Can Vector Supercomputing Be Revived?

Seymour Cray loved vector supercomputers, and made the second part of that term a household word because of it. NEC, the last of the pure vector supercomputer makers, is so excited about its new “Aurora” SX-10+ vector processor and the “Tsubasa” supercomputer that will use it that it forgot to announce the processor to the world when it previewed the system this week.

Here at The Next Platform, we easily forgive such putting of carts before horses – so long as someone eventually explains the horse to us before the cart starts shipping for real. NEC is expected to …

Can Vector Supercomputing Be Revived? was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

WPA2 and Infineon

The recent bug in WPA2 has a worst case outcome that is the same as using a wifi without a password: People can sniff, maybe inject… it’s not great but you connect to open wifi at Starbucks anyway, and you’re fine with that because you visit sites with HTTPS and SSH. Eventually your client will get a fix too, so the whole thing is pretty “meh”.

But there’s a reason I call it “WPA2 bug” and I call the recent issue with Infineon key generation “the Infineon disaster”. It’s much bigger. It seems like the whole of Estonia needs to re-issue ID cards, and several years worth of PC-, smartcard-, Yubikey, and other production have been generating bad keys. And these keys will stick around.

From now until forever when you generate, use, or accept RSA keys you have to check for these weak keys. I assume OpenSSH will if it hasn’t already.

But then what? It’s not like servers can just reject these keys, or it’ll lock people out. And it’s not clear that an adversary even has your public key for SSH. And you can’t crack the key if you don’t have the public half. Maybe a Continue reading

AWS First Up With Volta GPUs In The Cloud

It must be tough for the hyperscalers that are expanding into public cloud and the public cloud builders that also use their datacenters to run their own businesses to decide whether to hoard all of the new technologies that they can get their hands on for their own benefit, or to make money selling that capacity to others.

For any new, and usually constrained, kind of capacity, such as shiny new “Skylake” Xeon SP processors from Intel or “Volta” Tesla GPU accelerators from Nvidia, it has to be a hard call for Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba to …

AWS First Up With Volta GPUs In The Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

IBM cranks up flash storage for greater capacity and speed

All-flash storage has become increasingly popular in data centers as a means of much faster data access than traditional hard disk, but its growth has been impeded by cost and storage density. There was too much of the former and too little of the latter.Every memory, storage and server vendor is working full out to address that issue, and it has turned into quite an arms race, which benefits the customer. So much so that Gartner predicts that within the next 12 months, solid-state arrays will improve in performance by a factor of 10 while doubling in density and cost-effectiveness.Also on Network World: After virtualization and cloud, what’s left on premises? IBM has just made its contribution to that growth. It has announced advances in flash storage that it claims will provide a three-fold increase in density in the same physical space for its FlashSystem 900 flash arrays, while reducing data capacity costs by 60 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Reimagining IT networks with reconfigurable computing solutions

reimagine /riːɪˈmadʒɪn/To reinterpret something imaginatively – in other words, in a creative and innovative way The word “reimagine” is one of those words loved by marketing people and often loathed by engineers. But, in the context of this column, I think it is appropriate. The word “reimagine” should be close to every engineer’s heart, as it is at the essence of what we all love: solving problems in a creative and innovative way.Over the last decade or two, we have witnessed a great deal of creativity and innovation in how we build networks and deliver communication services. We have witnessed the rise of Ethernet and IP and how these two protocols laid the foundation for a common networking paradigm that we take for granted today. We have witnessed the rise of the IP-based internet and how every imaginable service has been dramatically affected. We have witnessed the rise of cloud computing and how this has, in a sense, completed the disruption that the introduction of the internet first promised.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Reimagining IT networks with reconfigurable computing solutions

reimagine /riːɪˈmadʒɪn/To reinterpret something imaginatively – in other words, in a creative and innovative way The word “reimagine” is one of those words loved by marketing people and often loathed by engineers. But, in the context of this column, I think it is appropriate. The word “reimagine” should be close to every engineer’s heart, as it is at the essence of what we all love: solving problems in a creative and innovative way.Over the last decade or two, we have witnessed a great deal of creativity and innovation in how we build networks and deliver communication services. We have witnessed the rise of Ethernet and IP and how these two protocols laid the foundation for a common networking paradigm that we take for granted today. We have witnessed the rise of the IP-based internet and how every imaginable service has been dramatically affected. We have witnessed the rise of cloud computing and how this has, in a sense, completed the disruption that the introduction of the internet first promised.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Reimagining IT networks with reconfigurable computing solutions

reimagine /riːɪˈmadʒɪn/To reinterpret something imaginatively – in other words, in a creative and innovative way The word “reimagine” is one of those words loved by marketing people and often loathed by engineers. But, in the context of this column, I think it is appropriate. The word “reimagine” should be close to every engineer’s heart, as it is at the essence of what we all love: solving problems in a creative and innovative way.Over the last decade or two, we have witnessed a great deal of creativity and innovation in how we build networks and deliver communication services. We have witnessed the rise of Ethernet and IP and how these two protocols laid the foundation for a common networking paradigm that we take for granted today. We have witnessed the rise of the IP-based internet and how every imaginable service has been dramatically affected. We have witnessed the rise of cloud computing and how this has, in a sense, completed the disruption that the introduction of the internet first promised.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Using Google Cloud Platform to Analyze Cloudflare Logs

We’re excited to announce that we now offer deep insights into your domain’s web traffic, working with Google Cloud Platform (GCP). While Cloudflare Enterprise customers always have had access to their logs, they previously had to rely on their own tools to process them, adding extra complexity and cost.

Cloudflare logs provide real time insight into traffic, malicious activity, attack incidents, and infrastructure health checks. The output is used to help customers adjust their settings, manage costs and resources, and plan for expansion.

Working with Google, we created an end-to-end solution that allows customers to retrieve Cloudflare access logs, store and process data in a simple way. GCP components such as Google Storage, Cloud Function, BigQuery and Data Studio come together to make this possible.

One of the biggest challenges of data analysis is to store and process large volume of data within a short time period while avoiding high costs. GCP Storage and BigQuery easily address these challenges.

Cloudflare customers can decide if they wish to obtain and process data from Cloudflare access logs on demand or on a regular basis. The full solution is described in this Knowledge Base article. Initial setup takes no more than 30 minutes Continue reading

Several on KRACK

Three articles of interest on the new WiFi KRACK—

This is not a crypto bug but a protocol bug (a pretty obvious and trivial protocol bug). When a client connects to the network, the access-point will at some point send a random “key” data to use for encryption. Because this packet may be lost in transmission, it can be repeated many times. What the hacker does is just repeatedly sends this packet, potentially hours later. Each time it does so, it resets the “keystream” back to the starting conditions. The obvious patch that device vendors will make is to only accept the first such packet it receives, ignore all the duplicates. —Robert Graham @Errata Security

So this is essentially a replay attack—something that is not taken seriously enough in the security world, by and large.

Researchers this week published information about a newfound, serious weakness in WPA2 — the security standard that protects all modern Wi-Fi networks. What follows is a short rundown on what exactly is at stake here, who’s most at-risk from this vulnerability, and what organizations and individuals can do about it. —Krebs on Security

And, finally, an article on protecting your network from KRACK—

Wi-Fi is Continue reading

Finnish Railways and Accenture Partner to Modernize Key Transportation Apps  

VR Group is the state-owned company that runs Finnish Railways, and provides 82 million passenger train rides and transports 36 million tons of goods per year. The 150+ year old transportation business is broken into separate divisions, each with their own technology departments. Finnish Railways does not have an in-house development team, so each division leverages external vendors and partners for their application development needs.

On Day 2 of DockerCon Europe, Markus Niskanen, Integration Manager at VR Group, and Oscar Renalias, Solutions Architect at Accenture presented their story on how they worked together to modernize critical business applications for Finnish Railways, including the reservation and commuter applications.

Partnership Drives Faster Results

Finnish Railways began working with Accenture, a long-time partner, to design a new common application platform based on Docker Enterprise Edition (EE). Leveraging Accenture’s Container Migration Factory, Finnish Railways had access to hundreds of Docker-trained Accenture architects which meant that this project could be delivered more efficiently. For example, Accenture has customized Terraform scripts that set up a Docker EE environment in AWS in about 25 minutes.

They started with the old reservation system which was running on mainframe and a legacy commuter service application. They rewrote these applications with microservices Continue reading

Tempered Networks extends Bring Your Own Network across the enterprise

Remember when Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) was all the rage? That’s the concept of workers being able to bring their own mobile phones and tablets into the workplace and use them for business-related functions. That quickly evolved into bring your own applications, where workers or lines of business would go get their own apps via the cloud.Also on Network World: 7 must-have network tools So, what else can non-technical people go get on their own? How about a network? That may seem a bit farfetched, as I’ve never seen an application developer bring a router into the office. But that’s exactly what Tempered Networks is enabling with the introduction of Bring Your Own Network (BYON). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Tempered Networks extends Bring Your Own Network across the enterprise

Remember when Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) was all the rage? That’s the concept of workers being able to bring their own mobile phones and tablets into the workplace and use them for business-related functions. That quickly evolved into bring your own applications, where workers or lines of business would go get their own apps via the cloud.Also on Network World: 7 must-have network tools So, what else can non-technical people go get on their own? How about a network? That may seem a bit farfetched, as I’ve never seen an application developer bring a router into the office. But that’s exactly what Tempered Networks is enabling with the introduction of Bring Your Own Network (BYON). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cumulus Networks inducted into JPMorgan Chase Hall of Innovation

Roll out the red carpet and get your acceptance speech ready — no, Rocket Turtle hasn’t won an Oscar (yet), but we do have some exciting news. Cumulus Networks is happy to announce that we have been inducted into the JPMorgan Chase Hall of Innovation, which recognizes select emerging tech companies for their innovation, business value and disruptive nature. The Hall of Innovation Award was presented at the 9th Annual J.P. Morgan Technology Innovation Symposium in Menlo Park, California.

Cumulus Networks has received this honor after providing JPMorgan Chase with our NOS Cumulus Linux. In fact, Cumulus Networks is currently the networking standard for Gaia, JPMorgan Chase’s private cloud, and is also pursuing other use cases within the firm. Matthew Liste, Head of Cloud Engineering, stated that “Cumulus Networks has helped the firm reduce capital expenditures, optimize data center network costs, and bring infrastructure to the market faster.” That’s the power of web-scale networking!

When asked for comment about our partnership with JPMorgan Chase, our fearless leader and CEO Josh Leslie had this to say: “For a company with the size and reputation of JPMorgan Chase, it is critical that the network operates with efficiency to keep the Continue reading

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