Peter Sayer, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Peter Sayer

Author Archives: Peter Sayer

Mid-range models ring the changes in Top500 supercomputer ranking

With no change at the top of the latest Top500.org supercomputer list, you need to look further down the rankings to see the real story.Top500.org published the 49th edition of its twice-yearly supercomputer league table on Monday, and once again the Chinese computers 93-petaflop Sunway TaihuLight and 33.9-petaflop Tianhe 2 lead the pack.An upgrade has doubled the performance of Switzerland's GPU-based Piz Daint to 19.6 petaflops (19.6 quadrillion floating-point operations per second), boosting it from eighth to third place and nudging five other computers down a place. The top U.S. computer, Titan, is now in fourth.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Mid-range models ring the changes in Top500 supercomputer ranking

Mid-range supercomputers surge on the Top500 list of fastest machines

Nokia rolls out its first ‘petabit-class’ router

With internet traffic set to triple over the next five years or so, according to recent estimates from Nokia and Cisco Systems, Nokia thinks the time is right for a new range of high-end routers that can boost core capacity by a factor of six—and even help 10-year-old devices to double their capacity.Nokia predicts that by 2022, total internet traffic will reach 330 exabytes per month. (That's 330 million terabytes). For its part, Cisco forecasts it will grow at 24 percent per year from a base of 96 exabytes per month in 2016 to 278 exabytes per month in 2021.That traffic growth will be driven by three things, according to Nokia: cloud services, 5G mobile networks, and the Internet of Things.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Nokia rolls out its first ‘petabit-class’ router

Imagination adds safety, resilience to processor for IoT

Picture this: The networking stack on the main pump controller has crashed, and you need to reboot it -- but it's 20 meters underground, on another continent -- and there's no-one on site to hit 'reset'.Or you're bowling along the highway and one of the processor cores in your self-driving car gets zapped by a cosmic ray (yes, this could actually happen). The software can't tell whether the resulting error is a transient glitch or a hardware fault, so limits you to 50 kilometers per hour for safety: No fun with a monster truck hurtling up behind you.Chip designers such as ARM and Imagination Technologies are applying industrial safety design techniques to their processor cores so that they can get themselves out of situations like this. You could soon feel the benefit even if you don't run a subterranean pumping station in Azerbaijan, nor yet have a self-driving car in your garage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Don’t be left behind by IPv6 deployment, ISOC warns enterprises

They have the resources, the expertise and, though they may not realize it, the need -- but it turns out that enterprises are often the ones that don't yet have IPv6.That's the finding of the Internet Society its latest report on IPv6 deployment, published five years after the organization began a worldwide push to deploy the new addressing protocol and almost 20 years after the protocol was defined.Around 13 percent of the top one million websites is inviting IPv6 traffic today, it said, citing a Hurricane Electric analysis of data provided by Amazon.com. That figure rises to around 22 percent for the top 1,000 websites.In 37 countries, IPv6 is used for over 5 percent of internet traffic, according to Google, which bases its estimate on traffic hitting its load-balancers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Don’t be left behind by IPv6 deployment, ISOC warns enterprises

They have the resources, the expertise and, though they may not realize it, the need -- but it turns out that enterprises are often the ones that don't yet have IPv6.That's the finding of the Internet Society its latest report on IPv6 deployment, published five years after the organization began a worldwide push to deploy the new addressing protocol and almost 20 years after the protocol was defined.Around 13 percent of the top 1 million websites is inviting IPv6 traffic today, it said, citing a Hurricane Electric analysis of data provided by Amazon.com. That figure rises to around 22 percent for the top 1,000 websites.In 37 countries, IPv6 is used for over 5 percent of internet traffic, according to Google, which bases its estimate on traffic hitting its load-balancers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Power surge at British Airways data center causes flight chaos

A major British Airways crash has highlighted the importance for businesses of testing backup systems and disaster recovery procedures to ensure that they work as planned.The airline experienced what CEO Alex Cruz described as "a major IT systems failure" that, he said, affected all check-in and operational systems.The failure on Saturday, May 27, resulted in the delay or cancellation of hundreds of flights, leaving thousands of passengers stranded at London's Heathrow Airport on a holiday weekend. Things were still not back to normal two days later.Cruz described the cause of the failure as "a power supply issue," without going into detail.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Power surge at British Airways data center causes flight chaos

The AI fight is escalating: This is the IT giants’ next move

Artificial intelligence is where the competition is in IT, with Microsoft and Google both parading powerful, always-available AI tools for the enterprise at their respective developer conferences, Build and I/O, in May. It's not just about work: AI software can now play chess, go, and some retro video games better than any human -- and even drive a car better than many of us. These superhuman performances, albeit in narrow fields, are all possible thanks to the application of decades of AI research -- research that is increasingly, as at Build and I/O, making it out of the lab and into the real world.Meanwhile, the AI-powered voice technologies behind virtual assistants like Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Amazon.com's Alexa and Samsung Electronics' Bixby may offer less-than-superhuman performance, but they also require vastly less power than a supercomputer to run. Businesses can dabble on the edges of these, for example developing Alexa "skills" that allow Amazon Echo owners to interact with a company without having to dial its call center, or jump right in, using the various cloud-based speech recognition and text-to-speech "-as-a-service" offerings to develop full-fledged automated call centers of their own.To read this article in full Continue reading

Amazon Web Services sets a lure for Java programmers

Amazon Web Services has long offered an SDK to make it easier to access its web services from Java. Now it has another lure for Java programmers: James Gosling, the father of Java.Gosling revealed his new employer on his Facebook page with the words: "It's time for a change. I'm leaving Boeing Defense (nee Liquid Robotics), with many fond memories. Today I start a new Adventure at Amazon Web Services."He gave his title at AWS as "distinguished engineer" in an update to his LinkedIn profile. Of his work there, he would only say that he would be "wandering around."Gosling began work on what would later become Java in the early 1990s, while working at Sun Microsystems, and continued its development until the company's April 2009 acquisition by Oracle. He left a year later, frustrated that his role had been reduced to that of an evangelist for Java, with the engineering decisions concerning it taken elsewhere.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SAP has designs on new government business

Steve Ballmer's latest hobby, USAfacts.org, cast a spotlight on the effectiveness of local, state and federal governments when it launched in April. Its easy-to-read dashboards allow ordinary citizens to compare government's performance of its core missions with spending at all levels.In a roundabout way, that's made the former Microsoft CEO something of an evangelist for companies like SAP, which has released a new cloud service to help public sector organizations manage their spending.USAfacts and OpenGov, a young company offering financial reporting, budgeting and publishing tools for the public sector, are stirring interest in ERP tools for government, and that's creating opportunities for SAP to get involved in the sales cycle, according to Darren Koch, SAP's chief product officer for small and medium-size businesses. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SAP seeks to speed analytics with AI technology

SAP wants to speed up how analytics adapt to change. It's doing that by embedding SAP Predictive Analytics' machine learning capabilities in S/4Hana."When you take something rules-based, you are not able to adapt predictions to new data," said Mike Flannagan, SAP's senior vice president for analytics, ahead of the company's Sapphire Now customer conference in Orlando."The power of machine learning is you are able to continually update the model. Your model is running against all the data it has seen so far."But there's another stumbling block to that: the computing power required for machine learning systems. "Most business apps aren't robust enough to handle the machine learning computation," said Flannagan. S4/Hana, on the other hand, is fast enough to embed machine-learning prediction in a core ERP system, something that was previously only possible with rules-based prediction, he said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IBM makes leap in quantum computing power

IBM has some new options for businesses wanting to experiment with quantum computing.Quantum computers, when they become commercially available, are expected to vastly outperform conventional computers in a number of domains, including machine learning, cryptography and the optimization of business problems in the fields of logistics and risk analysis.Where conventional computers deal in ones and zeros (bits) the processors in quantum computers use qubits, which can simultaneously hold the values one and zero. This -- to grossly oversimplify -- allows a quantum computer with a 5-qubit processor to perform a calculation for 32 different input values at the same time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

SAP wants to help enterprises learn from their smart devices

SAP has added machine learning to its Leonardo IoT software suite to help businesses handle data gathered from smart devices more intelligently.It unveiled the additions to Leonardo -- and a cloud of other news -- at its customer conference, Sapphire Now, in Orlando on Tuesday.Leonardo runs on SAP Cloud Platform and provides a number of services to process data from the internet of things, including streaming and predictive analytics. Now, those predictive capabilities will include machine-learning tools tuned to work with the rest of the Leonardo components."It's about adding intelligence to existing business processes and integrating with the core systems of record. Leonardo's capabilities can be infused into SAP applications," said Mike Flannagan, SAP's senior vice president for analytics. "We see Leonardo as something that will help customers transform processes."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook hit with maximum fine for breaking French privacy law

The French data protection watchdog has imposed its harshest penalty on Facebook for six breaches of French privacy law.The breaches include tracking users across websites other than Facebook.com without their knowledge, and compiling a massive database of personal information in order to target advertising.The French National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL) began its investigation of Facebook and its European subsidiary, Facebook ireland, after the company made changes to its terms and conditions outlining the practices in January 2015.CNIL wasn't the only organization concerned by Facebook's changes: data protection authorities in Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Hamburg, Germany also began investigations around the same time.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Twenty years after Deep Blue, what can AI do for us?

On May 11, 1997, a computer showed that it could outclass a human in that most human of pursuits: playing a game. The human was World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov, and the computer was IBM's Deep Blue, which had begun life at Carnegie Mellon University as a system called ChipTest.One of Deep Blue's creators, Murray Campbell, talked to the IDG News Service about the other things computers have learned to do as well as, or better than, humans, and what that means for our future. What follows is an edited version of that conversation.IDGNS: Is it true that you and Deep Blue joined IBM at the same time?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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