Establishing Early Neural Network Standards

Today’s podcast episode of “The Interview” with The Next Platform will focus on an effort to standardize key neural network features to make development and innovation easier and more productive.

While it is still too early to standardize across major frameworks for training, for instance, portability for new architectures via a common file format is a critical first step toward more interoperability between frameworks and between training and inferencing tools.

To explore this, we are joined by Neil Trevett, Vice President of the Developer Ecosystem at Nvidia and President of the Khronos Group, an industry consortium focused on creating open …

Establishing Early Neural Network Standards was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Indigenous Connectivity Summit Participants Share Their Stories

Madeleine Redfern, the mayor of Iqaluit – the largest and only city in Nunavut, Canada – has a colorful way of describing how sparsely populated the territory is. “The seals outnumber the people.” With a population of just over 35,000 people spread out over an arctic 1,750,000 square kilometers, Internet access is a challenge. In fact, according to Redfern, her most favorited tweet was that she couldn’t tweet… because the connection was too slow.

Madeleine Redfern participated in the first ever Indigenous Connectivity Summit last November. She and other participants shared their experience and expertise to help close the connectivity gap in Indigenous communities. Many also sat down for brief interviews with the 1st-Mile Institute, a New Mexico nonprofit that has initiated a local “Broadband for All” program. The videos are now available to watch on the 1st-Mile Institute’s website.

You can also find the videos on the Internet Society’s Indigenet page, which includes resources from the Summit including the presentations, the policy brief Spectrum Approaches for Community Networks, and other ways to get involved!

The post Indigenous Connectivity Summit Participants Share Their Stories appeared first on Internet Society.

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.

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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

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