HPE to buy Cray, offer HPC as a service

HPE has agreed to buy supercomputer-maker Cray for $1.3 billion, a deal that the companies say will bring their corporate customers high-performance computing as a service to help with analytics needed for artificial intelligence and machine learning, but also products supporting high-performance storage, compute and software.In addition to bringing HPC capabilities that can blend with and expand HPE’s current products, Cray brings with it customers in government and academia that might be interested in HPE’s existing portfolio as well.[ Now read: Who's developing quantum computers ] The companies say they expect to close the cash deal by the end of next April.To read this article in full, please click here

Ericsson Head Criticizes Europe For Slow 5G Rollouts

HPE Buys Supercomputer Company Cray for $1.3B, Boosts Its HPC Business

Weekend Reads 051919

Another week, another devastating, industry-shaking, cybersecurity threat. This week’s is particularly haunting, though — the resurrected corpse of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, aptly known as ZombieLoad. —Another week, another devastating, industry-shaking, cybersecurity threat. This week’s is particularly haunting, though — the resurrected corpse of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, aptly known as ZombieLoad.

Today sees the publication of a range of closely related flaws named variously RIDL, Fallout, ZombieLoad, or Microarchitectural Data Sampling. The many names are a consequence of the several groups that discovered the different flaws. From the computer science department of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Helmholtz Center for Information Security, we have “Rogue In-Flight Data Load.” —Peter Bright

Academic researchers today disclosed details of the newest class of speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel processors that impacts all modern chips, including the chips used in Apple devices. —Swati Khandelwal

Researchers have discovered a severe vulnerability in Cisco products that could allow attackers to implant persistent backdoor on wide range devices used in enterprises and government networks, including routers, switches, and firewalls. —Mohit Kumar

Intel’s struggles to get its 10 nanometer processors out the door has forced the company to do some serious soul-searching. And while Continue reading

With Cray Deal, HPE Finally Enters The HPC Big Leagues

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has reached the top of the HPC sector in an unconventional way, but one that could prove truly transformative for its new acquisition, legendary supercomputer maker Cray. …

With Cray Deal, HPE Finally Enters The HPC Big Leagues was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

Project EVE Seed Code Drops, Creates Virtualization Standard for Edge Devices

ngrok on Cumulus Linux

If you’ve landed on this page, you likely already have a good idea of what ngrok is and what it does. For those that don’t, the reader’s digest version is that it’s a simple way to securely tunnel to a device that sits behind a firewall/NAT device. It’s a slick implementation that is easy to install and allows a few different tunneling options. For the purpose of this blog, we’re using ssh and eliminating the need for port forwarding on the firewall.

Here are step-by-step instructions for turning up ngrok ssh services on Cumulus Linux. Note that these instructions work on the default VRF. You’ll need to take additional configuration steps to get this to work on Cumulus Linux with mgmt VRF enabled.

First, install the unzip package from the repo

Then wget the ngrok application, or optionally add the appropriate repo to your /etc/apt/sources.list and use apt to pull the package. You’ll obviously want to find the appropriate package for your switch (x86 or ARM).

If you don’t know the download link, navigate to https://dashboard.ngrok.com/get-started and copy the link address on the web link of the download section (right click the download link to snag the Continue reading

SDxCentral Weekly Wrap: Thrangrycat Attacks Cisco Switches, Routers, Firewalls

Open19 Hardware in PoCs With ‘Mega Data Center Operators’

History of Networking: Pseudowires

In this episode of the History of Networking, Donald Sharp and I talk to Luca Martini about the origins of pseudowires—one of the more interesting innovations in the use of MPLS.

Outro Music:
Danger Storm Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Short Take – Peering and Resources in the DFZ

The post Short Take – Peering and Resources in the DFZ appeared first on Network Collective.

Gone Fishin’

Well, not exactly Fishin', but I'll be on a month long vacation starting today. I won't be posting new content, so we'll all have a break. Disappointing, I know. Please use this time for quiet contemplation and other inappropriate activities.

If you really need a not so quick fix there's always the back catalog of Stuff the Internet Says. Odds are there's a lot you didn't read—yet.

Telefónica Takes AURA AI Program to More Markets

You Don’t Want To Be A Rock Star

When I say “rock star”, you probably have all kinds of images that pop up in your head. Private planes, penthouse suites, grand stages, and wheelbarrows full of money are probably on that list somewhere. Maybe you’re a purist and you think of someone dedicated to the craft of entertaining the masses and trying to claw their way to fame one note at a time. But I’m also sure in both of those cases you also think about the negative aspects of being a rock star. Like ego. And lack of humility. I want to touch on some of that as it pertains to our jobs and our involvement in the community.

Great Like Elvis. Without The Tassels.

The rock star mentality at work is easy to come by. Perhaps you’re very good at what you do. You may even be the best at your company or even at the collection of companies that are your competitors. You’re the best senior architect there is. You know the products and the protocols and you can implement a complex project with your eyes closed. That’s how people start looking at you. Larger than life. The best. One of a kind.

And that Continue reading

Heavy Networking 450: Getting To Know The Open-Source VyOS Network OS

Today's Heavy Networking digs into VyOS, an open-source, Linux-based network OS for routing. Forked from the Vyatta Core, VyOS includes a full routing stack and features including firewalling, VPN, and more. Guest Yuriy Andamasov, the project coordinator, gives us a guided tour.

The post Heavy Networking 450: Getting To Know The Open-Source VyOS Network OS appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Faster script loading with BinaryAST?

JavaScript Cold starts

The performance of applications on the web platform is becoming increasingly bottlenecked by the startup (load) time. Large amounts of JavaScript code are required to create rich web experiences that we’ve become used to. When we look at the total size of JavaScript requested on mobile devices from HTTPArchive, we see that an average page loads 350KB of JavaScript, while 10% of pages go over the 1MB threshold. The rise of more complex applications can push these numbers even higher.

While caching helps, popular websites regularly release new code, which makes cold start (first load) times particularly important. With browsers moving to separate caches for different domains to prevent cross-site leaks, the importance of cold starts is growing even for popular subresources served from CDNs, as they can no longer be safely shared.

Usually, when talking about the cold start performance, the primary factor considered is a raw download speed. However, on modern interactive pages one of the other big contributors to cold starts is JavaScript parsing time. This might seem surprising at first, but makes sense - before starting to execute the code, the engine has to first parse the fetched JavaScript, make sure Continue reading

Technology Short Take 114

Welcome to Technology Short Take #114! There will be a longer gap than usual before the next Tech Short Take (more details to come on Monday), but in the meantime here’s some articles and links to feed your technical appetite. Enjoy!

Networking

• Courtesy of Tigera, Alex Pollitt shares some guidelines on when Linux conntrack is no longer your friend.

Servers/Hardware

• Apparently Dell’s new docking stations support firmware updates via Linux. Nice!

Security

• Michael Allen published an article on weaponizing the Yubikey. It’s an interesting read, although I’m not sure about the usefulness or practicality of the technique he describes.
• This is a pretty detailed write-up of a remote code execution vulnerability prsent on most Dell computers (courtesy of Dell SupportAssist). I’m thankful that Bill Demirkapi followed a responsible disclosure policy.
• Here’s a summary of attacks against GPG-signed APT repositories. The “TL;DR” on this one is simple: always serve your APT repositories over TLS.
• Since we’re on a bit of a security kick this time around, then the recent announcement by HyTrust of HyTrust CloudControl 6.0 seems appropriate to include. There’s some interesting new functionality found in this release, including support for/integration with Kubernetes.

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

• This article by Continue reading

IDG Contributor Network: The modern data center and the rise in open-source IP routing suites

As the cloud service providers and search engines started with the structuring process of their business, they quickly ran into the problems of managing the networking equipment. Ultimately, after a few rounds of getting the network vendors to understand their problems, these hyperscale network operators revolted.Primarily, what the operators were looking for was a level of control in managing their network which the network vendors couldn’t offer. The revolution burned the path that introduced open networking, and network disaggregation to the work of networking. Let us first learn about disaggregation followed by open networking.Disaggregation The concept of network disaggregation involves breaking-up of the vertical networking landscape into individual pieces, where each piece can be used in the best way possible. The hardware can be separated from the software, along with open or closed IP routing suites. This enables the network operators to use the best of breed for the hardware, software and the applications.To read this article in full, please click here

Programmable Packet Forwarding Pipelines Using P4 on Software Gone Wild

Every time a new simple programming language is invented, we go through the same predictable cycle:

• Tons of hype;
• Unbounded enthusiasm when people who never worked in target environment realize they could get something simple done in a short time;
• Ever-worsening headaches as the enthusiasts try to get a real job done with the shiny new tool;
• Disappointment;
• A more powerful language is invented to replace the old one.

A few years ago we experienced the same cycle when OpenFlow was the-one-tool-to-bind-them all.

Understanding real-world concurrency bugs in Go

Understanding real-world concurrency bugs in Go Tu, Liu et al., ASPLOS’19

The design of a programming (or data) model not only makes certain problems easier (or harder) to solve, but also makes certain classes of bugs easier (or harder) to create, detect, and subsequently fix. Today’s paper choice studies concurrency mechanisms in Go. Before we dive in, it might be interesting to pause for a moment and consider your own beliefs about Go, which may well include some of the following:

• Go was explicitly designed to make concurrent programming easier and less error-prone
• Go makes concurrent programming easier and less error-prone
• Go programs make heavy use of message passing via channels, which is less error prone than shared memory synchronisation
• Go programs have less concurrency bugs
• Go’s built-in deadlock and data race detectors will catch any (most?)
  bugs you do let slip into your code

The first of those statements is true. For the remaining statements, you can use the data from this research to re-evaluate how strongly you want to hold those opinions…

We perform the first systematic study on concurrency bugs in real Go programs. We studied six popular Go software [projects] including Docker, Kubernetes, and Continue reading