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OpenSwitch Meets P4

Note: This article was originally published here.

Before moving on the next post to continue our saga of OpenSwitch Simulations with GNS3, I wanted to take a quick deviation to document a subject that gets a lot of attention these days: P4.

In case you have been missing all the action around P4, the 30,000 feet view is that it’s a language to describe forwarding pipelines (and no, it’s not the same as OpenFlow, that is useful for programming entries in almost-always-pre-defined pipelines). One of the (many) nice things about this is that you can potentially ‘compile’ your pipeline definition into an executable program that provides a functional simulation of a P4-based ASIC. Did I mention the tools for doing all of this are available as open source?

What does P4 has to do with OpenSwitch?

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Google has a new chip that makes machine learning way faster

Google has taken a big leap forward with the speed of its machine learning systems by creating its own custom chip that it's been using for over a year.The company was rumored to have been designing its own chip, based partly on job ads it posted in recent years. But until today it had kept the effort largely under wraps.It calls the chip a Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, named after the TensorFlow software it uses for its machine learning programs. In a blog post, Google engineer Norm Jouppi refers to it as an accelerator chip, which means it speeds up a specific task.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google has a new chip that makes machine learning way faster

Google has taken a big leap forward with the speed of its machine learning systems by creating its own custom chip that it's been using for over a year. The company was rumored to have been designing its own chip, based partly on job ads it posted in recent years. But until today it had kept the effort largely under wraps. It calls the chip a Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, named after the TensorFlow software it uses for its machine learning programs. In a blog post, Google engineer Norm Jouppi refers to it as an accelerator chip, which means it speeds up a specific task.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Congrats to Neil Moore – **NINE TIME** CCIE & CCDE!

Congratulations to Neil Moore on passing the CCDE Practical Exam this week, and becoming a NONTUPLE (9x) CCIE & CCDE!

Neil was a student in both my CCIE Data Center Bootcamp and CCDE Bootcamp within the past few years, and is truly an inspiration to us all. Neil’s brother Kelly is also a CCIE in Data Center. Neil likes to introduce himself and his brother to people at Cisco Live that they have 9 CCIEs between the two of them! ;) This year Neil gets to bump that up to 10 CCIEs and CCDE between the two of them!

Neil for sure will win the longest badge this year at Cisco Live 2016 Las Vegas!

Neil currently works for VMWare as an NSX Systems Engineer, is a VMware Certified Implementation Expert — Network Virtualization (VCIX-NV), and has plans to pursue the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX).

Congrats Neil!

Got privacy? If you use Twitter or a smartphone, maybe not so much

The notion of online privacy has been greatly diminished in recent years, and just this week two new studies confirm what to many minds is already a dismal picture.First, a study reported on Monday by Stanford University found that smartphone metadata -- information about calls and text messages, such as time and length -- can reveal a surprising amount of personal detail.To investigate their topic, the researchers built an Android app and used it to retrieve the metadata about previous calls and text messages -- the numbers, times, and lengths of communications -- from more than 800 volunteers’ smartphone logs. In total, participants provided records of more than 250,000 calls and 1.2 million texts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Got privacy? If you use Twitter or a smartphone, maybe not so much

The notion of online privacy has been greatly diminished in recent years, and just this week two new studies confirm what to many minds is already a dismal picture.First, a study reported on Monday by Stanford University found that smartphone metadata -- information about calls and text messages, such as time and length -- can reveal a surprising amount of personal detail.To investigate their topic, the researchers built an Android app and used it to retrieve the metadata about previous calls and text messages -- the numbers, times, and lengths of communications -- from more than 800 volunteers’ smartphone logs. In total, participants provided records of more than 250,000 calls and 1.2 million texts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft releases ‘service pack 2’ for Windows 7

One of the most vexing aspects of a Windows 7 reinstall is that even after you install the operating system and Service Pack 1, you can expect to spend a ridiculous amount of time applying patches that came post-SP1. Service Pack 1 came out in 2011, and there have been dozens and dozens of fixes over the past five years.For the longest time, this was a sore spot among users. That and the fact that Microsoft was reluctant to issue a second service pack with just a rollup of current fixes.Well, that wish has been granted. The company today announced a "convenience rollup" for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 that contains all of the security and non-security updates it has issued for the two operating systems since the Windows 7 Service Pack up through April 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google I/O 2016: Android N hits beta, boasts VR and more

Google’s been hard at work under the hood of its Android operating system, announcing performance, security and productivity updates in the new Android N alongside a swanky new suite of VR capabilities called Daydream and version 2.0 of Android Wear.Android N is available for select devices in beta today, and will be released in a stable version this fall. It’s been publicly available as an open alpha for developer use for some time, but Google’s presentation offers the company’s definitive vision for the future of the Android platform.+ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Microsoft leaves feature-phone business as Nokia moves back in, sort of + ARM acquires Apical to add eyes to IoTTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Twitter location data reveals users’ homes, workplaces

Geographic location stamps transmitted in tweets can provide enough information for people to deduce where a Twitter user lives and works, say researchers. The deduction occurs through the clustering of the posting locations. The assemblage provides location patterns that provide a good guess as to where the poster spends most of his or her time. When that’s coupled with other data, such as the time of day, non-scientists recruited for the study simply picked out the homes and workplaces of the tweeters, said researchers from MIT and Oxford University in a press release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Twitter location data reveals users’ homes, workplaces

Geographic location stamps transmitted in tweets can provide enough information for people to deduce where a Twitter user lives and works, say researchers. The deduction occurs through the clustering of the posting locations. The assemblage provides location patterns that provide a good guess as to where the poster spends most of his or her time. When that’s coupled with other data, such as the time of day, non-scientists recruited for the study simply picked out the homes and workplaces of the tweeters, said researchers from MIT and Oxford University in a press release.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google gets smart with Google Assistant and Google Home

Google is launching a smart personal assistant that uses artificial intelligence and search to let people not just get answers to their questions but to even control their devices.Google wants users to be able to do more than ask Google Assistant what the weather will be that day.+ Follow all the stories out of Google I/O 2016 +Google says its new assistant will make movie suggestions based on what films you've liked before. Going to the theater with your kids? Google Assistant will change its recommendations accordingly. It'll offer up moview reviews and buy your tickets for you.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft’s sale of feature phone biz erodes smartphone commitment

Microsoft today continued to undo its disastrous 2014 acquisition of Nokia's phone business, announcing that it is exiting the feature phone market, which it had once trumpeted as a critical component of its mobile strategy.The sale of its feature phone business for $350 million prompted analysts to again question Microsoft's commitment to smartphones. "There won't be any more Lumia [smartphones]," said Jan Dawson, chief analyst at Jackdaw Research, in an email reply to Computerworld's questions today. "It does leave the door open for a new, narrower, phone strategy in the future."MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 10 (FREE!) Microsoft tools to make admins happier In a statement Wednesday, Microsoft said it had sold its remaining Nokia assets, including its factory in Hanoi, Vietnam, to FIH Mobile Ltd., a subsidiary of Taiwanese contract manufacturer Hon Hai, better known as Foxconn, and to Finnish firm HMD Global.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Martian author Andy Weir calls for massive new space station to prep humans for Mars trip

When it comes to living on Mars, the human body is simply not suited to living for long periods in zero-g. Until this issue is solved, we have no hope of landing humans on the surface of Mars, nor can we create permanent residences in space.That was the crux of the testimony given to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology today by best-selling author of The Martian, Andy Weir. The hearing, entitled “Next Steps to Mars: Deep Space Habitats,” is exploring what NASA’s plans are for the development of deep space habitation. Weir was among speakers from NASA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Orbital.+More on Network World: NASA touts real technologies highlighted in 'The Martian' flick+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Martian author Andy Weir calls for massive new space station to prep humans for Mars trip

When it comes to living on Mars, the human body is simply not suited to living for long periods in zero-g. Until this issue is solved, we have no hope of landing humans on the surface of Mars, nor can we create permanent residences in space.That was the crux of the testimony given to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology today by best-selling author of The Martian, Andy Weir. The hearing, entitled “Next Steps to Mars: Deep Space Habitats,” is exploring what NASA’s plans are for the development of deep space habitation. Weir was among speakers from NASA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Orbital.+More on Network World: NASA touts real technologies highlighted in 'The Martian' flick+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Worth Reading: The API fight everyone loses

Attorneys for the Oracle and Google companies presented opening statements this week in a high-stakes copyright case about the use of application-programming interfaces, or APIs. As Oracle eagerly noted, there are potentially billions of dollars on the line; accordingly, each side has brought “world-class attorneys,” as Judge William Alsup noted to the jury. And while each company would prefer to spend their money elsewhere, these are businesses that can afford to spend years and untold resources in the courtroom. -via deeplinks

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Identifying bad ECMP paths

In the talk Move Fast, Unbreak Things! at the recent DevOps Networking Forum,  Petr Lapukhov described how Facebook has tackled the problem of detecting packet loss in Equal Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) networks. At Facebook's scale,  there are many parallel paths and actively probing all the paths generates a lot of data. The active tests generate over 1Terabits/second of measurement data per Facebook data center and a Hadoop cluster with hundreds of compute nodes is required per data center to process the data.

Processing active test data can detect that packets are being lost within approximately 20 seconds, but doesn't provide the precise location where packets are dropped. A custom multi-path traceroute tool (fbtracert) is used to follow up and narrow down the location of the packet loss.

While described as measuring packet loss, the test system is really measuring path loss. For example, if there are 64 ECMP paths in a pod, then the loss of one path would result in a packet loss of approximately 1 in 64 packets in traffic flows that cross the ECMP group.

Black hole detection describes an alternative approach. Industry standard sFlow instrumentation embedded within most vendor's switch hardware provides visibility into the Continue reading
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