Cray’s Ever-Expanding Compute For HPC

With choice comes complexity, and the Cambrian explosion in compute options is only going to make this harder even if it is a much more satisfying intellectual and financial challenge. This added complexity is worth it because companies will be able to more closely align the hardware to the applications. This is why search engine giant Google has been driving compute diversity and why supercomputer maker Cray has been looking forward to it as well.

This expanding of the compute ecosystem is also necessary because big jumps in raw compute performance for general purpose processors are possible as they were …

Cray’s Ever-Expanding Compute For HPC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Is Facebook looking to build its own data center chips?

A job posting on Facebook has led to speculation that the company is building a team to design its own semiconductors, thus ending their reliance on Intel. If so, it would be another step in the trend of major firms building their own silicon.Bloomberg was the first to note a job opening, titled “Manager, ASIC Development,” that sought a manager to help build an "end-to-end SoC/ASIC, firmware and driver development organization." There is also an opening for an “ASIC & FPGA Design Engineer,” which seems an unusual position for a social network website to need.To read this article in full, please click here

Is Facebook looking to build its own data center chips?

A job posting on Facebook has led to speculation that the company is building a team to design its own semiconductors, thus ending their reliance on Intel. If so, it would be another step in the trend of major firms building their own silicon.Bloomberg was the first to note a job opening, titled “Manager, ASIC Development,” that sought a manager to help build an "end-to-end SoC/ASIC, firmware and driver development organization." There is also an opening for an “ASIC & FPGA Design Engineer,” which seems an unusual position for a social network website to need.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Cultivating an app-first mentality in enterprise network management

Today’s enterprise relies heavily on applications for just about every business function, making it critical for administrators to have full visibility into networks to better manage traffic and application usage. With MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) networks, this level of visibility is virtually impossible because those networks weren’t designed with an application-first mentality, but that is changing with the implementation of software-defined networks (SDN).Often, administrators don’t even know what apps are on their network or they know only what traffic comes in and out of their firewall/proxy servers. SDN, which replaces most network hardware with software-based controls, is providing transparency that administrators never had before, allowing them to steer application traffic to achieve the best performance.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Cultivating an app-first mentality in enterprise network management

Today’s enterprise relies heavily on applications for just about every business function, making it critical for administrators to have full visibility into networks to better manage traffic and application usage. With MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) networks, this level of visibility is virtually impossible because those networks weren’t designed with an application-first mentality, but that is changing with the implementation of software-defined networks (SDN).Often, administrators don’t even know what apps are on their network or they know only what traffic comes in and out of their firewall/proxy servers. SDN, which replaces most network hardware with software-based controls, is providing transparency that administrators never had before, allowing them to steer application traffic to achieve the best performance.To read this article in full, please click here

How White Box Networking is Channeling Trader Joe’s

2018 is a particularly good time to be in the disaggregated networking business. Truth is, it’s never been better – either for the vendors or for the enterprise network managers themselves. The market for network innovation has finally sorted itself out after a long wander through the desert of academic SDN piety, and the hardware that disaggregated Linux-based NOS software runs on is now world class – same ASICs and hardware the legacy guys use, probably even the same power cords if you look close enough.

So where does Trader Joe’s – a highly successful retail food store innovator in the US – possibly come into this equation? Two words: value proposition. While white box NOS vendors like Pica8 did not deliberately set out to emulate the basic business values of Trader Joe’s, it turns out that, well, we basically did.  The mapping is eerily similar.

Higher quality at lower cost? Check.

A focus on service and responsiveness? Double check.

Using the same product sources as their larger competitors but without brand-name labels? Triple check.

And, finally, having absolutely everything you need to make a great meal/network without burying you under unnecessary options that make your head spin? Quadruple Continue reading

How White Box Networking is Channeling Trader Joe’s

2018 is a particularly good time to be in the disaggregated networking business. Truth is, it’s never been better – either for the vendors or for the enterprise network managers themselves. The market for network innovation has finally sorted itself out after a long wander through the desert of academic SDN piety, and the hardware that disaggregated Linux-based NOS software runs on is now world class – same ASICs and hardware the legacy guys use, probably even the same power cords if you look close enough.

So where does Trader Joe’s – a highly successful retail food store innovator in the US – possibly come into this equation? Two words: value proposition. While white box NOS vendors like Pica8 did not deliberately set out to emulate the basic business values of Trader Joe’s, it turns out that, well, we basically did.  The mapping is eerily similar.

Higher quality at lower cost? Check.

A focus on service and responsiveness? Double check.

Using the same product sources as their larger competitors but without brand-name labels? Triple check.

And, finally, having absolutely everything you need to make a great meal/network without burying you under unnecessary options that make your head spin? Quadruple Continue reading

1 year and 3 months working at Cloudflare: How is it going so far?

1 year and 3 months working at Cloudflare: How is it going so far?

This post is inspired by a very good blog post from one of my colleague in the US, which I really appreciated as I was a newcomer to the company. It was great to see what it is like working for Cloudflare after one year and to learn from the lessons she had learnt.

I'll try to do the same in three parts. Beginning with how my on-boarding went, my first customer experiences and finally what is my day-to-day life at Cloudflare. These writings only reflect my personal feelings and thoughts. The experience is different for each and every newcomer to Cloudflare.

Chapter 1 - On-boarding, being impressed and filling the (big) knowledge gaps.


Before I joined Cloudflare, I was working as a Security Consultant in Paris, France. I never had the opportunity to move abroad to speak English (me.englishLevel = 0), I never had any reason to live outside of France and was at the same time looking for another Job. Perfect then!

When I saw the job posting, I immediately applied as I knew the company well, the mindset and the products Cloudflare provided. It took me 6 months to get the offer probably because Continue reading

Wouldn’t it be nice…if you could trust your device?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could trust that your device is secure, so that it isn’t leaking your private data, becoming a bot and attacking other users, or putting you at risk?

We think so too.

By using their buying power to influence the market, combined with forward-looking, smart policies and regulations, governments can help build an Internet of Things (IoT) we can trust. With over ten billion IoT devices, applications, and services already in use, and the number of connected devices forecasted to jump to over thirty-eight billion by 2020, ensuring that governments take the right actions now around IoT security is critical.

Governments have important choices to make now to help ensure that IoT consumers are secure, innovation can flourish, and we can all fully benefit from IoT.

We are pleased to release IoT Security for Policymakers, a discussion paper to help provide a solid foundation for policymakers and regulators as they address IoT security. In the paper, we highlight key issues and challenges of IoT security, along with guiding principles and recommendations. While many of IoT’s challenges are technical, some of the most pressing are social, economic, or legal. There are countless consumers with little Continue reading

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

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