New Products

While the Web provides information in bulk at your fingertips, there remains no substitute for concise, authoritative reference works that are more than a stranger's brain dump. Such is the role of Benjamin W. Wah's new Wiley Encyclopedia of Science and Engineering, a five-volume, 3,300-page set with more than 450 A-to-Z articles on the latest advances and findings in computer science and engineering. Some broad topics include standards, electronic commerce, financial engineering and computer education. Each article is written by experts in their particular specialty and is peer-reviewed by two others to ensure reliability.

www.wiley.com

The father-son team of Warren D. Sande and Carter Sande think that anyone can program a computer, even a 12-year-old. The duo's new book Hello World! Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners from Manning is a “gentle but thorough introduction to the world of computer programming”. Written in a manner free of “geek speak”, Hello World! contains lots of pictures, cartoons and fun examples to hold the reader's interest. The free Python is the programming language utilized in the book. Programming concepts that are covered include memory, looping, decisions, input and output, data structures, graphics and others, which are then applied to interesting topics like computer graphics, game programming and simulations. The publisher says that Hello World! can be used in either a home or classroom setting.

www.manning.com

In support of the needs of scientific computing, AMAX has released its new ServMax Personal Supercomputer (PSC) workstation, which it dubs “a cluster in a box”. The ServMax PSC supports up to 720 processing cores and 3 Teraflops in a single workstation. AMAX asserts that the product delivers “up to 15x cost savings and 15x lower power consumption than traditional 1U rack-optimized servers”. Targeted applications include life sciences, geosciences, engineering and sciences, molecular biology, medical diagnostics, EDA, government/defense, visualization and financial modeling. Other features include parallel architecture and NVIDIA CUDA technology.

www.amax.com