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Category Archives for "Networking"

America’s first exascale supercomputer set for 2021 debut

The next step up in supercomputer performance is exaflops, and there is something of an arms race between nations to get there first — although it’s much more benign than the nuclear arms race of the last century. If anything, it’s beneficial because these monster machines will allow all kinds of advanced scientific research. An exascale computer is capable of processing one exaflop, one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations of floating point operations per second. That’s about a trillion times more powerful than a consumer laptop. + Also on Network World: Texas goes big with 18-petaflop supercomputer + China has said it will have an exascale computer by 2020, one year sooner than the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

America’s first exascale supercomputer set for 2021 debut

The next step up in supercomputer performance is exaflops, and there is something of an arms race between nations to get there first — although it’s much more benign than the nuclear arms race of the last century. If anything, it’s beneficial because these monster machines will allow all kinds of advanced scientific research. An exascale computer is capable of processing one exaflop, one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) calculations of floating point operations per second. That’s about a trillion times more powerful than a consumer laptop. + Also on Network World: Texas goes big with 18-petaflop supercomputer + China has said it will have an exascale computer by 2020, one year sooner than the U.S.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Why it pays to spend more on premium people

To spend, or not to spend — that is the question. Whether it’s wiser to invest in the latest and most-hyped hardware and suffer the great misfortune of mediocre talent, or to take the hit and invest in greater minds, and thus end troubles. We can wax poetic for much longer on the many dilemmas that accompany partitioning a budget, but we think our time is better spent providing an actual solution. The reality is that too much of funding is spent on hardware, and not enough is spent on investing in the people who make the technology mean something. In this blog post, we’ll help you understand the benefits of investing more money in employees, and then show you how you can reduce your TCO so that you can stop overspending on hardware and start investing in premium people.

What are the benefits of investing in people?

It pays to invest in people who can really make your company great. In fact, failing to properly invest in your hires can actually cost your company. A study in 2013 showed that seventy percent of American workers were actively disengaged at their job, which cost businesses more than $450 million. So, Continue reading

The Internet Society’s 25th Anniversary and the Renewal of Commitment

Last week was a proud and memorable moment for us at the Internet Society as we celebrated our 25th anniversary in Los Angeles. In addition to the well-known Internet Hall of Fame award ceremony and the annual InterCommunity 2017 event, this year’s event also had a dialogue on topics from  the 2017 Internet Society Global Internet Report: Paths to Our Digital Future and introduced the 25 under 25 award ceremony, which celebrated inspiring and remarkable ideas and projects that young and motivated entrepreneurs in the Internet space have initiated.

I was equally, however, touched by the strong drive and energy in the Internet Society leadership and staff, whose efforts and attention to detail have been clearly visible throughout the two-day event. The joyful spirit demonstrated by the Internet Society team at the Brussels interactive node helped ensure that the 15-hour InterCommunity 2017 marathon covering 16 interactive regional nodes was truly a global conversation. Using the Internet to connect those nodes demonstrated one practical application of the Internet to run a global event with precision and high productivity. Furthermore, the positive mood at Brussels appeared to be quite contagious as reflected by the celebrations that took place in at least another 55 Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: Addressing the Great IoT Analytics Skills Gap

Expect to see a huge uptick in demand for people who have technology and business skills related to the Internet of Things (IoT), as organizations continue to ramp up their IoT projects in a big way.A new report by 451 Research notes that finding IoT-skilled workers is a big challenge. Nearly half of the 575 IT and IoT decision makers the firm surveyed, primarily in North America and Europe, said they face a skills shortage for IoT-related tasks.The skills companies need to acquire include expertise in areas such as cyber security, networking, device hardware, applications, and overall management of IoT strategy. But perhaps nowhere will demand be greater in the coming years than in areas related to data analytics. As companies seek to use IoT data to predict outcomes,  prevent failures, optimize operations and develop new products, advanced analytics competency—including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)—will be critical to their success.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How Should We Handle Failure?

I had an interesting conversation this week with Greg Ferro about the network and how we’re constantly proving whether a problem is or is not the fault of the network. I postulated that the network gets blamed when old software has a hiccup. Greg’s response was:

Which led me to think about why we have such a hard time proving the innocence of the network. And I think it’s because we have a problem with applications.

Snappy Apps

Writing applications is hard. I base this on the fact that I am a smart person and I can’t do it. Therefore it must be hard, like quantum mechanics and figuring out how to load the dishwasher. The few people I know that do write applications are very good at turning gibberish into usable radio buttons. But they have a world of issues they have to deal with.

Error handling in applications is a mess at best. When I took C Programming in college, my professor was an actual coder during the day. She told us during the error handling Continue reading

Weird IP networks: Internet via birds and ham radios

If you're reading this, you have internet access.You probably have it either through a local cable or fibre ISP or through your cell phone provider. We all have one (usually both) of these.Speedy. Reliable (mostly). Boring.What happens when that infrastructure goes down? Maybe the power goes out somewhere along the network. Maybe a cell tower gets attacked by Godzilla. Who knows? Dangers lurk around every corner. + Also on Network World: When disasters strike, edge computing must kick in + In those cases, when your traditional network connection fails you, you're going to need a backup. Something to get you back up, online and moving data around. And, what the heck, we might as well do it all with as much flair and pizzazz as possible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Weird IP networks: Internet via birds and ham radios

If you're reading this, you have internet access.You probably have it either through a local cable or fibre ISP or through your cell phone provider. We all have one (usually both) of these.Speedy. Reliable (mostly). Boring.What happens when that infrastructure goes down? Maybe the power goes out somewhere along the network. Maybe a cell tower gets attacked by Godzilla. Who knows? Dangers lurk around every corner. + Also on Network World: When disasters strike, edge computing must kick in + In those cases, when your traditional network connection fails you, you're going to need a backup. Something to get you back up, online and moving data around. And, what the heck, we might as well do it all with as much flair and pizzazz as possible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 5 myths surrounding rugged IoT testing

Today’s tech-hungry consumers and innovative producers wouldn’t be able to enjoy the IoT without all the rugged testing necessary to ensure products can handle the stress they’ll endure daily. Yet while many companies and consumers alike pride themselves on the vitality of their equipment, however, many egregious myths about rugged IoT testing still endure.So, what are the five common myths that most-often surround rugged IoT testing, and who’s responsible for creating and proliferating these rumors? A quick review below shows some of the nastiest of these myths, and why they should be avoided.1. Going beyond specification limits if a waste of time In many test labs, the mainstream logic is that IoT products don’t need to be tested past their specification limits. Consumers won’t really care, the faux-logic insist, and it would be a waste of time and resources to try and push devices past their commercial limits.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

my.ipSpace.net outage: fixing broken libraries

An update of PERL libraries broke a number of my scripts (don't ask). Here's the current status:

  • Fixed: credit card processing. It was impossible to buy products from ipSpace.net with credit cards (the credit card form didn't appear at all)
  • Fixed: Google+ login
  • Unrelated and fixed: blog search

Anything else not working? Please write a comment or send me an email. Thank you!

Your Network: The Glue Holding the Business Together (Thwack)

TCP congestion control, buffer bloat and micro bursting are just a few of the things that can ruin your network and, as a consequence, your business.

On the Solarwinds Thwack Geek Speak blog I looked at these issues and more, examining the elements that make up network performance. Please do take a trip to Thwack and check out my post, “Your Network: The Glue Holding the Business Together“.

Your Network: The Glue Holding the Business Together

 

Please see my Disclosures page for more information about my role as a Solarwinds Ambassador.

If you liked this post, please do click through to the source at Your Network: The Glue Holding the Business Together (Thwack) and give me a share/like. Thank you!