The DNS Negative Cache

Considering the DNS query chain—

  • A host queries a local recursive server to find out about banana.example
  • The server queries the root server, then recursively the authoritative server, looking for this domain name
  • banana.example does not exist

There are two possible responses in this chain of queries, actually. .example might not exist at all. In this case, the root server will return a server not found error. On the other hand, .example might exist, but banana.example might not exist; in this case, the authoritative server is going to return an NXDOMAIN record indicating the subdomain does not exist.

Assume another hosts, a few moments later, also queries for banana.example. Should the recursive server request the same information all over again for this second query? It will unless it caches the failure of the first query—this is the negative cache. This negative cache reduces load on the overall system, but it can also be considered a bug.

Take, for instance, the case where you set up a new server, assign it banana.example, jump to a host and try to connect to the new server before the new DNS information has been propagated through the system. On Continue reading

A First Look At IBM’s Power9 ZZ Systems

The HPC crowd got a little taste of the IBM’s “Nimbus” Power9 processors for scale out systems, juiced by Nvidia “Volta” Tesla GPU accelerators, last December with the Power AC922 system that is the basis of the “Summit” and “Sierra” pre-exascale supercomputers being built by Big Blue for the US Department of Energy.

Now, IBM’s enterprise customers that use more standard iron in their clusters, and who predominantly have CPU-only setups rather than adding in GPUs or FPGAs and who need a lot more local storage, are getting more of a Power9 meal with the launch of six new machines

A First Look At IBM’s Power9 ZZ Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Even at the Edge, Scale is the Real Challenge

Neural networks live on data and rely on computational firepower to help them take in that data, train on it and learn from it. The challenge increasingly is ensuring there is enough computational power to keep up with the massive amounts of data that is being generated today and the rising demands from modern neural networks for speed and accuracy in consuming the data and training on datasets that continue to grow in size.

These challenges can be seen playing out in the fast-growing autonomous vehicle market, where pure-play companies like Waymo – born from Google’s self-driving car initiative –

Even at the Edge, Scale is the Real Challenge was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Sponsored Post: Triplebyte, Exoscale, Symbiont, Loupe, Etleap, Aerospike, Scalyr, Domino Data Lab, MemSQL

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  • Symbiont is a New York-based financial technology company building new kinds of computer networks to connect independent financial institutions together and allow them to share business logic and data in real time. This involves developing a distributed system which is also decentralized, and which allows for the creation of smart contracts, self-executing cryptographic agreements among counterparties. To do so, we're using a lot of techniques in blockchain technology, as well as those from traditional distributed systems, programming language design and cryptography. We are hiring for a number of roles, from entry-level to expert, including Haskell Backend Engineer, Database Engineer, Product Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), Programming Language Engineer and SecOps Engineer. To find out more, just e-mail us your resume

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Fun and Informative Events

  • 5 Signs You’ve Outgrown DynamoDB. Companies often select a database that seems to Continue reading

Demand for managed SD-WAN services skyrockets

Demand for SD-WAN delivered as a managed service is exploding as customers see the benefits that SD-WAN can bring to their distributed organizations.For example, communications service providers (CSPs) such as Verizon, NTT, and BT all report strong demand for SD-WAN services. Plus, hundreds of other CSPs, cable providers (e.g. Comcast), managed service providers (MSPs), and system integrators have recently deployed new SD-WAN services.Also on Network World: SD-WAN: What is it and why you’ll use it one day | How to make the transition to SD-WAN We also see that managed SD-WAN revenues are growing rapidly as they displace traditional managed WAN services (e.g. private lines and MPLS) — an addressable market of over $40 billion in business services.To read this article in full, please click here

Demand for managed SD-WAN services skyrockets

Demand for SD-WAN delivered as a managed service is exploding as customers see the benefits that SD-WAN can bring to their distributed organizations.For example, communications service providers (CSPs) such as Verizon, NTT, and BT all report strong demand for SD-WAN services. Plus, hundreds of other CSPs, cable providers (e.g. Comcast), managed service providers (MSPs), and system integrators have recently deployed new SD-WAN services.Also on Network World: SD-WAN: What is it and why you’ll use it one day | How to make the transition to SD-WAN We also see that managed SD-WAN revenues are growing rapidly as they displace traditional managed WAN services (e.g. private lines and MPLS) — an addressable market of over $40 billion in business services.To read this article in full, please click here

Delivering Predictive Outcomes with Superhuman Knowledge

Massive data growth and advances in acceleration technologies are pushing modern computing capabilities to unprecedented levels and changing the face of entire industries.

Today’s organizations are quickly realizing that the more data they have the more they can learn, and powerful new techniques like artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning are helping them convert that data into actionable intelligence that can transform nearly every aspect of their business. NVIDIA GPUs and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) high performance computing (HPC) platforms are accelerating these capabilities and helping organizations arrive at deeper insights, enable dynamic correlation, and deliver predictive outcomes with superhuman

Delivering Predictive Outcomes with Superhuman Knowledge was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.