NVLink Shines On Power9 For AI And HPC Tests

The differences between peak theoretical computing capacity of a system and the actual performance it delivers can be stark. This is the case with any symmetric or asymmetric processing complex, where the interconnect and the method of dispatching work across the computing elements is crucial, and in modern hybrid systems that might tightly couple CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and memory class storage on various interconnects, the links could end up being as important as the compute.

As we have discussed previously, IBM’s new “Witherspoon” AC922 hybrid system, which was launched recently and which starts shipping next week, is designed from …

NVLink Shines On Power9 For AI And HPC Tests was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Namibia Chapter Launches in the “Land of the Brave”

Namibia becomes the 32nd Internet Society (ISOC) chartered chapter to launch in Africa. Namibia is a Southern Africa country just slightly bigger than Texas, and the 34th largest country in the world , with 2.3 million inhabitants according to the last census (2011). Popularly referred as the “Land Of The Brave,” Namibia is the only place on the continent of Africa where the Atlantic ocean meets the desert.

The new chapter sets itself to serve an important role: being at the centre of Internet development & policy in the country. The ISOC Namibia Chapter seeks to address the digital divide and emerging Internet issues in Namibia with some core objectives:

  • To add value to the Internet ecosystem at its locality
  • To advocate for a secure cyber environment
  • To promote free & secured Internet access for all

The chapter’s key interests in the country include collaborating with strategic partners on community network projects, strengthening local IXPs, as well as issues related to security and furthering connectivity.

The colorful launch event was attended by 111 participants and was officiated by the Minister of ICT, Honourable Tjekero Tweya. An additional government delegation of members of the Parliamentary Committee on ICTs, led by the Continue reading

Juniper Flips OpenContrail To The Linux Foundation

It’s a familiar story arc for open source efforts started by vendors or vendor-led industry consortiums. The initiatives are launched and expanded, but eventually they find their way into independent open source organizations such as the Linux Foundation, where vendor control is lessened, communities are able to grow, and similar projects can cross-pollinate in hopes of driving greater standardization in the industry and adoption within enterprises.

It happened with Xen, the virtualization technology that initially started with XenSource and was bought by Citrix Systems but now is under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. The Linux kernel lives there, too, …

Juniper Flips OpenContrail To The Linux Foundation was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Weekend Reads 121517

Crooks who make and deploy ATM skimmers are constantly engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with financial institutions, which deploy a variety of technological measures designed to defeat skimming devices. The latest innovation aimed at tipping the scales in favor of skimmer thieves is a small, battery powered device that provides crooks a digital readout indicating whether an ATM likely includes digital anti-skimming technology. —Krebs on Security

Not long ago, phishing attacks were fairly easy for the average Internet user to spot: Full of grammatical and spelling errors, and linking to phony bank or email logins at unencrypted (http:// vs. https://) Web pages. Increasingly, however, phishers are upping their game, polishing their copy and hosting scam pages over https:// connections — complete with the green lock icon in the browser address bar to make the fake sites appear more legitimate. —Krebs on Security

As the European Union General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) looms, a privacy stripping email setting continues in widespread use around the world. It threatens sensitive communications that containing personally-identifiable information, intellectual property, financial information, and your most intimate photos. —Free Code Camp

This week, the Supreme Court will hear a case with profound implications on your security and Continue reading

Enable nested virtualization on Google Cloud

Google Cloud Platform introduced nested virtualization support in September 2017. Nested virtualization is especially interesting to network emulation research since it allow users to run unmodified versions of popular network emulation tools like GNS3, EVE-NG, and Cloonix on a cloud instance.

Google Cloud supports nested virtualization using the KVM hypervisor on Linux instances. It does not support other hypervisors like VMware ESX or Xen, and it does not support nested virtualization for Windows instances.

In this post, I show how I set up nested virtualization in Google Cloud and I test the performance of nested virtual machines running on a Google Cloud VM instance.

Create Google Cloud account

Sign up for a free trial on Google Cloud. Google offers a generous three hundred dollar credit that is valid for a period of one year. So you pay nothing until either you have consumed $300 worth of services or one year has passed. I have been hacking on Google cloud for one month, using relatively large VMs, and I have consumed only 25% of my credits.

If you already use Google services like G-mail, then you already have a Google account and adding Google Cloud to your account is easy. Continue reading

Microburst: PSIRT Notifications – Are They Good Or Bad?

If your hardware or software vendor issues a lot of PSIRT (Product Security Incident Response Team) notifications, is that a good thing or a bad thing? After all, a PSIRT bulletin means that there’s a security issue with the product, so lots of PSIRTs means that the product is insecure, right?

Mp psirt

What about the alternative, then? If a vendor issues very few PSIRT notifications does it mean that their product is somehow more secure? This is an issue I’ve been thinking about a lot over the last year, and the conclusion I came to is that if a vendor is not issuing regular bulletins, it’s a bad thing. Either the vendor doesn’t think its customers should be aware of vulnerabilities in the product, or perhaps the bugs aren’t being fixed. A PSIRT bulletin involves the vendor admitting that it got something wrong and potentially exposed its customers to a security vulnerability, and I’m ok with that. Sure, I don’t like sloppy coding, but I do appreciate the transparency.

I believe that when a vendor is shy about publishing security notifications it’s probably a decision made by management based on the naive belief that limiting the number of times they admit Continue reading

Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability For December 15th, 2017

Hey, wake up, it's HighScalability time:

 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone! I'll be off until the new year. Here's hoping all your gifts were selected using machine learning.

 

If you like this sort of Stuff then please support me on Patreon. And I'd appreciate your recommending my new book—Explain the Cloud Like I'm 10—to anyone who needs to understand the cloud (who doesn't?). I think they'll like it. Now with twice the brightness and new chapters on Netflix and Cloud Computing.

 

  • 157 terabytes: per second raw data output of the Square Kilometre Array; $11 million: made by a 6 year old on YouTube; 14TB: helium hard drive; 1: year education raises IQ 1-5 points; 10: seconds mining time to pay for wifi; 110 TFLOPS: Nvidia Launches $3,000 Titan V; 400: lines of JavaScript injected by Comcast; 20 million: requests per second processed by Netflix to personalize artwork; 270: configuration parameters in postgresql.conf; hundreds: eyes in scallop from a unique mirroring system; $72 billion: record DRAM revenue; 20: rockets landed by SpaceX; 

  • Quotable Quotes:

Worth Reading: Deployment Strategies

Let’s talk about deployments. This topic used to be considered an uninteresting implementation detail, but is now becoming a fundamental element for modern systems. I feel like everyone understand its importance, and is working to build solutions around it, but we are missing some structure and definition. People use different terms for same meanings, or same terms for different meanings. This leads to other people reinventing the wheel trying to solve their problems. We need a common understanding of this topic in order to build better tools, make better decisions, and simplify communication with each other. —Itay Shakury

IDG Contributor Network: ‘Tis the season for this year’s networking ‘naughty and nice’ lists

The holiday season is as good a time as any to take stock of what we witnessed in 2017, and from a technology perspective it was a year unlike any other. We saw the value of crypto currencies skyrocket and the opening of a crypto-futures market. The first shipments of 400G technologies into the wide-area-network with AT&T and Vodafone New Zealand, the continued deployment of Software-Defined Networking, a technology we’ve long championed, an early example of augmented reality go viral with Pokémon Go and Virtual Reality start to reshape the way we interact with the world around us – such as changing how we watch live sports.To read this article in full, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: ‘Tis the season for this year’s networking ‘naughty and nice’ lists

The holiday season is as good a time as any to take stock of what we witnessed in 2017, and from a technology perspective it was a year unlike any other. We saw the value of crypto currencies skyrocket and the opening of a crypto-futures market. The first shipments of 400G technologies into the wide-area-network with AT&T and Vodafone New Zealand, the continued deployment of Software-Defined Networking, a technology we’ve long championed, an early example of augmented reality go viral with Pokémon Go and Virtual Reality start to reshape the way we interact with the world around us – such as changing how we watch live sports.To read this article in full, please click here

Should We Build A Better BGP?

One story that seems to have flown under the radar this week with the Net Neutrality discussion being so dominant was the little hiccup with BGP on Wednesday. According to sources, sources inside AS39523 were able to redirect traffic from some major sites like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft through their network. Since the ISP in question is located inside Russia, there’s been quite a lot of conversation about the purpose of this misconfiguration. Is it simply an accident? Or is it a nefarious plot? Regardless of the intent, the fact that we live in 2017 and can cause massive portions of Internet traffic to be rerouted has many people worried.

Routing by Suggestion

BGP is the foundation of the modern Internet. It’s how routes are exchanged between every autonomous system (AS) and how traffic destined for your favorite cloud service or cat picture hosting provider gets to where it’s supposed to be going. BGP is the glue that makes the Internet work.

But BGP, for all of the greatness that it provides, is still very fallible. It’s prone to misconfiguration. Look no further than the Level 3 outage last month. Or the outage that Google caused in Japan in August. Continue reading

FTP and Telnet removed from OSX High Sierra (10.13.1)

For those of us that often have to use console servers to connect over IP to serial ports of devices, the removal of telnet from High Sierra is a bit of a pain in the bum.   Here are two things you can do:

Use the ‘nc’ command to connect in exactly the same way as you used to do at the command-line with telnet.  For example:   nc <IP address> <Port Number>

nc

SFTP is good and I use it wherever I can, but sometimes you come across some old kit that can’t support SSH or SFTP, so you just need those old tools.   An alternative is to do this:

  1. Enter Time Machine
  2. Look for a backup taken from before your upgrade.  You can
  3. If you’re not using the time-machine interface, you can find your backup here:  /Volumes/com.apple.TimeMachine.localsnapshots/Backups.backupdb/
  4. In the appropriate backup subdirectory, look in usr/bin and you should find the telnet and ftp executable files.
  5. Copy these to your machine in /usr/local/bin

 

 


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