Where The FPGA Hits The Server Road For Inference Acceleration

There are an increasing number of ways to do machine learning inference in the datacenter, but one of the increasingly popular means of running inference workloads is the combination of traditional CPUs acting as a host for FPGAs that run the bulk of the inferring. …

Where The FPGA Hits The Server Road For Inference Acceleration was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .

How industrial predictive maintenance can prevent equipment failure

Entropy sucks. But industrial predictive maintenance can help it suck a little less for factories, oil rigs, aircraft engines, and even data centers. The key is to leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine learning to help companies “accurately determine when a manufacturing plant, machine, component, or part is likely to fail, and thus needs to be replaced.”That, in a nutshell, is the point behind a fascinating new Google Cloud blog post by Prashant Dhingra, Machine Learning Lead, Advanced Solutions Lab, laying out “A strategy for implementing industrial predictive maintenance.”To read this article in full, please click here

Huawei targets Nvidia, Intel, Qualcomm with new AI chips

Chinese smartphone giant Huawei Technologies Co. announced at its Huawei Connect 2018 show in Shanghai an update to its Ascend artificial intelligence (AI) chips with a new set of cloud services, software, tools, training, and framework.The company is putting itself in direct competition with the main AI chip developers in the U.S., namely Nvidia, Intel, and Qualcomm, but also ARM, IBM, to some degree Google, and even fellow Chinese tech giant Alibaba.Chairman Eric Xu introduced the Ascend 910 and Ascend 310 chips along with the Compute Architecture for Neural Networks (CANN), a chip operators library and automated operators development toolkit, and MindSpore, an inference framework for devices, edge networks, and cloud training.To read this article in full, please click here

The Week in Internet News: Facebook Bans ‘Clickbait’ Political Accounts

Good-bye clickbait? Facebook has tossed out more than 800 publishers and accounts it accused of trafficking in clickbait and political spam, the Washington Post reports. Facebook also accused some of the accounts of “inauthentic behavior,” otherwise known as fake news. The bans met with some resistance, with some critics saying Facebook’s terms of service represent a moving target.

Let’s Encrypt rising: Let’s Encrypt, a service that provides websites free SSL certificates, is helping the Internet move toward better encryption, Forbes says. Let’s Encrypt “may finally fix the broken world of HTTPS hosting and usher in an online future in which creating an HTTPS site becomes as transparent as visiting one,” the author writes.

Government’s role in IoT security: The U.S. government could drive more security into the Internet of Things industry by changing its tech acquisition standards, says Nextgov. Federal agencies could use the Federal Acquisition Regulation to enforce minimum security standards, the author suggests.

RIP Google+: Google is planning to shut down the consumer version of its Google+ social media site after the company disclosed a massive data breach there, The Verge reports. Google+ also has “low usage and engagement,” according to Google.

Insecure security cameras: Millions of Continue reading

Why Is Network Automation such a Hot Topic?

This blog post was initially sent to subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

One of my readers asked a very valid question when reading the Why Is Network Automation So Hard blog post:

Why was network automation 'invented' now? I have been working in the system development engineering for 13+ years and we have always used automation because we wanted to save time & effort for repeatable tasks.

He’s absolutely right. We had fully-automated ISP service in early 1990’s, and numerous service providers used network automation for decades.

Read more ...

Capturing and enhancing in situ system observability for failure detection

Capturing and enhancing in situ system observability for failure detection Huang et al., OSDI’18

The central idea in this paper is simple and brilliant. The place where we have the most relevant information about the health of a process or thread is in the clients that call it. Today the state of the practice is to log and try to recover from a failed call at the client, while a totally separate failure detection infrastructure is responsible for figuring out whether or not things are working as desired. What Panorama does is turn clients into observers and reporters of the components they call, using these observations to determine component health. It works really well!

Panorama can easily integrate with popular distributed systems and detect all 15 real-world gray failures that we reproduced in less than 7s, whereas existing approaches detect only one of them in under 300s.

Panaroma is open source and available at https://github.com/ryanphuang/panorama.

Combating gray failures with multiple observers

Panaroma is primarily design to catch gray failures, in which components and systems offer degraded performance but typically don’t crash-stop. One example of such a failure is a ZooKeeper cluster that could no longer service write Continue reading

How to irregular cyber warfare

Somebody (@thegrugq) pointed me to this article on "Lessons on Irregular Cyber Warfare", citing the masters like Sun Tzu, von Clausewitz, Mao, Che, and the usual characters. It tries to answer:
...as an insurgent, which is in a weaker power position vis-a-vis a stronger nation state; how does cyber warfare plays an integral part in the irregular cyber conflicts in the twenty-first century between nation-states and violent non-state actors or insurgencies
I thought I'd write a rebuttal.

None of these people provide any value. If you want to figure out cyber insurgency, then you want to focus on the technical "cyber" aspects, not "insurgency". I regularly read military articles about cyber written by those, like in the above article, which demonstrate little experience in cyber.

The chief technical lesson for the cyber insurgent is the Birthday Paradox. Let's say, hypothetically, you go to a party with 23 people total. What's the chance that any two people at the party have the same birthday? The answer is 50.7%. With a party of 75 people, the chance rises to 99.9% that two will have the same birthday.

The paradox is that your intuitive way of calculating Continue reading

Hands-on Learning Opportunities at DockerCon EU

 

The value of attending a conference is measured by how much you can learn and who you will meet. While DockerCon has you covered on both fronts. We know that everyone learns differently so the conference provides three options for you.

Workshops: Starting this year at DockerCon San Francisco, we introduced a track dedicated to workshops where technical experts deliver 2-hour deep dive sessions with hands-on tutorials to deepen your understanding of Docker technology, Kubernetes, Isito and solutions from our ecosystem partners. Included as part of your conference pass, you must pre-register for workshops to save your seat.  

Hands on Labs: I instructor-led isn’t your thing, check out the self-paced Hands-On Labs. Also included with our conference pass, Hands-On Labs are available at any time throughout the conference. Drop in between sessions or anytime – grab a seat and launch a tutorial. Docker moderators will be on hand to help answer questions.

Training: In addition, you can add official Docker training courses to your DockerCon schedule at a discounted rate. Come early to Barcelona for a 2 day training course led by Docker authorized instructors and designed specifically for your role in using containers. Each course features a variety Continue reading

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