Version 5.5 is the latest and greatest iteration of NVIDIA CUDA, NVIDIA's parallel computing platform and programming model that harnesses the power of GPUs. CUDA 5.5, sayeth NVIDIA, provides programmers with a robust, easy-to-use platform to develop advanced science, engineering, mobile and HPC applications on x86 CPU-based systems, and now on ARM-based ones as well. Beyond native support for ARM platforms, CUDA 5.5 delivers a number of new advanced performance and productivity features, including enhanced Hyper-Q support, MPI workload prioritization, and new guided, step-by-step performance analysis and fast cross-compile on x86. The latter feature enables developers to compile ARM code on fast x86 processors and transfer the compiled application to ARM. The v5.5 release also offers a full suite of programming tools, GPU-accelerated math libraries and documentation for both x86- and ARM-based platforms.
Gumstix continues to add fire power and options to Geppetto, the company's modular, drag-and-drop platform for designing and building customized single-board Linux solutions. The most recent enhancement to Geppetto involves the addition of the Texas Instruments Sitara AM3354 processor, which Gumstix says will offer more flexibility to users and raise Geppetto's ability to enable a rapid go-to-market strategy for its customers. While designing a board using Geppetto, users simply drag and drop the processor onto a board and then connect the desired features to implement it. Fully assembled single-board computers are ordered at the touch of a button and arrive within 20 business days. Furthermore, notes Gumstix, Geppetto's support for the Yocto Project build system makes it easy for developers to create a complete, portable solution with minimal time and effort.
NoSQL tools like MongoDB, Neo4j and Redis take innovative approaches to the unique problems of handling data in modern distributed and Web-based systems. The new book, Making Sense of NoSQL: A guide for managers and the rest of us by Dan McCreary and Ann Kelly, is a resource for learning about NoSQL solutions. According to publisher Manning Publications, the book clearly and concisely explains the concepts, features, benefits, potential and limitations of NoSQL technologies. Using examples and use cases, illustrations and plain, jargon-free writing, this guide shows how one can assemble a NoSQL solution to replace or augment a traditional RDBMS effectively. After reviewing database concepts alongside the new NoSQL patterns, authors McCreary and Kelly explore topics including Big Data, search, reliability, business adaptability, cloud computing, large CPU-count data centers and customized solutions.
What's even better than playing games? Creating your own, of course. And thus you shall be so empowered if you digest the contents of Chris Strom's new book 3D Game Programming for Kids: Create Interactive Worlds with JavaScript. Targeted at younger readers, Strom's book illustrates how to create on-line games. Using nothing more than a browser and the language of the Web, JavaScript, readers will learn programming and visualize cool, 3-D results as they type. To make things easier for beginners, the kid-friendly ICE Code Editor was created especially for this book. Want a red donut? Make hundreds of them, spinning around like crazy, right next to the entered code. Readers can create games quickly by focusing on the project-based lessons. If they want to go further and understand the theory or mathematical functions, they can turn to the chapters that explain the programming concepts.
Into the big Linux tent we welcome Directory Wizards, whose UnitySync solution is now available on the Linux platform. UnitySync is a centralized service that synchronizes data between directories so that organizations enjoy a unified view of their disparate directories. Our sources at Directory Wizards say that UnitySync can scale from small directories with hundreds of objects to enterprise directories consisting of hundreds of thousands of objects without requiring extensive training or installation/configuration time. UnitySync users can synchronize account information between different directories so that each directory contains a unified view of the other non-connected directories. In addition, users can define authoritative data sources, enabling one system to update individual attributes of existing objects of another. No scripting, programming or extra databases are required. The Windows Intel 32-bit platform also is supported.
Public cloud scalability, economics and resilience models are three macroforces affecting IT. Storage specialist Coraid's response to these trends is the new ZX4000 File Storage Appliance, a storage building-block solution for both enterprise and cloud deployments that combines Flash performance, multi-petabyte scale and distributed resilience. Coraid suggests that the ZX solution's unique architecture allows for a potentially limitless pool of elastic, shared, block storage that easily scales performance via the addition of more ZX appliances. The ZX4000 can be deployed in a resilient architecture that offers protection against up to three shelf or drive failures while retaining high storage efficiencies of around 80%. This enterprise-class storage solution, says Coraid, is available at a cost comparable to consumer-grade public cloud services and at a fraction of the cost of legacy NAS storage. Since its introduction in 2012, the ZX product line has been deployed by customers in a wide variety of applications including backup, public and private clouds, and media.
The Document Foundation proudly calls its new LibreOffice 4.1 office suite “not only the best but also the most interoperable free office suite ever”. The 4.1 milestone release features a large number of improvements in the area of document compatibility, which increases the opportunities of sharing knowledge with users of proprietary software while retaining the original layout and contents. Numerous improvements have been made to Microsoft OOXML import and export filters, as well as to legacy Microsoft Office and RTF file filters. Other new interoperability-focused features include font embedding in Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw and import and export functions new in Excel 2013 for ODF OpenFormula compatibility.
The Android security testing framework formerly known as Mercury—and now called drozer—was released recently by MWR InfoSecurity. With drozer, companies using Android mobile devices now can safeguard their assets and IT infrastructure by running full, dynamic security assessments. A new drozer feature is the ability to compromise Android devices through publicly available exploits, something that helps organizations understand how a technical vulnerability on a mobile device can become a real threat to their business. Drozer unifies these publicly available exploits into a single framework and improves the quality of the exploitation code and payloads available to the penetration tester. Drozer provides support for any Android device running Android 2.1 and beyond, covering 99% of the devices in the market. The open-source tool is available to download from the MWR Labs Web site.