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IBM has introduced a new supercomputer that is water-cooled and energy-efficient. The Power 575 is equipped with the latest POWER6 microprocessor and, to remove heat, has water-chilled copper plates in a grid overlay, with one plate over each microprocessor.

Water 4,000 Times More Effective

The water cooling means there can be 80 percent fewer air-conditioning units, resulting in 40 percent less energy consumption in the data center. That’s because water can be up to 4,000 times more effective in cooling computers than air, according to IBM scientists.

And there are lots of processing cores to cool. Each rack houses 448 processor cores, providing five times as much performance as the predecessor microprocessor, the POWER5, while being three times more energy efficient. The 575, which supports both IBM’s UNIX operating system, AIX, and Linux, will be available in May.

The computer system is nicknamed “Hydro-Cluster,” and it can support hundreds of nodes. There are 14 nodes in a rack, and 32 POWER6 cores in each node, with each core running at 4.7 GHz. Each node can provide 600 gigaFLOPS, and the rack offers 3.5 terabytes of memory.

Dave Jursik, vice president for supercomputing sales at IBM, said the Power 575 microprocessor is designed for the “most computationally intensive problems in energy, engineering, aerospace and weather modeling.”

‘Five to 20 Times Faster’

The company cited one of its customers, the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, Germany, as saying that the new supercomputer will enable its researchers to solve computing tasks “five to 20 times faster than their current system,” which was the fastest supercomputer in Germany in 2002.

Similarly, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, England, said the Power 575 will allow it to create “more detailed models, resulting in more accurate forecasts and improved early warnings of severe weather events.”

The…

Michael Chertoff, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said his agency is ready to launch a Manhattan Project for cybersecurity. Speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, Chertoff said cyberwarfare and cyberterrorism are huge threats.

“Imagine what would happen if a sophisticated attack on our financial systems caused them to be paralyzed. It would be a shaking of the foundation of trust on which commercial intercourse depends,” Chertoff said.

He called on Silicon Valley and other technology hubs to send their “best and brightest” to Washington.

Presidential Directive

“The time has come to take a quantum leap forward, what I would call a game-changer, in how we deal with attacks on the federal government and in working with the private sector,” he said.

The initiative started in January when President Bush signed a directive to improve network security throughout the government. The directive permits the National Security Agency to monitor all federal computers. As reported in The Washington Post, the administration is expected to ask for billions of dollars for the initiative in the 2009 budget but, of course, that budget is likely to be rewritten by the new president elected in November.

Because cyberattacks by nature are distributed, “we need to have a network response to a network attack,” Chertoff said.

A key aspect of the initiative is the creation of a new assistant secretary for cybersecurity.

Reducing Access Points

“I will look carefully at who he selects” as assistant secretary, said David Stephenson, a homeland security consultant, in a telephone interview. “On the one hand you want somebody very well-versed in the technology,” Stephenson said, “but that kind of person is often so left-brain and analytical they can’t address the nature of the networked threat and networked response” that Chertoff referred to.

“The risk is tremendous if you can’t grasp…

Another month, another Patch Tuesday. For April, Microsoft has issued eight security bulletins that address 10 vulnerabilities, five of them rated critical.

All the bulletins address client-side vulnerabilities, continuing a trend reported this week in Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report. The report found that in the second half of 2007, more than half of patched operating-system vulnerabilities were browser and client-side vulnerabilities.

Scripting Stands Out

While all of Tuesday’s security bulletins are serious, the vulnerabilities in the VBScript and JScript engines stand out because they ship on Windows by default and are tied to the operating system, according to Ben Greenbaum, senior research manager at Symantec Security Response.

“An attacker need only compromise and modify any Web page, which, when viewed by a user in a browser that uses these engines, will result in the execution of attacker-supplied code on the user’s computer,” Greenbaum said. “This attack requires no additional user action or intervention to exploit.”

Microsoft actually reintroduced the VBScript and JScript fix that was pulled in February. Sheldon Malm, director of security research and development for nCircle, a network-security firm that works with companies like Visa, US Cellular and Archer Daniels Midland, has been watching this one closely.

“We’ve been very concerned about this one. It’s another case where Web sites hosting third-party content can be used in multi-staged attacks,” Malm said. “This is a particularly troubling trend for users because trusted sites can be used in an attack without compromising the site itself. One common example of this in action would be serving malicious ads on an otherwise trusted Web site.”

Three Are Very Critical

Of the critical patches, Qualys suggests IT departments give three immediate attention: MS08-021, MS08-022 and MS08-023. These three, relating to the Graphical Device Interface (GDI), ActiveX controls, and the Visual Basic (VBScript) and JavaScript (JScript) engines, contain…