Bringing a New HPC File System to Bear

File systems have never been the flashiest segment of the IT space, which might explain why big shakeups and new entrants into the market don’t draw the attention they could.

Established vendors have rolled out offerings that primarily are based on GPFS or Lustre and enterprises and HPC organizations have embraced those products. However, changes in the IT landscape in recent years have convinced some companies and vendors to rethink file servers. Such changes as the rise of large-scale analytics and machine learning, the expansion of HPC into more mainstream enterprises and the growth of cloud storage all have brought …

Bringing a New HPC File System to Bear was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Welcome Salt Lake City and Get Ready for a Massive Expansion

Welcome Salt Lake City and Get Ready for a Massive Expansion

Welcome Salt Lake City and Get Ready for a Massive Expansion

We just turned up Salt Lake City, Utah — Cloudflare's 120th data center. Salt Lake holds a special place in Cloudflare's history. I grew up in the region and still have family there. Back in 2004, Lee Holloway and I lived just up into the mountains in Park City when we built Project Honey Pot, the open source project that inspired the original idea for Cloudflare.

Welcome Salt Lake City and Get Ready for a Massive Expansion

Salt Lake also holds a special place in the history of the Internet. The University of Utah, based there, was one of the original four Arpanet locations (along with UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and the Stanford Research Institute). The school also educated the founders of great technology companies like Silicon Graphics, Adobe, Atari, Netscape, and Pixar. Many were graduates of the computer graphics department lead by Professors Ivan Sutherland and David Evans.

Welcome Salt Lake City and Get Ready for a Massive Expansion

In 1980, when I was seven years old, my grandmother, who lived a few blocks from the University, gave me an Apple II+ for Christmas. I took to it like a duck to water. My mom enrolled in a continuing education computer course at the University of Utah teaching BASIC programming. I went with her to the classes. Unbeknownst to the Continue reading

Leverage the power of the mainframe to make sense of your IoT data

Companies today face incredible challenges around compliance, security and analytics, as their data lakes fill with invaluable information from ever more sensors. And tomorrow’s challenges will be no easier. As the digital age expands to cover all facets of our lives, more and more computing power will be necessary to process all of the data created.Take the explosion of Internet of Things (IoT) as an example. We have only sampled the benefits that the IoT can provide. In the words of Dan Mitchell, a retail analytics industry expert with SAS, IoT can be fundamentally described as “a network of connected physical objects embedded with sensors. IoT allows these devices to communicate, analyze, and share data about the physical world around us via networks and cloud-based software platforms.”To read this article in full, please click here

Leverage the power of the mainframe to make sense of your IoT data

Companies today face incredible challenges around compliance, security and analytics, as their data lakes fill with invaluable information from ever more sensors. And tomorrow’s challenges will be no easier. As the digital age expands to cover all facets of our lives, more and more computing power will be necessary to process all of the data created.Take the explosion of Internet of Things (IoT) as an example. We have only sampled the benefits that the IoT can provide. In the words of Dan Mitchell, a retail analytics industry expert with SAS, IoT can be fundamentally described as “a network of connected physical objects embedded with sensors. IoT allows these devices to communicate, analyze, and share data about the physical world around us via networks and cloud-based software platforms.”To read this article in full, please click here

Chipping Away At Technical Debt

We’re surrounded by technical debt every day. We have a mountain of it sitting in distribution closets and a yard full of it out behind the data center. We make compromises for budget reasons, for technology reasons, and for political reasons. We tell ourselves every time that this is the last time we’re giving in and the next time it’s going to be different. Yet we find ourselves staring at the landscape of technical debt time and time again. But how can we start chipping away at it?

Time Is On Your Side

You may think you don’t have any time to work on the technical debt problem. This is especially true if you don’t have the time due to fixing problems caused by your technical debt. The hours get longer and the effort goes up exponentially to get simple things done. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Every minute you spend trying to figure out where a link goes or a how a server is connected to the rest of the pod is a minute that should have been spent documenting it somewhere. In a text document, in a picture, or even on the back of a Continue reading

Impact of Intel and Micron ending their NAND partnership is negligible

Intel and Micron earlier this week announced an end to their long-term joint development partnership for 3D NAND memory. What does this mean for buyers of Intel SSDs? Turns out, not much — if anything.On the surface, it looks like a blow to Intel — which makes chips, not memory — but in fact, it has that base covered. Intel has a 300-mm fab in Dalian, China, that it began to convert to produce 3D NAND flash memory in 2015. With Dalian online, Intel simply didn’t need Micron any more.Intel and Micron will still partner on other things This is hardly a split between the two. The companies will complete development of their third-generation of 3D NAND flash technology, which will be delivered toward the end of this year.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: 4th-gen UI

Once every few decades, we experience a broad shift in how people interact with computers. Think about it. How long have you been relying on your mouse to click on the things you want to interact with? In many ways, the typical user interfaces model hasn’t changed much since 1984 but we’re finally in the midst of a major new shift.What I’m calling the fourth-gen user interface has arrived, and it will create a truly dramatic shift for users over the next few years. These new interfaces will leverage technologies like ubiquitous connected devices, location-based services, speech recognition, computer vision, biometrics and even augmented reality (AR).  This isn’t your dad’s computing environment.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Why we need to rethink transistors for the IoT

Innovators who make their living pioneering the ever-expanding internet of things always have their eyes open to detect trends and flaws before they ever surface in the mainstream. In today’s rapidly changing age, however, few innovators or tech investors have given sufficient attention to the question of the future of transistors as they relate to the IoT, and only the savviest, most forward-thinking analyst are beginning to understand that we need to rethink transistors entirely.So, what forthcoming changes to the IoT necessitate that we review the fundamental building block of modern electronics, on the back of which we’ve built a digital empire that spans the globe? A review of forthcoming changes to energy consumption show that transistors stand to yet again revolutionize how we work, socialize, and play – and that a failure to rethink them now could seriously cost us in the future.To read this article in full, please click here

Issue with VMware-Formatted Cumulus VX Vagrant Box

I recently had a need to revisit the use of Cumulus VX (the Cumulus Networks virtual appliance running Cumulus Linux) in a Vagrant environment, and I wanted to be sure to test what I was doing on multiple virtualization platforms. Via Vagrant Cloud, Cumulus distributes VirtualBox and Libvirt versions of Cumulus VX, and there is a slightly older version that also provides a VMware-formatted box. Unfortunately, there’s a simple error in the VMware-formatted box that prevents it from working. Here’s the fix.

The latest version (as of this writing) of Cumulus VX was 3.5.0, and for this version both VirtualBox-formatted and Libvirt-formatted boxes are provided. For a VMware-formatted box, the latest version is 3.2.0, which you can install with this command:

vagrant box add CumulusCommunity/cumulus-vx --box-version 3.2.0

When this Vagrant box is installed using the above command, what actually happens is something like this (at a high level):

  1. The *.box file for the specific box, platform, and version is downloaded. This .box file is nothing more than a TAR archive with specific files included (see here for more details).

  2. The *.box file is expanded into the ~/.vagrant.d/boxes directory Continue reading

Worth Reading: How Google ditched VPNs

Today, none of Google’s employee-facing applications are on a virtual private network. They all have public IP addresses. The company feels this approach, which it has dubbed BeyondCorp, is the “new cloud model,” for doing cloud security, asserted Neal Mueller, head of infrastructure product marketing at Google, who gave a presentation on this approach at the O’Reilly Security conference, held recently in New York. —Joab Jackson @ The New Stack

NOAA Weather Forecasts Stick With CPUs, Keep An Eye On GPUs

When it comes to supercomputing, more is almost always better. More data and more compute – and more bandwidth to link the two – almost always result in a better set of models, whether they are descriptive or predictive. This has certainly been the case in weather forecasting, where the appetite for capacity to support more complex models of the atmosphere and the oceans and the integration of models running across different (and always increasing) resolutions never abates.

This is certainly the case with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which does weather and climate forecasting on a regional, national, …

NOAA Weather Forecasts Stick With CPUs, Keep An Eye On GPUs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Intel, Nervana Shed Light on Deep Learning Chip Architecture

Almost two years after the acquisition by Intel, the deep learning chip architecture from startup Nervana Systems will finally be moving from its codenamed “Lake Crest” status to an actual product.

In that time, Nvidia, which owns the deep learning training market by a long shot, has had time to firm up its commitment to this expanding (if not overhyped in terms of overall industry dollar figures) market with new deep learning-tuned GPUs and appliances on the horizon as well as software tweaks to make training at scale more robust. In other words, even with solid technology at a reasonable …

Intel, Nervana Shed Light on Deep Learning Chip Architecture was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

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