Intel has joined RISC-V International association, an open hardware standards organization dedicated to designing and building ultralow-power processors. The news comes on the heels of another Intel announcement, that it is investing $1 billion in foundry services.Bob Brennan, vice president of customer solutions engineering for Intel Foundry Services (IFS), will be joining both the RISC-V Board of Directors and Technical Steering Committee. Intel is also partnering with several RISC-V leaders, including Andes Technology, Esperanto Technologies, SiFive and Ventana Micro Systems.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
The RISC-V ecosystem uses an open collaboration model, similar to how Linux and other open-source software products are developed. This is unique in chip design. Developers have freedom to design their processors for specific domains and industries. RISC-V started as a project at UC Berkeley and has gained many supporters, but Intel is by far the biggest supporter to back the project.To read this article in full, please click here
Security firm Binarly has discovered more than 20 vulnerabilities hiding in BIOS/UEFI software from a wide range of system vendors, including Intel, Microsoft, Lenovo, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, HPE, Siemens, and Bull Atos.Binarly found the issues were associated with the use of InsydeH20, a framework code used to build motherboard unified extensible firmware interfaces (UEFI), the interface between a computer’s operating system and firmware.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
All of the aforementioned vendors used Insyde’s firmware SDK for motherboard development. It is expected that similar types of vulnerabilities exist in other in-house and third-party BIOS-vendor products as well.To read this article in full, please click here
A Canadian startup called Infinidium Power claims it has a new data-center cooling system that will generate power from the heat generated by the servers deployed within it.Infinidium claims its Next Generation Datacenter Cooling and Power Supply Infrastructure can reduce both operating and capital costs by as much as 50% through air cooling. It has its own compute containers called the Vortex Vacuum Chamber and a low-voltage direct-current smart Nanogrid, which saves power by not doing AC-to-DC conversion.A video animation on the company's site explains how the Vortex Vacuum Chamber sucks in cold air to a bell-shaped chamber where server boards are arranged in levels of circular racks. It uses a combination of the shape of the chamber and physics (warm air rises, cold air sinks) to generate power. Cool air is pulled into the chamber, and as heat generated by the servers warms the air it rises to a vent in the ceiling where it drives a turbine on its way out, generating power.To read this article in full, please click here
Pluribus Networks has significantly upgraded its switch-fabric software to provide a better handle on distributed, containerized enterprise-cloud resources.The upgrades add three new fabric-monitoring capabilities—FlowTracker, KubeTracker, and Virtualized Packet Broker Service—to Netvisor One, the company’s virtualized Linux-based NOS that provides Layer 2 and Layer 3 networking and distributed fabric intelligence.The NOS virtualizes switch hardware and implements the company’s Adaptive Cloud Fabric software-defined networking package. Adaptive Cloud Fabric operates without a controller and can be deployed across a data center or targeted to specific racks, pods, server farms, or hyperconverged infrastructures, the company said.To read this article in full, please click here
The seq command is handy for generating number sequences on Linux.It requires at least one number as an argument and, given that, it will provide all the numbers from 1 to whatever number you specify. However, that's just the command's simplest use. With additional arguments, seq can be surprisingly useful, especially when you use the generated numbers to drive a loop or do a calculation.How to tell if you're using a bash built-in in Linux
The seq command below illustrates the most basic use of this command:To read this article in full, please click here
The Linux expand and unexpand commands sound like they can make files larger and smaller, but what they actually do is turn tabs into spaces and spaces into tabs.In this post, we’ll use some simple text files to demonstrate what happens when you use expand and unexpand. We’ll also compare how these commands work with some likely more familiar commands—sed and awk—that can provide similar results and offer additional options.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
To begin, let’s take a look at this very simple text file:To read this article in full, please click here
AMD has been given the green light by the Chinese government to acquire FPGA giant Xilinx. No formal announcement has been made, but eagle-eyed writers spotted the detail in an 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.The deal was first announced in October 2020. The U.S. and EU have already approved the acquisition, but in late December, AMD said it had to delay closing as China's regulators slow-walked the deal. Then came the filing this week:To read this article in full, please click here
Nvidia may be about to do something it never does: give up.The chip giant is finally ready to throw in the towel on its proposed acquisition of Arm Holdings after vociferous opposition by UK regulators, according to a report from Bloomberg (paywalled).[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
First announced in September 2020, the deal has dragged on due to almost immediate opposition from UK entities. Arm Holdings is a British company but owned by Japanese tech giant Softbank. Laden with debt, Softbank wanted to unload Arm to someone better suited to manage the company, and Nvidia stepped forward.To read this article in full, please click here
Making inventories of computer storage, particularly on severs, is complex due to the number of factors involved. There might be multiple physical media devices each of which contains multiple logical volumes. Volumes could span multiple disks with hardware or software-based RAID configurations. Each volume could be configured with its own drive letter, and folders throughout the file system could be shared on the network.Those inventories are important because gathering data on physical storage media can identify what type of storage is available and what physical storage capacity servers have. PowerShell can help with those inventories, particularly the Get-PhysicalDisk cmdlet, which uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) under the covers. Get-PhysicalDisk uses WMI to query the MSFT_PhysicalDisk class, with the WMI class providing numeric values for things like MediaType and BusType, while Get-PhysicalDisk returns descriptive text values.To read this article in full, please click here
When you type “hash” on a Linux system, you could get one of two very different responses depending on the shell you are using.If you are using bash or a related shell such as ksh, you should see a list of the commands that you have used since your terminal session began, sometimes with a count of how many times each command was used. This can be more useful than using the history command if you just want to see your very recent command activity, but the hash command is not a single executable. Instead, it relies on your shell.How to tell if you're using a bash built-in in Linux
hash in bash
Here’s an example of the hash command run in bash:To read this article in full, please click here
Facebook’s parent company Meta said it is building the world's largest AI supercomputer to power machine-learning and natural language processing for building its metaverse project.The new machine, called the Research Super Computer (RSC), will contain 16,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs and 4,000 AMD Epyc Rome 7742 processors. It has 2,000 Nvidia DGX-A100 nodes, with eight GPU chips and two Epyc microprocessors per node. Meta expects to complete construction this year.World's fastest supercomputer is 3x faster than No. 2
RSC is already partially built, with 760 of the DGX-A100 systems deployed. Meta researchers have already started using RSC to train large models in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision for research with the goal of eventually training models with trillions of parameters, according to Meta.To read this article in full, please click here
Dell Technologies is charging ahead with its Apex consumption-based sales portfolio with a total of seven new launches, while also expanding its public cloud integration for a broader multi-cloud experience for its customers.Dell sees the writing on the wall and that the future is hybrid and multicloud. Today, 92% of organizations have a multi-cloud strategy in place or underway, and 82% of large enterprises have adopted a hybrid cloud infrastructure. And a new Forrester study commissioned by Dell Technologies found that 83% of organizations have adopted a multi-cloud approach or plan to within the next 12 months.To read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, learn how to use the true and false commands. What they do is very simple. The true command generates an exit code of 0 (no problems) and the false command generates a value of 1.
Worldwide spending on edge computing is expected to reach $176 billion in 2022, an increase of 14.8% over last year, according to new figures from analyst IDC.Edge computing started out rather modest in its use cases but has quickly expanded across industries and scope. Five years ago an edge network was a few mid-range servers in a ruggedized container. Now Nvidia and Lenovo are deploying GPU-based AI systems.How to choose an edge gateway
“If we have learned anything over the last two years, the ability to quickly adapt to rapidly changing conditions is critical to business success. Organizations investing in edge computing combined with AI and modern application design will have an advantage when it comes to tackling whatever challenge comes next,” according to Dave McCarthy, research vice president for Cloud and Edge Infrastructure Services at IDC.To read this article in full, please click here
When it comes to hardcore quantum computing players Cisco might not be the first company you think of, but that could change a lot in 2022 and beyond.For starters, the company is investing in photonics development, which will enable quantum communications as well as other hardware and software technologies for quantum computing, networking, and cryptography. Researchers show quantum computers can reason
Developing quantum technologies was also one of the top predictions on the 2022 predictions list of Cisco’s executive vice president, general manager and Chief Strategy Officer Liz Centoni. To read this article in full, please click here
Intel is collaborating with Green Revolution Cooling (GRC), a startup specializing in immersion cooling for server hardware, in an effort that seeks to take immersion cooling mainstream.The two companies announced a multi-year partnership that involves working with data center customers to develop and implement advanced immersion cooling techniques for future data centers. The two will look to test the safety and reliability of the technology for immersion-cooled racks running Intel Xeon Scalable processors.
Read more: Intel under attack, fighting back on many frontsTo read this article in full, please click here
The look command on Linux can be handy for selecting particular lines from text files with sorted contents. Let's look into how it can be used and where you might run into some problems.Case sensitivity
If you type a command such as "look unix", you should see this:$ look unix
UNIX
Unix
unix
Notice that, because no file was specified in the command shown, look reverts to using the words file on the system (probably /usr/share/dict/words or whatever that points to). Also notice that it finds the three lines in the file even though the argument for the command has only lowercase characters. The command is case-insensitive when you don't provide a file name and instead allow it to default to the words file.To read this article in full, please click here
Lenovo’s latest addition to the ThinkEdge portfolio of edge-computing devices packs Nvidia GPUs with AI capabilities into a ruggedized design that’s roughly the size of a laptop.The ThinkEdge SE450 is a 2U, 300mm (12 inches) unit that includes a third-generation Xeon Platinum processor and up to four single-width or two double-width GPUs, along with six NVMe SSDs and 1TB of DDR4 memory, making it one of the first Nvidia-certified Edge systems. There is also a slightly larger model that’s 360mm (14.2 inches).
Read more: 4 essential edge-computing use casesTo read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, learn how to use the fold command. It allows you to limit the length of lines when displaying a text file by "folding" long lines into smaller pieces and, of course, you can save the shortened lines into another file.
Remember when Nvidia was a gaming-card vendor? That doesn’t seem all that long ago but now it’s a full-blown enterprise high-performance computing and AI company that happens to sell videogame cards - if you can actually find them.Its latest move is the acquisition of Bright Computing, a maker of Bright Cluster Manager software that controls the configuration of clustered HPC systems, including Nvidia’s own DGX servers and HGX systems made by OEMs and ODMs, plus clusters from other manufacturers. The clusters of servers are linked by high-speed networks into a single unit.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
If the deal goes through, Bright Cluster Manager will become a part of Nvidia’s Enterprise Products Group. Nvidia has no intention of keeping Bright Cluster Manager for itself, and by being a part of the Nvidia channel, it gives Bright an opportunity to expand and grow its market.To read this article in full, please click here