Found this Douglas Adams quote in The Signal and the Noise (a must-read book):
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair
I’ll leave to your imagination how this relates to stretched VLANs, ACI, NSX, VSAN, SD-WAN and a few other technologies.
If GPU acceleration had not been conceived of by academics and researchers at companies like Nvidia more than a decade ago, how much richer would Intel be today? How many more datacenters would have had to be expanded or built? Would HPC have stretched to try to reach exascale, and would machine learning have fulfilled the long-sought promise of artificial intelligence, or at least something that looks like it?
These are big questions, and relevant ones, as Nvidia’s datacenter business has just broken through the $2 billion run rate barrier. With something on the order of a 10X speedup across …
Nvidia Breaks $2 Billion Datacenter Run Rate was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The company says it plans to evolve Swarm but hasn't provided any details.
Telstra and Ericsson complete 5G data call; SoftBank increases stake in Sprint; Edgecore Networks contributes hardware for white box packet transponder to TIP.
Much of the quantum computing hype of the last few years has centered on D-Wave, which has installed a number of functional systems and is hard at work making quantum programming more practical.
Smaller companies like Rigetti Computing are gaining traction as well, but all the while, in the background, IBM has been steadily furthering quantum computing work that kicked off at IBM Research in the mid-1970s with the introduction of the quantum information concept by Charlie Bennett.
Since those early days, IBM has hit some important milestones on the road to quantum computing, including demonstrating the first quantum …
IBM Bolsters Quantum Capability, Emphasizes Device Differentiation was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
This is targeted to the data center use case.
The company's SD-WAN service is powered by Cisco Meraki.
Hey, it's HighScalability time:
Ah, the good old days. This is how the FBI stored finger prints in 1944. (Alex Wellerstein). How much data? Estimates range from 30GB to 2TB.
If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon. Also, there's my new book, Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10, for complete cloud newbies.
If you’re a web dev / devops / etc. meetup group that also works toward building a faster, safer Internet, I want to support your awesome group by buying you pizza. If your group’s focus falls within one of the subject categories below and you’re willing to give us a 30 second shout out and tweet a photo of your group and @Cloudflare, your meetup’s pizza expense will be reimbursed.
I’m Andrew Fitch and I work on the Developer Relations team at Cloudflare. One of the things I like most about working in DevRel is empowering community members who are already doing great things out in the world. Whether they’re starting conferences, hosting local meetups, or writing educational content, I think it’s important to support them in their efforts and reward them for doing what they do. Community organizers are the glue that holds developers together socially. Let’s support them and make their lives easier by taking care of the pizza part of the equation.
It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten to rant against Network Address Translation (NAT). At first, I had hoped that was because IPv6 transitions were happening and people were adopting it rapidly enough that NAT would eventually slide into the past of SAN and DOS. Alas, it appears that IPv6 adoption is getting better but still not great.
Geoff Huston, on the other hand, seems to think that NAT is a good thing. In a recent article, he took up the shield to defend NAT against those that believe it is an abomination. He rightfully pointed out that NAT has extended the life of the modern Internet and also correctly pointed out that the slow pace of IPv6 deployment was due in part to the lack of urgency of address depletion. Even with companies like Microsoft buying large sections of IP address space to fuel Azure, we’re still not quite at the point of the game when IP addresses are hard to come by.
So, with Mr. Huston taking up the shield, let me find my +5 Sword of NAT Slaying and try to point out a couple of issues in his defense.
The first Continue reading
Welcome to Technology Short Take 90! This post is a bit shorter than most, as I’ve been on the road quite a bit recently. Nevertheless, there’s hopefully something here you’ll find useful.
While I was writing the post comparing the new Qualcomm server chip, Centriq, to our current stock of Intel Skylake-based Xeons, I noticed a disturbing phenomena.
When benchmarking OpenSSL 1.1.1dev, I discovered that the performance of the cipher ChaCha20-Poly1305 does not scale very well. On a single thread, it performed at the speed of approximately 2.89GB/s, whereas on 24 cores, and 48 threads it performed at just over 35 GB/s.
CC BY-SA 2.0 image by blumblaum
Now this is a very high number, but I would like to see something closer to 69GB/s. 35GB/s is just 1.46GB/s/core, or roughly 50% of the single core performance. AES-GCM scales much better, to 80% of single core performance, which is understandable, because the CPU can sustain higher frequency turbo on a single core, but not all cores.
Why is the scaling of ChaCha20-Poly1305 so poor? Meet AVX-512. AVX-512 is a new Intel instruction set that adds many new 512-bit wide SIMD instructions and promotes most of the existing ones to 512-bit. The problem with such wide instructions is that they consume power. A lot of power. Imagine a single instruction that does the work of 64 regular Continue reading
