may be the tool for the job. EEED is an interactive solution that displays real-time building data and educates occupants on sustainable building-management practices. The new version is a fully encapsulated application based on the Adobe AIR platform that runs as a standalone client or software as a service with no browser constraints. The solution often is used by organizations to help earn points toward green-building-certification programs, such as US Green Building Council's LEED and the Green Building Initiative's Green Globes.
Don't got bandwidth? Don't get bummed; get SuperLumin Networks' Nemesis, a 64-bit caching and application-acceleration platform. Besides offering the capabilities of a standard proxy cache, Nemesis addresses the need to enable and cache streaming video and rich-media on the Web. The application is optimized to cache bandwidth-intensive social-media sites, such as Facebook and YouTube. Other features include scalability to 64 CPUs, 100 million cache objects, policy-based content filtering, bandwidth management/traffic shaping and content distribution, among others. Nemesis runs on SUSE Linux.