CCIE Collaboration Blueprint Changes and Collab. 2.0 Video Release Dates: As Explained by Rohit Pardasani

Cisco has announced that the CCIE Collaboration Lab blue print is changing from version 1.0 to version 2.0. The new blueprint goes live on July 23, 2018.
As expected, the lab will not have any physical devices, everything will be virtualized. The phones (8845), being the only physical devices, will be remotely controlled, students will not have them on their desk anymore.
Besides the phones, students will also have remote control of Spark, Jabber and the Cisco Meeting App.

Cisco also announced several new products and solutions, such as the Cisco Expressway Series, Cisco Meeting Server, Cisco Spark Hybrid Services, Cisco Unified Communications Mobile and Remote Access, and Cisco Cloud Services Router (CSR) 1000V. New topics such as APIs have also been added to ensure that CCIE Collaboration certified engineers have the knowledge and skills needed to satisfy dynamic requirements in customers’ collaboration environments today.

The traditional UC products are using version 12 (UCM/IMP/Unity Connection) and 11.6 in the case of CCX. All CCIE Collaboration v2.0 lab exam candidates will be provided a headset for questions that require audio verifications.

The new lab exam curriculum comprises seven domains. The new segmentation into these seven domains improves Continue reading

Intel launches new Xeon processor aimed at edge computing

Intel has launched its brand-new lineup of Xeon processors designed specifically for edge computing needs, where space, heat, and power are all of greater concern than in a traditional data center design.The Xeon D-2100 processors are the successor to the 1000-D series that Intel introduced last year. They are high-powered SoCs with anywhere from four to 18 Skylake-generation cores and sport the full range of Skylake features, including VT-X/VT-d for virtualization, RAS features and the entire TXT, AVX-512, TSX Instruction sets.Also read: What is edge computing and how it’s changing the network The platform supports up to 512 GB of memory, up to 32 PCI Express 3.0 lanes and up to 20 Flexible High Speed I/O. TDP ranges from 60 to 100 watts, slightly lower than the traditional Xeon design. All told, there are six processors in the Xeon D-2100 family, ranging from four cores to 18 and from 2.3Ghz to 2.8Ghz in speed.To read this article in full, please click here

Intel launches new Xeon processor aimed at edge computing

Intel has launched its brand-new lineup of Xeon processors designed specifically for edge computing needs, where space, heat, and power are all of greater concern than in a traditional data center design.The Xeon D-2100 processors are the successor to the 1000-D series that Intel introduced last year. They are high-powered SoCs with anywhere from four to 18 Skylake-generation cores and sport the full range of Skylake features, including VT-X/VT-d for virtualization, RAS features and the entire TXT, AVX-512, TSX Instruction sets.Also read: What is edge computing and how it’s changing the network The platform supports up to 512 GB of memory, up to 32 PCI Express 3.0 lanes and up to 20 Flexible High Speed I/O. TDP ranges from 60 to 100 watts, slightly lower than the traditional Xeon design. All told, there are six processors in the Xeon D-2100 family, ranging from four cores to 18 and from 2.3Ghz to 2.8Ghz in speed.To read this article in full, please click here

Workshop on Binary Analysis Research (BAR) 2018 at NDSS on 18 February

Binary analysis refers to the process where human analysts and/or automated systems scrutinize the underlying code in software to discover, exploit, and defend against malice and vulnerabilities, oftentimes without access to source code. Through protecting legacy software deployed in all types of devices and platforms in the modern world, binary analysis techniques are becoming more and more critical in making our everyday life and our society more secure.

A Workshop on Binary Analysis Research (BAR) will be co-located with the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), and held in San Diego, CA, USA, on February 18, 2018.

The Workshop aims to provide an interaction point for researchers doing work in binary program analysis, with half of the workshop dedicated to traditional paper sessions and the other half to a roundtable discussion among researchers, implementers, and end-users of binary analysis techniques. BAR has attracted attention of many researchers, especially tool and framework authors, who actively work to create cutting-edge techniques and build powerful tools. Here we are happy to announce that eight high-quality academic papers have been accepted to appear in the paper sessions of the workshop, with presenters from both academia and industry. Researchers and authors of several Continue reading

Happy Valentine’s Day! Modernized infrastructure that I love

Today is Valentine’s Day, and that means showing appreciation to the people you love. I love my kids; my cats; my new puppy, Bodhi; and most of all my wonderful and amazing wife, Christine. She’s a kind, warm and loving person who has been fighting a rare illness called CVID for the past few years and still keeps a smile on her face and stops to smell the roses — something I’m not very good at.I would also like to use this Valentine’s Day to show appreciation for cool infrastructure innovation because the new stuff is becoming super important.To read this article in full, please click here

Happy Valentine’s Day! Modernized infrastructure that I love

Today is Valentine’s Day, and that means showing appreciation to the people you love. I love my kids; my cats; my new puppy, Bodhi; and most of all my wonderful and amazing wife, Christine. She’s a kind, warm and loving person who has been fighting a rare illness called CVID for the past few years and still keeps a smile on her face and stops to smell the roses — something I’m not very good at.I would also like to use this Valentine’s Day to show appreciation for cool infrastructure innovation because the new stuff is becoming super important.To read this article in full, please click here

Cloudflare ♥ Open Source: upgrade to Pro Plan on the house

Cloudflare ♥ Open Source: upgrade to Pro Plan on the house

Happy Valentine's Day, Internet!

There’s a special place in our heart for all the open source projects that support the Internet and improve the lives of everyone in the developer community, and today seems like an appropriate time to express the gratitude we have for the non-profit / volunteer-run projects that hold everything together.

Cloudflare uses a lot of open source software and also contributes to open source. Informally, Cloudflare has already been upgrading the plans of certain eligible open source projects that have reached out to us or that we have interfaced with. Here are some of the projects whose landing pages are already protected by Cloudflare.

Cloudflare ♥ Open Source: upgrade to Pro Plan on the house
A subset of open source projects on Cloudflare. See more >>

To really pay the goodwill forward, we want to make this opportunity common knowledge in the developer community. In 2018, we intend to provide free Cloudflare Pro Plan upgrades to eligible open source projects (subject to a case-by-case evaluation) that:

  1. provide engineering tools or resources to the developer community; and
  2. are volunteer-run or working on a non-profit basis.

Programmable Networks Train Neural Nets Faster

When it comes to machine learning training, people tend to focus on the compute. We always want to know if the training is being done on specialized parallel X86 devices, like Intel’s Xeon Phi, or on massively parallel GPU devices, like Nvidia’s “Pascal” and “Volta” accelerators, or even on custom devices from the likes of Nervana Systems (now part of Intel), Wave Systems, Graphcore, Google, or Fujitsu.

But as is the case with other kinds of high performance computing, the network matters when it comes to machine learning, and it can be the differentiating

Programmable Networks Train Neural Nets Faster was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Looking Back: The Evolution of HPC Power, Efficiency and Reliability

On today’s podcast episode of “The Interview” with The Next Platform, we talk about exascale power and resiliency by way of a historical overview of architectures with long-time HPC researcher, Dr. Robert Fowler.

Fowler’s career in HPC began at his alma mater, Harvard in the early seventies with scientific codes and expanded across the decades to include roles at several universities, including the University of Washington, the University of Rochester, Rice University, and most recently, RENCI at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where he spearheads high performance computing initiatives and projects, including one we will

Looking Back: The Evolution of HPC Power, Efficiency and Reliability was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

A Look at What’s in Store for China’s Tianhe-2A Supercomputer

The field of competitors looking to bring exascale-capable computers to the market is a somewhat crowded one, but the United States and China continue to be the ones that most eyes are on.

It’s a clash of an established global superpower and another one on the rise, and one that that envelopes a struggle for economic, commercial and military advantages and a healthy dose of national pride. And because of these two countries, the future of exascale computing – which to a large extent to this point has been more about discussion, theory and promise – will come into sharper

A Look at What’s in Store for China’s Tianhe-2A Supercomputer was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.