Cray reunites with AMD for new supercomputers

Cray owes its survival to AMD. The company was bought by SGI in 1996, hollowed out, and spun off in 2000 with very little left. SGI had taken most of the talent and IP.Desperate for a win, Cray began working with Sandia National Labs in 2002 to build a supercomputer based on x86 technology. Intel at the time was dismissive of 64-bit x86 and was promoting Itanium. AMD had other plans and was in the process of developing Athlon for desktops and Opteron for servers.[ Learn how server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency and find out what the top 10 fastest supercomputers are. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] The project came to be known as Red Storm, starting with single-core Opterons and upgrading to dual- and quad-core CPUs as they hit the market. Red Storm ranked as high as number two on the Top 500 list of supercomputers. More important, it served as the basis for the XT3 line of supercomputers that revived Cray as a player in that field, and lit a fire under Intel as well.To read this article in full, please click here

Cray reunites with AMD for new supercomputers

Cray owes its survival to AMD. The company was bought by SGI in 1996, hollowed out, and spun off in 2000 with very little left. SGI had taken most of the talent and IP.Desperate for a win, Cray began working with Sandia National Labs in 2002 to build a supercomputer based on x86 technology. Intel at the time was dismissive of 64-bit x86 and was promoting Itanium. AMD had other plans and was in the process of developing Athlon for desktops and Opteron for servers.[ Learn how server disaggregation can boost data center efficiency and find out what the top 10 fastest supercomputers are. | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] The project came to be known as Red Storm, starting with single-core Opterons and upgrading to dual- and quad-core CPUs as they hit the market. Red Storm ranked as high as number two on the Top 500 list of supercomputers. More important, it served as the basis for the XT3 line of supercomputers that revived Cray as a player in that field, and lit a fire under Intel as well.To read this article in full, please click here

Worth Reading: White box switching

White box switching seems to be all the networking hype. For some in-depth research, check out this podcast from packet pushers about ATT making its move into white box switching. Cisco is also committed to offering a decoupled version of IOS-XR from Cisco hardware to enable running their NOS on OCP (open compute project) compliant hardware aka “white box switching.” Fascinating stuff, but what’s the big deal? Well, I’m going to try and make a comparison. —Javi Isolis

PQ 146: Practical Python For Deploying BFD

Today on the Priority Queue, some practical Python for network engineers.

My guest is Billy Downing, and we walk through an example of how to use Python to deploy BFD, or Bidirectional Forwarding Detection.

We start by describing BFD and how it works, and then explore how to use Python to make it go in your network.

Billy is a data center engineer who works for the Department of Defense. Check out his blog at NetworkTechStudy.com.

Show Links:

NetworkTechStudy.com – Billy Downing’s blog

Learning Python from a Network Engineer’s Perspective – NetworkTechStudy.com

Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) – IETF

The post PQ 146: Practical Python For Deploying BFD appeared first on Packet Pushers.

BrandPost: Evolution to SDN, NFV, and Intelligent Automation

Mobile devices. The data center. The WAN. All are players in the move to a software-defined industry that gives network operators more control, programmability and responsiveness to business needs.The momentum behind the shift to Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) has seen organizations embrace the benefits and advantages offered by software and virtualization—benefits that center around agility, flexibility, and adaptability. This shift significantly changes how networks are built and operated, as well as how services are created and delivered. An increasingly critical component of any network, software helps meet evolving end-user demands for greater programmability and openness.To read this article in full, please click here

Scalable, Flexible Networking Included in Docker Enterprise Edition 2.0

 

 

Docker EE Calico

Docker believes in making technology easy to use and accessible and that approach also extends to our enterprise-ready container platform. That means providing out-of-the-box integrations to key extensions of the platform that enterprise organizations require, but also making it possible to swap these built-in solutions with other tools as desired.

Docker Enterprise Edition 2.0, integrates Kubernetes to our platform and delivers the only Kubernetes platform that can be deployed across multiple clouds and multiple operating systems. As part of this release, we have included Project Calico by Tigera as the “batteries included” Kubernetes CNI plug-in for a highly scalable, industry-leading networking and routing solution.

Why Project Calico?

While we support our customers using their preferred CNI plug-in, we chose to integrate Project Calico for our built-in solution because it aligns well with our design objectives for Docker EE 2.0:

    • Choice & Flexibility for Different Deployment Models: Enterprise organizations are largely pursuing hybrid and multi-cloud strategies and we want to ensure that you have the flexibility to operate Docker EE in any environment. The Tigera team behind Project Calico has worked closely with all the major cloud providers to ensure that Calico works well with their Continue reading

Why Can’t We All Use Provider-Independent IPv6 Addresses?

Here’s another back-to-the-fundamentals question I received a while ago when discussing IPv6 multihoming challenges:

I was wondering why enterprise can’t have dedicated block of IPv6 address and ISPs route the traffic to it. Enterprise shall select the ISP's based on the routing and preferences configured?

Let’s try to analyze where the problem might be. First the no-brainers:

Read more ...

Darwin: a genomics co-processor provides up to 15,000x acceleration on long read assembly

Darwin: a genomics co-processor provides up to 15,000x acceleration on long read assembly Turakhia et al., ASPLOS’18

With the slow demise of Moore’s law, hardware accelerators are needed to meet the rapidly growing computational requirements of X.

For this paper, X = genomics, and genomic data is certainly growing fast: doubling every 7 months and on track to surpass YouTube and Twitter by 2025. Rack-size machines can sequence 50 genomes a day, portable sequencers require several days per genome. Third-generation sequencing technologies are now available which produce much longer reads of contiguous DNA – on the order of tens of kilobases compared to only a few hundred bases with the previous generations of technology.

For personalized medicine, long reads are superior in identifying structural variants i.e. large insertions, deletions and re-arrangements in the genome spanning kilobases or more which are sometimes associated with diseases; for haplotype phasing, to distinguish mutations on maternal vs paternal chromosomes; and for resolving highly repetitive regions in the genome.

The long read technology comes with a drawback though – high error rates in sequencing of between 15%-40%. The errors are corrected using computational methods ‘that can be orders of magnitude slower than Continue reading

FreeZTP: Zero-Touch Provisioning for Cisco Catalyst

Configuring Cisco IOS switches the “old-fashioned” way can be a time consuming and tedious task. Pull out the serial cable and USB adapter, connect your laptop to the switch, and sit on the cold raised floor banging away at the keyboard until you have remote access and can escape to a more terran-friendly environment. There […]

Resumes: “Begin with the End in Mind” – Musings from the FishBowl

I feel like I should go to some “Resume PTSD” meetings.. are there such things?  LOL.  I can imagine a dark room like they have in the movies for 12 step meetings.  Some podium up in the front where everyone has to tell their story.  The lead nods to me that it is my turn and I go up to the podium….

“Hello, my name is Fish, and I have Resume PTSD.  It all started for me one evening when I was 16 years old. I remember was in the family room of our house in Princeton, New Jersey… it was deep winter out so we had the fire in the fireplace going.  Dad walked across the room to sit by the fire… he put before him 2 stacks of resumes – one stack for people applying to be a Vice President and another stack for people applying to be a Lobby Ambassador and Admin.  I watched in appropriate 16 year old horror as he glanced at each piece of paper and within 5-10 seconds he decided if it went in the pile for definitely interview, or the pile for review resume again Continue reading

VMware’s Platform Can Only Reflect The Enterprise Datacenter

When a company has 500,000 enterprise customers that are paying for perpetual licenses and support on systems software – this is an absolutely enormous base by corporate standards, and a retro licensing model straight from the 1980s and 1990s – what does it do for an encore?

That’s a very good question, and for now the answer for VMware seems to be to sell virtual storage and virtual networking networking to that vast base of virtual compute customers, and take wheelbarrows full of money to the bank on behalf of parent Dell Technologies. Virtualization took root during the Great Recession …

VMware’s Platform Can Only Reflect The Enterprise Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Self-hosted videos with HLS

Note

This article was first published on Exoscale blog with some minor modifications.

Hosting videos on YouTube is convenient for several reasons: pretty good player, free bandwidth, mobile-friendly, network effect and, at your discretion, no ads.1 On the other hand, this is one of the less privacy-friendly solution. Most other providers share the same characteristics—except the ability to disable ads for free.

With the <video> tag, self-hosting a video is simple:2

<video controls>
  <source src="../videos/big_buck_bunny.webm" type="video/webm">
  <source src="../videos/big_buck_bunny.mp4" type="video/mp4">
</video>

However, while it is possible to provide a different videos depending on the screen width, adapting the video to the available bandwidth is trickier. There are two solutions:

They are both adaptive bitrate streaming protocols: the video is sliced in small segments and made available at a variety of different bitrates. Depending on current network conditions, the player automatically selects the appropriate bitrate to download the next segment.

HLS was initially implemented by Apple but is now also supported Continue reading

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