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5G network slices could be vulnerable to attack, researchers say
5G promises increased speed, lower latency, and support for a significantly larger number of connected devices. But the growth in devices and in new applications that will ensue also will expand the attack surface, offering new opportunities for malicious actors to take advantage of security gaps.Plus, as with any new technology, there is a great deal of potential for misconfigurations, errors, and unpatched vulnerabilities while companies are still learning how to deploy and secure 5G at scale.About 75% of communication service providers worldwide said that they had experienced up to six security breaches of 5G networks within the past year, according to a November 2022 survey by GlobalData and Nokia. Half of the respondents said that they experienced an attack that resulted in the leakage of customer data, and nearly three quarters said that an attack had caused a service outage.To read this article in full, please click here
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Frontier still reigns as world’s fastest supercomputer
For the third time in a row, Frontier is ranked number one among the world’s fastest supercomputers, and it remains the only whose fastest speed exceeds one exaFLOPS.At 1.194 quintillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS), Frontier kept its ranking with more than double the top speed of its nearest competitor, according to the list compiled by TOP500, which issues the rankings twice a year. A quintillion is 1018 or one exaFLOPS (EFLOPS).The number two machine, Fugaku, maxed out at 442.01petaFLOPS. A petaFLOPS is 1015 FLOPS.Two competitors in the top 10 improved their speeds since the last ranking period that ended in November 2022, but not nearly enough to even draw close. Those two—LUMI and Leonardo—rank third and fourth, respectively.To read this article in full, please click here
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UK announces $1.2B chip strategy, faces criticism over funding size
The UK government has finally unveiled its delayed 10-year strategy for supporting the country’s semiconductor industry, which includes £1 billion ($1.24 billion) in investments to drive research and development efforts and shore up the industry’s talent pipeline.More than two years after the strategy was first promised, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the policy Friday at a meeting of leaders of the G7 group of nations in Japan, coinciding with an agreement to launch a "semiconductors partnership" between the two countries in order to boost supply-chain resilience.“Semiconductors underpin the devices we use every day and will be crucial to advancing the technologies of tomorrow,” Sunak said in a statement. “Our new strategy focuses our efforts on where our strengths lie, in areas like research and design, so we can build our competitive edge on the global stage.”To read this article in full, please click here
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Meta is working on its own chip, data center design for AI workloads
Facebook parent company Meta has revealed plans for the development of its own custom chip for running artifical intelligence models, and a new data center architecture for AI workloads.“We are executing on an ambitious plan to build the next generation of Meta’s AI infrastructure and today, we’re sharing some details on our progress. This includes our first custom silicon chip for running AI models, a new AI-optimized data center design and the second phase of our 16,000 GPU supercomputer for AI research,” Santosh Janardhan, head of infrastructure at Meta, wrote in a blog post Thursday.To read this article in full, please click here
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How to quickly make minor changes to complex Linux commands
When working in the Linux terminal window, you have a lot of options for moving on the Linux command line; backing up over a command you’ve just typed is only one of them.Using the Backspace key We likely all use the backspace key fairly often to fix typos. It can also make running a series of related commands easier. For example, you can type a command, press the up arrow key to redisplay it and then use the backspace key to back over and replace some of the characters to run a similar command. In the examples below, a single character is backed over and replaced.To read this article in full, please click here
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Ampere launches 192-core AmpereOne server processor
Ampere has announced it has begun shipping its next-generation AmpereOne processor, a server chip with up to 192 cores and special instructions aimed at AI processing.It is also the first generation of chips from the company using homegrown cores rather than cores licensed from Arm. Among the features of these new cores is support for bfloat16, the popular instruction set used in AI training and inferencing.“AI is a big piece [of the processor] because you need more compute power,” said Jeff Wittich, chief products officer for Ampere. ”AI inferencing is one of the big workloads that is driving the need for more and more compute, whether it’s in your big hyperscale data centers or the need for more compute performance out at the edge.”To read this article in full, please click here
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DOE funds $40 million for advanced data-center cooling
The Department of Energy has awarded $40 million to 15 vendors and university labs as part of a government program that aims to reduce the portion of data centers' power usage that's used for cooling to just 5% of their total energy consumption.The DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) is providing the funding to jumpstart a program called COOLERCHIPS, an acronym for Cooling Operations Optimized for Leaps in Energy, Reliability, and Carbon Hyperefficiency for Information Processing Systems.For chip cooling to account for just 5% of total energy consumption, that would translate to a PUE of 1.05. (Power usage effectiveness, or PUE, is a metric to measure data center efficiency. It’s the ratio of the total amount of energy used by a data center facility to the energy delivered to computing equipment.)To read this article in full, please click here
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IBM wants drag-and-drop connectivity for hybrid cloud applications
IBM is developing a SaaS package to help enterprises securely network heterogenous environments, including edge, on-prem and multicloud resources.The IBM Hybrid Cloud Mesh is a SaaS service that implements a virtualized Layer 3-7 environment to rapidly enable secure connectivity between users, applications, and data distributed across multiple locations and environments, according to Andrew Coward, general manager of IBM’s software defined networking group. In a nutshell, Hybrid Cloud Mesh deploys gateways within the clouds – including on-premises, AWS or other providers’ clouds, and transit points, if needed – to support the infrastructure, and then it builds a secure Layer 3-7 mesh overlay to deliver applications, Coward said. At the application level, the exposure to developers occurs at Layer 7, and the networking teams see Layer 3 and 4 activities, Coward said.To read this article in full, please click here
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AWS to invest $12.7B to expand its cloud infra in India by 2030
Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Thursday said it is committing $12.7 billion to expand its cloud infrastructure in India by 2030 in order to meet growing customer demand for its cloud services.“Today we’re announcing an additional planned investment of $12.7 billion for cloud infrastructure in India. That will bring our total investment to $16.4 billion by 2030 — boosting the country’s GDP, supporting tens of thousands of jobs, and continuing to help customers innovate,” AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said in a tweet.The new investment, according to the company, is expected to add $23.3 billion to the country’s GDP by 2030, generating 131,700 jobs annually for the next seven years.To read this article in full, please click here
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AWS to invest $12.7B to expand its cloud infrastructure in India by 2030
Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Thursday said it is committing $12.7 billion to expand its cloud infrastructure in India by 2030 in order to meet growing customer demand for its cloud services.“Today we’re announcing an additional planned investment of $12.7 billion for cloud infrastructure in India. That will bring our total investment to $16.4 billion by 2030 — boosting the country’s GDP, supporting tens of thousands of jobs, and continuing to help customers innovate,” AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said in a tweet.The new investment, according to the company, is expected to add $23.3 billion to the country’s GDP by 2030, generating 131,700 jobs annually for the next seven years.To read this article in full, please click here
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Juniper MISTifies ChatGPT, Zoom and NAC security service
Juniper Networks is looking to simplify the control of enterprise networks by expanding the AI-driven conversational interface of its cloud-based Mist management system and adding a new security access control service.Juniper is integrating the ChatGPT AI-based large language model (LLM) with Mist’s virtual network assistant, Marvis. Marvis can detect and describe myriad network problems, including persistently failing wired or wireless clients, bad cables, access-point coverage holes, problematic WAN links, and insufficient radio-frequency capacity. To read this article in full, please click here
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Startup NEO Semiconductor promises 8x increase in memory density
System memory is a complex problem. More memory means more performance, especially in a virtualized environment. But more memory also requires more power, and that can add up as you start to get into thousands of memory sticks.Plus, you can only put so many memory sticks in a server, depending on the number of slots available. So how do you increase memory capacity? By increasing memory density on the chips, which is easier said than done. However, a startup called NEO Semiconductor is claiming it will be able to increase memory density by up to eight times over standard memory with a breakthrough 3D design.It’s not a new concept; 3D memory stacking has been used in NAND flash to increase capacity for a decade now. Memory transistors can only be so large to fit in the confines of a DRAM chip. Rather than an increase the number of transistors laid out side by side, memory makers began stacking it on top of each other, thus increasing capacity in the same physical space. In the 10 years since 3D stacking began, NAND flash DRAM has reached the 170-layer mark, and SSDs have seen a significant increase in capacity without Continue reading
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Restoring databases from backup requires hands-on practice
It’s important to back up your databases, but it’s even more important to be able to restore it, so once you’ve identified how you’re going to back it up, make sure you test the different recovery scenarios.Broadly speaking, there are two database types considered here, traditional and modern, and recovery is different for each. A traditional database in this context is a database that runs in a single server or virtual machine that you manage, and a modern database might run across many nodes or it might even be serverless, where you have no access to the underlying infrastructure.Recovering traditional databases Restoring a traditional database is straightforward as long as you have practiced how to handle different things that could go wrong. You don’t want to test your backup system for the first time during an actual database outage.To read this article in full, please click here
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eBay scores cost savings and a bandwidth boost with white-box switches running SONiC
For online auction powerhouse eBay, customer service is everything. Or, as Parantap Lahiri, vice president of network and data center engineering, puts it, “We want to make the network more like air or water, so our people don’t have to worry about network resources when creating magical services for our users.”The demands on the eBay infrastructure are staggering: 1.8 billion active listings; 133 million active buyers. It’s main landing page gets 250 million visits per day. Unlike a static storefront site like Amazon, an eBay auction can entail multiple bidders from all over the world competing against each other as the clock ticks down to the end of the auction. And the eBay platform supports direct communication between sellers and buyers, with offers and counteroffers flying back and forth.To read this article in full, please click here
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IT pros worry about network data being fed to AI tools
As more IT organizations apply artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and so-called AIOps technology to network management, network data is critical to success. AI/ML technology requires more and more data to learn individual networks, derive insights, and offer recommendations. Unfortunately, many organizations encounter problems when trying to feed network data to these AI tools.In other words, network teams need to modernize their approach to network data before they embrace AI technology.Enterprise Management Associates recently surveyed 250 IT professionals about their experience with AI/ML-driven network management solutions for a report, “AI-Driven Networks: Leveling up Network Management.” It found that data problems are the number-two technical challenge they encounter when applying AI/ML to network management. Only network complexity is a bigger technical issue.To read this article in full, please click here
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Google launches A3 supercomputer VMs
Google Cloud announced a new supercomputer virtual-machine series aimed at rapidly training large AI models.Unveiled at the Google I/O conference, the new A3 supercomputer VMs are purpose-built to handle the considerable resource demands of a large language model (LLM). “A3 GPU VMs were purpose-built to deliver the highest-performance training for today’s ML workloads, complete with modern CPU, improved host memory, next-generation Nvidia GPUs and major network upgrades,” the company said in a statement.The instances are powered by eight Nvidia H100 GPUs, Nvidia’s newest GPU that just begin shipping earlier this month, as well as Intel’s 4th Generation Xeon Scalable processors, 2TB of host memory and 3.6 TBs bisectional bandwidth between the eight GPUs via Nvidia’s NVSwitch and NVLink 4.0 interconnects.To read this article in full, please click here
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Cisco aims for full-stack observability with AppDynamics/ThousandEyes tie-in
Cisco is more tightly integrating its network- and application-intelligence tools in an effort to help customers quickly diagnose and remediate performance problems.An upgrade to Cisco's Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) platform melds the vendor’s AppDynamics application observability capabilities and ThousandEyes network intelligence with a bi-directional, OpenTelemetry-based integration package. (Read more about how to shop for network observability tools)The goal with DEM is to get business, infrastructure, networking, security operations, and DevSecOps teams working together more effectively to find the root cause of a problem and quickly address the issue, said Carlos Pereira, Cisco Fellow and chief architect in its Strategy, Incubation & Applications group. To read this article in full, please click here
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Taking advantage of the grep command’s many options
The grep command makes it easy to find strings in text files on Linux systems, but that's just a start. It can be used to search through these files for multiple strings or regular expressions at the same time. It can also ignore case when needed, and it can count the lines in the resulting output for you. This post shows how to use grep in all these ways.Basic grep The simplest grep command looks like the one shown below. This "find string in file" command will show all the lines in the file that contain the string, even when that string is only part of a longer one.$ grep word story The wording suggests there was more to the story than anyone wanted to admit. The sword had been left behind the shed. It was several days before it was Finding multiple strings There are a number of ways to search for a group of strings in a single command. In the command below, the '|' character serves as an "or" function. The command will display any lines in the file that contain the word "xray", the word "tape" or both.To read this article in full, Continue reading
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Multivendor 5G network slicing test claims 70% gain in deployment speeds
A group of about a dozen vendors announced this week that a test program for 5G network slicing had achieved 70% gains in the time required to programmatically create a network slice, marking a major step forward in the development of private 5G for enterprise users.A network “slice,” as it’s called, is essentially a logically distinct subnetwork in a 5G deployment that can be used for a variety of purposes to maximize bandwidth use and provide on-demand 5G services to users. The basic idea is that automation in the 5G core can apply a layer of virtualization to wireless networks, letting a service provider “slice” off parts of its available spectrum and provide them to a customer as a discrete network.To read this article in full, please click here
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Cisco bets on manufacturing in India amid global supply chain crisis
US networking giant Cisco Systems announced a manufacturing plant in India in an attempt to broaden its global supply chain.The factory is expected to be operational in 12 months and will generate $1 billion in total revenue including exports, said Cisco Chairman and Chief Executive Chuck Robbins.“We are announcing strategic investments in Indian manufacturing capabilities as the next step in delivering cutting-edge technologies to our customers in India and across the globe,” Robbins said in a press conference in New Delhi on Wednesday. “India is a focal point of innovation and business for Cisco, and we remain deeply committed to our partnerships here.”To read this article in full, please click here