Networks Within Networks: Optimization at Massive Scale

On today’s episode of “The Interview” with The Next Platform we talk about the growing problem of networks within networks (within networks) and what that means for future algorithms and systems that will support smart cities, smart grids, and other highly complex and interdependent optimization problems.

Our guest on this audio interview episode (player below) is Hadi Amini, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon who has focused on the interdependency of many factors for power grids and smart cities in a recent book series on these and related interdependent network topics. Here, as in the podcast, the focus is on the …

Networks Within Networks: Optimization at Massive Scale was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Sponsored Post: Clover, Triplebyte, Exoscale, Symbiont, Loupe, Etleap, Aerospike, Scalyr, Domino Data Lab, MemSQL

Who's Hiring? 

  • Clover is looking for seasoned software engineers to help us solve the most complicated problem in the world: healthcare. We're using sophisticated data analytics, custom software, and machine learning to coordinate care and build a clearer model of our member's health and risk factors. We are on a mission to help seniors and low-income members live healthier while keeping costs down. This is an opportunity for those who want to be at the intersection of health and technology and thrive in a collaborative environment as well as the freedom of self-direction. If you're interested, please directly apply here!

  • Triplebyte now hires software engineers for top tech companies and hundreds of the most exciting startups like Apple, Dropbox, Mixpanel, and Instacart. They identify your strengths from an online coding quiz and let you skip resume and recruiter screens at multiple companies at once. It's free, confidential, and background-blind. Apply here.

  • Symbiont is a New York-based financial technology company building new kinds of computer networks to connect independent financial institutions together and allow them to share business logic and data in real time. This involves developing a distributed system which is also decentralized, and which allows for the creation Continue reading

BrandPost: Can an SMB Really Afford IT Downtime

A recent blog post about the negative impact of a 1990s server room talked about downtime and its tremendous impact on any organization. It is now incumbent upon the IT team to do all it can to ensure that IT systems—and the infrastructure that supports them—are as reliable as possible. The spread of digital systems to every aspect of the business makes any service interruption a serious problem for all employees and many of your customers.Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) depend on their servers, storage, and network equipment to keep the company running, but failures do occur. In many cases, these outages result not from the equipment itself, but the racks, cooling, and power infrastructure on which this equipment depends. Based on research from the Institute, cooling and power failures that result from outmoded rack or data center infrastructure cause more than one-third of all unplanned outages. However, an outage is more than just an interruption in business operations; it can result in substantial data loss. To read this article in full, please click here

BrandPost: What is the Adaptive Network?

Since the introduction of the first Public Switched Telephone Network, networks have continually evolved. Through the various stages of development—from fixed endpoints in the early Internet to today’s broadband networks that connect mobile users to massive data centers and bandwidth behemoths like Netflix, Amazon, and Facebook—networks have adjusted to accommodate new demands.The once-static infrastructure is undergoing a more profound transformation than ever before. The latest incarnation is autonomous networking, which is a trend that has been building for some time. The autonomous network runs without much human intervention. It can configure, monitor and maintain itself independently.To read this article in full, please click here

Sandia, NREL Look to Aquarius to Cool HPC Systems

The idea of bringing liquids in the datacenter to cool off hot-running systems and components has often unnerved many in the IT field. Organizations are doing it as they look for more efficient and cost-effective ways to run their infrastructures, particularly as the workloads become larger and more complex, more compute resources are needed, parts like processors become more powerful and density increases.

But the concept of running water and other liquids through a system, and the threat of the liquids leaking into the various components and into the datacenter, has created uneasiness with the idea.

Still, the growing demands …

Sandia, NREL Look to Aquarius to Cool HPC Systems was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Blockchain and Digital Identity – A Good Fit?

Every time you see “Login with Facebook” or “Login with Twitter” etc. on a website or use login credentials issued by your employer or school, you’re using Identity and Access Management (IAM) technologies in the background. IAM has become central to our online interactions, but like a lot of infrastructure it’s largely invisible to users (at least when it’s well designed and implemented). IAM is evolving rapidly, the stakes are high, and enterprises face an increasingly complex and puzzling digital identity landscape. There is also growing concern that businesses know too much about us, and therefore end users should reclaim control over their own identities. IAM is a hot topic in the technology world, with new architectures, business models, and philosophies all in play.

Blockchain technology (sometimes also called distributed ledger technology – DLT) is also gaining attention. Proponents advocate it for a wide variety of use cases, including IAM. Blockchain is a broad class of relatively new data security methods, with certain properties of potential value in IAM. Many IAM companies have launched identity registration solutions “on the blockchain,” while others are developing new blockchain-inspired infrastructure for distributing information about users (called “attributes” and used to inform decisions about Continue reading

Changing HPC Workloads Mean Tighter Storage Stacks for Panasas

Changes to workloads in HPC mean alterations are needed up and down the stack—and that certainly includes storage. Traditionally these workloads were dominated by large file handling needs, but as newer applications (OpenFOAM is a good example) bring small file and mixed workload requirements to the HPC environment, it means storage approaches need to shift to meet the need.

With these changing workload demands in mind, recall that in the first part of our series on future directions for storage for enterprise HPC shops we focused on the ways open source parallel file systems like Lustre fall short for users …

Changing HPC Workloads Mean Tighter Storage Stacks for Panasas was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Container Monitoring

CA Technologies Container Monitoring Sponsored Article The Container Monitoring Essentials hub page discusses the importance of containers in today’s datacenter environment, predicting that containers will—in time—be the means by which all workloads are deployed on server platforms.

A few buckets of cold water on the Broadcom-Qualcomm-Intel merger talk

The M&A activity in the chip business isn’t restricted to the big guys snapping up promising startups. The titans are talking marriage, but really, there should be no merger between any of the three giants that are Intel, Broadcom, and Qualcomm.On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Intel was closely watching Broadcom’s hostile bid for Qualcomm in the hopes that Broadcom would fail so it could buy Broadcom. The deal would be valued at an insane $170 billion.Intel issued a denial over the weekend, saying it was only looking to assimilate and absorb several recent acquisitions.The White House steps in, stops Broadcom-Qualcomm merger Meanwhile, the Broadcom-Qualcomm talks persisted despite Qualcomm’s resistance to the idea until Monday, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order blocking the merger, citing national security concerns. I didn’t think he could do that.To read this article in full, please click here

Everyone can now run JavaScript on Cloudflare with Workers

Everyone can now run JavaScript on Cloudflare with Workers

Everyone can now run JavaScript on Cloudflare with Workers

Exactly one year ago today, Cloudflare gave me a mission: Make it so people can run code on Cloudflare's edge. At the time, we didn't yet know what that would mean. Would it be container-based? A new Turing-incomplete domain-specific language? Lua? "Functions"? There were lots of ideas.

Eventually, we settled on what now seems the obvious choice: JavaScript, using the standard Service Workers API, running in a new environment built on V8. Five months ago, we gave you a preview of what we were building, and started the beta.

Today, with thousands of scripts deployed and many billions of requests served, Cloudflare Workers is now ready for everyone.

"Moving away from VCL and adopting Cloudflare Workers will allow us to do some creative routing that will let us deliver JavaScript to npm's millions of users even faster than we do now. We will be building our next generation of services on Cloudflare's platform and we get to do it in JavaScript!"

— CJ Silverio, CTO, npm, Inc.

What is the Cloud, really?

Historically, web application code has been split between servers and browsers. Between them lies a vast but fundamentally dumb network which merely ferries data from point to Continue reading

Promoting RIPE-690 @ Netnod

Our colleague Jan Žorž will be promoting RIPE-690 “Best Current Operational Practice: IPv6 prefix assignment for end-users – persistent vs non-persistent, and what size to choose” as the opening keynote at the forthcoming Netnod Meeting on 14-15 March 2018 in the Sheraton Hotel, Stockholm, Sweden.

RIPE-690 outlines best current operational practices for the assignment of IPv6 prefixes (i.e. a block of IPv6 addresses) for end-users, as making wrong choices when designing an IPv6 network will eventually have negative implications for deployment and require further effort such as renumbering when the network is already in operation. This was published in late 2017 after a year of intensive work by IPv6 experts around the world, supported by the Internet Society’s Deploy360 programme.

Netnod is a neutral, not-for-profit Internet infrastructure organisation based in Sweden that operates six Internet exchange points (IXPs) in five different cities where network operators can connect and exchange traffic.

There’s also several other interesting talks on the agenda, including trends in Internet-of-Things Distributed-Denial-of-Service botnets, prudent TLS, how to practically deploy IPv6 in the mass-market, how clouds are making new demands for connectivity and hyperconnected datacentres, and establishing research networks in Arctic environments, plus a panel session on the future of peering Continue reading

A new telepresence robot takes the stage

Ava Robotics, a startup with strong technical ties to iRobot, just announced its telepresence robot. Her name is Ava, and she’s likely to win a lot of hearts.For one thing, Ava is quite perceptive, using video technology from Cisco and integrating with Cisco Spark (which provides tools for team messaging, online meetings, and white boarding). Ava is also quite friendly. She allows her users to participate in remote meetings, wander down hallways at other facilities while chatting with colleagues, and enjoy face-to-face discussions with people who may physically be thousands of miles away.Also read: Customer reviews: Top Remote Access Tools Telepresence robots provide a lot of benefits to companies that are spread across many locations — especially those spanning continents — or with staff who work from home. They make work relationships considerably more productive — even for individuals who may have never met in person. Carrying on casual conversations and checking remote data centers and manufacturing facilities (sometimes safer than being there in person) can make huge differences in how staffs coordinate and get important work done.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 11 ways to stabilize your infrastructure

What do you do if you’re struggling with infrastructure and stability? Maybe you’re a startup with no time for infrastructure. Maybe you’re a business that is reluctant to invest, with an IT gap that is hard to close. The stress, the worry and the escalation calls can keep you up at night – and then beat you down the next day.To regain your balance, first take a deep breath. Then consider these 11 steps to help you better align the people, processes and technology around your IT infrastructure: Reduce IT complexity. In a recent survey of 800 CIOs, more than three out of four say increased IT complexity could make it impossible to manage digital performance. Indeed, a single web transaction may now cross an average of 35 different technology systems, up from 22 five years ago. Is that sustainable? If you’re unable to handle your current level of complexity, review your operations, peel back the layers and make sure you’re building from a solid foundation. Delegate. Assign members of your team to key activities. Make sure they are enabled and understand they have authority to solve problems. It sounds simple, but many entry-level IT professionals worry that Continue reading

A new telepresence robot takes the stage

AvaⓇ Robotics, a startup with strong technical ties to iRobot, has just announced its telepresence robot. Her name is Ava and she’s likely to win a lot of hearts. For one thing, Ava is quite perceptive, using video technology from Cisco and integrating with Cisco Spark (which provides tools for team messaging, online meetings, and white boarding). Ava is also quite friendly. She allows her users to participate in remote meetings, wander down hallways at other facilities while chatting with colleagues, and enjoy face to face discussions with people who may physically be thousands of miles away.Telepresence robots provide a lot of benefits to companies that are spread across many locations – especially those spanning continents -- or with staff who work from home. They make work relationships considerably more productive -- even for individuals who may have never met in person. Carrying on casual conversations and checking remote data centers and manufacturing facilities (sometimes safer than being there in person) can make huge differences in how staffs coordinate and get important work done.To read this article in full, please click here

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