Turn Network Engineers into Software Engineers

Peyton Koran, Director of Technical Engagement at Electronic Arts, delivered a great session on why network vendors are losing to open source and whitebox. His view is that network engineers need to embrace software engineering, be flexible. Vendors and VARs are no longer working to benefit of the customer but to benefit themselves with increased […]

Cassandra NoSQL Data Model Design

We at Instaclustr recently published a blog post on the most common data modelling mistakes that we see with Cassandra. This post was very popular and led me to think about what advice we could provide on how to approach designing your Cassandra data model so as to come up with a quality design that avoids the traps.

There are a number of good articles around that with rules and patterns to fit your data model into: 6 Step Guide to Apache Cassandra Data Modelling and Data Modelling Recommended Practices.

However, we haven’t found a step by step guide to analysing your data to determine how to fit in these rules and patterns. This white paper is a quick attempt at filling that gap.

Phase 1: Understand the data

This phase has two distinct steps that are both designed to gain a good understanding of the data that you are modelling and the access patterns required.

Define the data domain

The first step is to get a good understanding of your data domain. As someone very familiar with relation data modelling, I tend to sketch (or at least think) ER diagrams to understand the entities, their keys and relationships. However, Continue reading

Mellanox Poised For HDR InfiniBand Quantum Leap

InfiniBand and Ethernet are in a game of tug of war and are pushing the bandwidth and price/performance envelopes constantly. But the one thing they cannot do is get too far out ahead of the PCI-Express bus through which network interface cards hook into processors. The 100 Gb/sec links commonly used in Ethernet and InfiniBand server adapters run up against bandwidth ceilings with two ports running on PCI-Express 3.0 slots, and it is safe to say that 200 Gb/sec speeds will really need PCI-Express 4.0 slots to have two ports share a slot.

This, more than any other factor, is …

Mellanox Poised For HDR InfiniBand Quantum Leap was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Thwarting the Tactics of the Equifax Attackers

Thwarting the Tactics of the Equifax Attackers

We are now 3 months on from one of the biggest, most significant data breaches in history, but has it redefined people's awareness on security?

The answer to that is absolutely yes, awareness is at an all-time high. Awareness, however, does not always result in positive action. The fallacy which is often assumed is "surely, if I keep my software up to date with all the patches, that's more than enough to keep me safe?". It's true, keeping software up to date does defend against known vulnerabilities, but it's a very reactive stance. The more important part is protecting against the unknown.

Something every engineer will agree on is that security is hard, and maintaining systems is even harder. Patching or upgrading systems can lead to unforeseen outages or unexpected behaviour due to other fixes which may be applied. This, in most cases, can cause huge delays in the deployment of patches or upgrades, due to requiring either regression testing or deployment in a staging environment. Whilst processes are followed, and tests are done, systems are sat vulnerable, ready to be exploited if they are exposed to the internet.

Looking at the wider landscape, an increase in security research Continue reading

Reflections from Copenhagen: RIPE NCC IPv6 Hackathon and Danish IPv6 Day

On 4-5 November, a group of enthusiastic and skillful people gathered at the 6th RIPE NCC hackathon with a theme of IPv6. The event was organized by RIPE NCC and DKNOG, sponsored by Comcast, hosted by IT University of Copenhagen and aimed to bring together open-minded developers and network engineers to work on different ideas and projects from the IPv6 field.

I was honoured to be a jury member and even before the hackathon we were quite busy rating all the submissions that came in, as the number of hackathon participants was limited. All potential participants had to submit a short bio, explain what kind of development (programming) knowledge they had, and also what their ideas or expectations for the hackathon were. We selected 24 participants – and what a skillful bunch that was! In total we were 33 people in the room, 24 participants, 5 jurors and 4 RIPE NCC staff for on-site support.

On Saturday,  4 November, the group came together at IT University of Copenhagen and after a short opening and update on logistics and rules of the hackathon, people got to work. First was a “speaker’s corner”, where everyone with an idea for a Continue reading

Supercomputing is becoming super-efficient, Top500 list shows

Supercomputing is becoming super-efficient. The highest climber in the latest Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers is also one of the highest scorers on the Green500 ranking of the world's most efficient.But the November 2017 edition of the Top500 and Green500 is also remarkable in other ways, as it marks a tipping point in U.S. dominance of the list.[ See these top supercomputers at our slideshow 10 of the world’s fastest supercomputers. ]Chinese systems now outnumber U.S. systems on the list by 202 to 144, a reversal of the situation just six months ago, when the U.S. had 169 systems in the Top500 vs China's 160. It will still be a long while before third-placed Japan overtakes the U.S.: It has 35 systems in the list, followed by Germany with 20, France with 18, and the UK with 15.To read this article in full, please click here

Supercomputing is becoming super-efficient, Top500 list shows

Supercomputing is becoming super-efficient. The highest climber in the latest Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers is also one of the highest scorers on the Green500 ranking of the world's most efficient.But the November 2017 edition of the Top500 and Green500 is also remarkable in other ways, as it marks a tipping point in U.S. dominance of the list.[ See these top supercomputers at our slideshow 10 of the world’s fastest supercomputers. ]Chinese systems now outnumber U.S. systems on the list by 202 to 144, a reversal of the situation just six months ago, when the U.S. had 169 systems in the Top500 vs China's 160. It will still be a long while before third-placed Japan overtakes the U.S.: It has 35 systems in the list, followed by Germany with 20, France with 18, and the UK with 15.To read this article in full, please click here

10 of the world’s fastest supercomputers

10 of the world's fastest supercomputersImage by Henrik5000 / Getty ImagesThe semi-annual Top500 ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers is in for fall 2018 with China claiming 227 of the 500 spots on the list, although it managed to take just two places in the top 10. The United states took five of the top 10, including first and second place. New to the Top500 rankings at number 205 is Astra, an HPE-built machine at Sandia National Laboratories that is the first powered by ARM chips to make the list. The top 10 highlighted in this slideshow demonstrate what might become available in corporate data centers.To read this article in full, please click here

10 of the world’s fastest supercomputers

10 of the world's fastest supercomputersImage by Henrik5000 / Getty ImagesThe semi-annual Top500 ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers is in for fall 2018 with China claiming 227 of the 500 spots on the list, although it managed to take just two places in the top 10. The United states took five of the top 10, including first and second place. New to the Top500 rankings at number 205 is Astra, an HPE-built machine at Sandia National Laboratories that is the first powered by ARM chips to make the list. The top 10 highlighted in this slideshow demonstrate what might become available in corporate data centers.To read this article in full, please click here

Top 500 Supercomputer Rankings Losing Accuracy Despite High Precision

If the hyperscalers have taught us anything, it is that more data is always better. And because of this, we have to start out by saying that we are grateful to the researchers who created and administer the Top 500 supercomputer benchmark tests for the past 25 years, creating an astonishing 50 consecutive lists ranking the most powerful machines in the world as gauged by the double precision Linpack Fortran parallel matrix math test.

This set of data stands out among a few other groups of benchmarks that have been used by the tens of thousands of organizations – academic …

Top 500 Supercomputer Rankings Losing Accuracy Despite High Precision was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Deploy360 at IETF 100, Day 2: More IPv6 & IoT

This week is IETF 100 in Singapore, and we’re bringing you daily blog posts highlighting some of the topics that Deploy360 is interested in. ‘Things’ are less hectic today, although there’s still plenty to follow in the areas of IPv6, the Internet of Things and encryption.

There’s a couple of choices for starting the day at 09.30 SGT/UTC+8. ACE is defining a framework for authentication and authorization in IoT environments based on OAuth 2.0 and CoAP, and there are 8 drafts up for discussion. Alternatively, DMM will be meeting to discuss issues related to Mobile IPv6.

NOTE: If you are unable to attend IETF 100 in person, there are multiple ways to participate remotely.

After lunch is 6MAN at 13.30 SGT/UTC+8 which is one of the key IPv6-related Working Groups. There’s one working group sponsored draft on IPv6 Node Requirements that specifies the minimum requirements for enabling effective IPv6 functionality and interoperability on nodes. There are also three recommendations on the security and privacy implications of IPv6, temporary IPv6 interface identifiers, and on the filtering of IPv6 packets containing extension headers, a further draft requesting the creation of an IANA registry for the Prefix Information Option in the IPv6 Neighbour Continue reading

Go, don’t collect my garbage

Not long ago I needed to benchmark the performance of Golang on a many-core machine. I took several of the benchmarks that are bundled with the Go source code, copied them, and modified them to run on all available threads. In that case the machine has 24 cores and 48 threads.

CC BY-SA 2.0 image by sponki25

I started with ECDSA P256 Sign, probably because I have warm feeling for that function, since I optimized it for amd64.

First, I ran the benchmark on a single goroutine: ECDSA-P256 Sign,30618.50, op/s

That looks good; next I ran it on 48 goroutines: ECDSA-P256 Sign,78940.67, op/s.

OK, that is not what I expected. Just over 2X speedup, from 24 physical cores? I must be doing something wrong. Maybe Go only uses two cores? I ran top, it showed 2,266% utilization. That is not the 4,800% I expected, but it is also way above 400%.

How about taking a step back, and running the benchmark on two goroutines? ECDSA-P256 Sign,55966.40, op/s. Almost double, so pretty good. How about four goroutines? ECDSA-P256 Sign,108731.00, op/s. That is actually faster than 48 goroutines, what is going on?

I ran the benchmark Continue reading

New Dates for the Building Network Automation Solutions Online Course

We’re slowly wrapping up the autumn 2017 Building Network Automation Solutions online course, so it’s time to schedule the next one. It will start on February 13th and you can already register (and save $700 over regular price as long as there are Enthusiast tickets left).

Do note that you get access to all course content (including the recordings of autumn 2017 sessions) the moment you register for the course. You can also start building your lab and working on hands-on exercises way before the course starts.

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