Your shoulder will thank you for traveling with TRENDnet's TEW-654TR Wireless N Travel Router Kit, a device that its maker calls the world's smallest 300Mbps wireless 802.11n router. This little guy measures a mere 6.4 x 8.2 x 1.9cm and comes with a carrying case, a thin 1-meter Ethernet cable, an Energy Star Certified external power adapter and an alternate USB cable to power the router from a computer. The router also features Access Point and Access Point Client modes and offers the latest in wireless encryption to protect valuable data. An advanced Multiple Input Multiple Output antenna technology delivers high-speed wireless connectivity and broad coverage that minimizes dead spots.
Forget your old device charger in your hotel room with élan after picking up Bluelounge's new Refresh charging station, which can simultaneously re-juice up to four devices of nearly any kind. Refresh has six universal connectors in one compact location—namely two iPod/iPhone connectors, a Micro USB, a Mini USB and two USB sockets. Users can extend their device options by plugging in their own connectors, and short USB connector cables are available from Bluelounge.
In an effort to expand the accessibility of HPC, Colfax International announced availability of two new low-cost HPC cluster computing bundles, which include InfiniBand switches and adapters provided by Mellanox Technologies and Platform Computing's Platform Cluster Manager. The new bundles improve application performance and productivity in enterprise and data centers by adding 20Gb/s (Bundle 1) or 40Gb/s (Bundle 2) InfiniBand connectivity and simplify cluster operation through a fully integrated software stack. They further enable more companies to take advantage of the performance, low-latency and efficiency benefits of InfiniBand and the ease of use provided by Platform Cluster Manager, the latter of which “allows a user to build a cluster in hours versus weeks”, says Colfax. A 10Gb/s bundle also is available.
Go green and save green with iX Systems' new iX-Green Neutron, a server line that its maker says “is optimized for high-performance applications and provides the lowest power consumption on the market”. The iX-Green Neutron models iX-GN1204, iX-GN1208 and iX-GN 2216 utilize power-saving DDR3 memory, 2.5" SAS and/or SATA drives and are equipped with high-efficiency (86%–93%) power supplies, all designed to reduce data-center costs without sacrificing performance. The series also leverages Intel's Xeon Processor 5500 series to boost performance, speed and energy efficiency over previous generation processors (12% at peak performance and 47% when idle), in part due to the way it interacts with power-saving DDR3 memory. The 5520 chipset introduces Intel QuickPath technology, which allows high-speed point-to-point links to navigate shared memory swiftly, distributed amongst the processors, greatly increasing efficiency and thereby cutting back on memory power utilization as well. The systems run FreeBSD.
Get Oracle running out of the box with IPBrick for Oracle, an appliance loaded and configured with Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle Database and Application Server. IPBrick asserts that its product offers greater simplicity than Microsoft Windows servers with automatic installation taking around 20 minutes, functional configuration via a Web interface that does not require Linux knowledge and simple recovery taking around 30 minutes. The company says firms can save money by not needing Linux experts to install and manage the system. The server also integrates with Microsoft Active Directory.
If you are planning on putting cloud computing to work in your organization, you'll want to consider picking up the new O'Reilly book Cloud Security & Privacy: An Enterprise Perspective on Risks and Compliance. The title is penned by Tim Mather, Subra Kumaraswamy and Shahed Latif. Written for readers as diverse as business managers, IT personnel, service providers and investors, the book walks through the steps needed to ensure that Web applications are secure and data is safe, as well as addresses regulatory issues, such as audit and compliance.
Learn how some of the world's most interesting computer programmers “tick” with Peter Seibel's new book Coders at Work from Apress. Editor Seibel whittled an original list of 284 names down to 15 that made it into the book. The interviews focus on how these programmers tackle the day-to-day work of programming while revealing how they became great programmers, how they recognize programming talent in others and what kinds of problems they find most interesting. Some of the interviewees include Frances Allen, the first female winner of the Turing Award and IBM fellow; L. Peter Deutsch, author of Ghostscript; Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript; Simon Peyton Jones, co-inventor of Haskell; Donald Knuth, creator of TeX; and Ken Thompson, inventor of UNIX. The book is for programmers interested in new approaches and points of view that can be gleaned from leaders in the field.
The new, updated v2.1 of Fixstars' Y-HPC for Sony PlayStation 3, dubbed by the company as the world's only commercial, cross-architecture cluster construction suite, is now available. This release's key improvement is the addition of the next generation of ps3vram for fast, temporary file storage or swap using PS3 video RAM. This version of ps3vram, says Fixstars, is up to 50% faster than prior versions and is automatically enabled as swap. Also included are the new features found in Yellow Dog Enterprise Linux v6.1, such as updated kernel v2.6.28, IBM Cell SDK v3.1.0.1, improved ps3vram support and Libfreevec. Fixstars says that the monumental improvements in compute performance from Y-HPC v2.1 will allow existing and new PlayStation 3 clusters to tackle problems never before believed to be practical.
