New Products

Cray Inc., progeny of the storied Cray Research, recently released its XT5 family of Linux-based supercomputers. Cray says the XT5's massively parallel processor (MPP) system includes a new eight-socket compute blade that quadruples local memory capacity, doubles processor density and improves energy efficiency. Other features include single-fan vertical cooling, compute blades designed for optimal airflow and CPU configurations up to 192 processor sockets or 768 CPU cores. To improve scalability, the Cray XT5 family also includes the industry's first integrated hybrid supercomputer, the Cray XT5^h system. The XT5^h integrates multiple processor architectures—including vector processors, GPUs, accelerators and FPGAs—with a complete software development environment into a single system supporting diverse work flows.

www.cray.com

At Supercomputing 2007, Appro unveiled its forthcoming Xtreme-X Supercomputer Series, a product line based on scalable clusters that provide cost-effectiveness, energy efficiency and scalability. The series is designed to scale out data centers for medium- to large-scale enterprises and HPC deployments. The first model in the series, the Appro Xtreme-X1, will ship in the first half of 2008 and is based on dual-socket, Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors. Besides its 128 nodes/512 processors and 6TF of computing power in a single 42U equipment rack, the product has Appro's new Directed Airflow cooling configuration, which the company says will reduce data-center floor space by 30% while maximizing power and cooling efficiency. In addition, the Xtreme-X1 features redundant (Dual Rail) InfiniBand connections with low-latency Mellanox ConnectX host channel adapters and Ethernet management fabric and network switches, with all critical components being easily accessible, hot-swappable and redundant.

www.appro.com

No Starch Press continues its tradition of naughty geek entertainment with the 2nd edition of Hacking: The Art of Exploitation by Jon Erickson. Although other books in this genre show not only how to run other people's exploits but also how to perform and write them on your own, Erickson uses examples to illustrate the most common computer security issues in three related fields: programming, networking and cryptography. Some examples include stack-based overflows, heap-based overflows, string exploits, return-into-libc, shellcode and cryptographic attacks on 802.11x. A live Linux CD also is included.

www.nostarch.com