The twice-annual ranking of distributed computing systems based on the Linpack parallel Fortran benchmark, a widely used and sometimes maligned test, is as much a history lesson as it is an expectation always looking forward, with anticipation, to the next performance milestones in high performance computing. …
The Widening Gyre Of Supercomputing was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
China wants fairness: Chinese President Xi Jinping called for international cooperation to make the Internet more “fair and equitable,” while also asserting the Chinese government’s authority to shape it, Reuters reports. Xi has pushed for his country’s “cyber sovereignty” while promoting “core socialist values” online. Chinese officials also promoted the idea that each country should choose its own Internet “governance model,” The Star says.
Drones for broadband: A U.K. company has begun using drones to build fiber broadband networks in remote areas, reports Computer Weekly. Openreach is using drones to lay fiber in remote areas of the Scottish Highlands, where river gorges have previously presented a challenge.
Encrypted chat busted: Dutch police have found a way to infiltrate IronChat, an encrypted chat service running on proprietary hardware, Gizmodo says. The police were able to read 258,000 messages on the service, which costs about US$1,700 for a six-month subscription. News reports suggest the encryption wasn’t as strong as the vendor may have claimed.
Saving the Web: World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee has been pushing a new Contract for the Web, in hopes of defining the responsibilities that governments, companies and citizens each have on the Web. Shortlist.com examines Continue reading
It's been a while since we last wrote about Layer 3/4 DDoS attacks on this blog. This is a good news - we've been quietly handling the daily onslaught of DDoS attacks. Since our last write-up, a handful of interesting L3/4 attacks have happened. Let's review them.
In April, John tweeted about a gigantic 942Gbps SYN flood:
It was a notable event for a couple of reasons.
First, it was really large. Previously, we've seen only amplification / reflection attacks at terabit scale. In those cases, the attacker doesn't actually have too much capacity. They need to bounce the traffic off other servers to generate a substantial load. This is different from typical "direct" style attacks, like SYN floods. In the SYN flood mentioned by John, all 942Gbps were coming directly from attacker-controlled machines.
Secondly, this attack was truly distributed. Normal SYN floods come from a small number of geographical locations. This one, was all over the globe, hitting all Cloudflare data centers:
Thirdly, the attack seem to be partially spoofed. While our analysis was not conclusive, we saw random, spoofed source IP addresses in the largest internet exchanges. The above Hilbert curve shows the source IP Continue reading
By teaming up to address key technical and organizational issues, information and operational security teams can improve the resiliency and safety of their infrastructure systems.
These are challenging times for Intel. Long – and still – the dominant chip maker in the datacenter with its battle-tested Xeon processors, the company is now seeing challenges everywhere. …
Intel Doubles Down On Doubled Up Xeons For HPC was written by Jeffrey Burt at .
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After publishing the Manual Work Is a Bug blog post, I got this feedback from Michele Chubirka explaining why automating changes in your network also increases network security:
Read more ...Debugging distributed systems with why-across-time provenance Whittaker et al., SoCC’18
This value is 17 here, and it shouldn’t be. Why did the get request return 17?
Sometimes the simplest questions can be the hardest to answer. As the opening sentence of this paper states:
Debugging distributed systems is hard.
The kind of why questions we’re interested in for this paper are questions of provenance. What are the causes of this output? Provenance has been studied in the context of relational databases and dataflow systems, but here we’re interested in general distributed systems. (Strictly, those where the behaviour of each node can be modelled by a deterministic state machine: non-deterministic behaviour is left to future work).
Relational databases have why-provenance, which sounds on the surface exactly like what we’re looking for.
Given a relational database, a query issued against the database, and a tuple in the output of the query, why-provenance explains why the output tuple was produced. That is, why -provenance produces the input tuples that, if passed through the relational operators of the query, would produce the output tuple in question.
One reason that won’t work in our distributed systems setting is that Continue reading
The countdown to the annual Supercomputing Conference has begun. As The Next Platform gears up to deliver in-depth analysis of this year’s most important HPC innovations, take a moment to plan your path at the show with some of our leading SC18 partners. …
What to See at Supercomputing 2018 was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .
On April 1st, 2018, we announced 1.1.1.1, the fastest public DNS resolver in the world ???. Today, we are launching the 1.1.1.1 mobile app to make it incredibly easy to use 1.1.1.1 on your phone.
Any time you are on a public internet connection people can see what sites you visit. Even worse, your Internet Service Provider is very possibly selling all of your browsing history to the highest bidder. We have a tool called 1.1.1.1 which makes it easy to get a faster, more private, Internet experience, but it’s historically been too complex for many people to use, particularly on mobile devices. Today, we’re launching an app you (and everyone you know) can use to use 1.1.1.1 every time your mobile phone connects to the Internet. It’s a free, it’s easy, download it now.
We launched 1.1.1.1 on April 1st. Frankly, we’ve been blown away by how many people actually made the switch. Changing your network settings is not easy, but if our traffic amount is any indication, many of you made the effort. Continue reading
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended the first World War. The 1918 ceasefire re-introduced a fragile peace that had collapsed when the world failed to defend common rules and international cooperation. International security and stability are as important now as they were a century ago.
That’s why French President Emmanuel Macron and leaders from around the world are about to gather in Paris for the first Paris Peace Forum. The forum will attempt to pave a way forward for a world that is shifting and changing faster than most of us can keep up with. That change and shift, and the speed of it is enabled by the Internet.
That is why the Internet Society is participating in the Forum.
I will be in Paris to speak on a panel about creating peace in cyberspace. Cybersecurity concerns across the world are real and justified and need to be addressed. We believe that the collaborative approach that helped to drive the growth of the Internet and allows it to thrive is essential for establishing cybersecurity.
The essence of a collaborative approach is that it allows stakeholders to create a shared vision for security.
The Shared Vision
At the Continue reading
Being at the forefront of high performance computing, as the oil and gas industry has been from the very beginning, also means always dealing with issues of power and cooling. …
Oil Immersion Cooling Cranks Up Oil Simulation HPC was written by Dan Olds at .
SDxCentral Weekly Wrap for Nov. 9, 2018: Cisco axes jobs; Verizon CEO Vestberg makes bold moves with restructuring; and more.
What’s in a name? NetApp says its HCI is really hybrid cloud infrastructure (not hyperconverged), but it sounds more like composable.
Xilinx is renown for its field programmable gate array (FPGA), which the company's founder invented. A purchase of Mellanox could give it additional products to sell into the data center.
Alibaba Group’s CEO said that cloud computing will be its “main business” in the future — following closely in Amazon’s footsteps.
