A Closer Look at 2016 Top 500 Supercomputer Rankings

The bi-annual rankings of the Top 500 supercomputers for the November 2016 systems are now live. While the top of the list is static with the same two Chinese supercomputers dominating, there are several new machines that have cropped up to replace decommissioned systems throughout, the momentum at the very top shows some telling architectural trends, particularly among the newcomers in the top 20.

We already described the status of the major Chinese and Japanese systems in our analysis of the June 2016 list and thought it might be more useful to look at some of the broader

A Closer Look at 2016 Top 500 Supercomputer Rankings was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

37% of IT pros to look for new jobs in 2017

If your IT department isn’t already worried about staff retention, some new stats might change that. A new poll finds 37% of IT pros plan to begin searching for a new employer in 2017, and 26% plan to accept a new job.Many factors are driving people’s desire for a job change, according to Spiceworks’ 2017 Tech Career Outlook. The most frequently cited reasons are: to advance my IT skills (cited by 69%); to get a more competitive salary (64%); to work at a company that makes IT more of a priority (40%); I’m burnt out at my current job (40%); to find a better work-life balance (38%); to get better benefits (401k, healthcare) (33%); to work with a more talented IT team (26%); to get better work-from-home options (24%); to get a better job title (22%).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Docker Datacenter adds enterprise orchestration, security policy and refreshed UI

Today we are excited to introduce new additions to Docker Datacenter, our Container as a Service (CaaS) platform for enterprise IT and application teams. Docker Datacenter provides an integrated platform for developers and IT operations teams to collaborate securely on the application lifecycle. Built on the foundation of Docker Engine, Docker Datacenter (DDC) also provides integrated orchestration, management and security around managing resources like access, images, applications, networks and more across the cluster.

This latest release of Docker Datacenter includes a number of new features and improvements focused in the following areas:

  • Enterprise orchestration and operations to make running and operating multi container applications simple, secure and scalable
  • Integrated end to end security to cover all of the components and people that interact with the application pipeline
  • User experience and performance improvements ensure that even the most complex operations are handled efficiently

Let’s dig into some of the new features.

Enterprise orchestration with backward compatibility

This release of Docker Datacenter not only integrates the built in orchestration capabilities of Docker Engine 1.12 utilizing swarm mode and services, but also provides backwards compatibility for standalone containers using the docker run commands. To help enterprise application teams migrate, it is important Continue reading

37% of IT pros to look for new jobs in 2017

If your IT department isn’t already worried about staff retention, some new stats might change that. A new poll finds 37% of IT pros plan to begin searching for a new employer in 2017, and 26% plan to accept a new job.Many factors are driving people’s desire for a job change, according to Spiceworks’ 2017 Tech Career Outlook. The most frequently cited reasons are: to advance my IT skills (cited by 69%); to get a more competitive salary (64%); to work at a company that makes IT more of a priority (40%); I’m burnt out at my current job (40%); to find a better work-life balance (38%); to get better benefits (401k, healthcare) (33%); to work with a more talented IT team (26%); to get better work-from-home options (24%); to get a better job title (22%).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Facebook just had a very, very bad week

There’s a rule of thumb in journalism that says three of anything is a trend. If that’s true, then the world’s largest social network is in the middle of one very tough trend. In the last week or so, the company has been absorbing criticism on three separate fronts, from embarrassing gaffes to potentially helping sway the results of that election—in multiple ways. Facebook = election influencer?  Let’s start at the top: with the election. Donald Trump’s victory surprised a lot of people, and one reason—say the Monday morning quarterbacks—is that Facebook and other social networks are how many people now get their news, which is creating bubbles where subscribers see primarily content that supports their own positions and politics. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Blockchain adoption in banks coming, but slower than expected

Recent headlines suggest that blockchain technology is revolutionizing financial services. JP Morgan Chase, Barclays, Commonwealth Bank, Wells Fargo and several other leading banks are using the digital ledger technology to conduct equity swaps, cross-border trades, and other transactions.You might think that blockchain has gone mainstream. Not so fast, says former UBS CIO Oliver Bussmann, who claims it may take banks two years to run blockchain in production due to regulatory hurdles, a lack of standards and other stumbling blocks. “This is real, this will come but in a very regulated environment. We will go through a lot of validation,” says Bussmann, who jumpstarted blockchain efforts when he was leading IT at the Swiss bank last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Blockchain adoption in banks coming, but slower than expected

Recent headlines suggest that blockchain technology is revolutionizing financial services. JP Morgan Chase, Barclays, Commonwealth Bank, Wells Fargo and several other leading banks are using the digital ledger technology to conduct equity swaps, cross-border trades, and other transactions.You might think that blockchain has gone mainstream. Not so fast, says former UBS CIO Oliver Bussmann, who claims it may take banks two years to run blockchain in production due to regulatory hurdles, a lack of standards and other stumbling blocks. “This is real, this will come but in a very regulated environment. We will go through a lot of validation,” says Bussmann, who jumpstarted blockchain efforts when he was leading IT at the Swiss bank last year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The 10 fastest supercomputers in the world

Fast and powerfulThe twice-annual Top500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world (adjudged by their performance on the Linpack benchmark) is out this morning, and there are a pair of newcomers on the list. Check it out.TrinityImage by Los Alamos National LaboratoryTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The 10 fastest supercomputers in the world

Fast and powerfulThe twice-annual Top500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world (adjudged by their performance on the Linpack benchmark) is out this morning, and there are a pair of newcomers on the list. Check it out.TrinityImage by Los Alamos National LaboratoryTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DoS technique lets a single laptop take down an enterprise firewall

At a time when the size of distributed denial-of-service attacks has reached unprecedented levels, researchers have found a new attack technique in the wild that allows a single laptop to take down high-bandwidth enterprise firewalls.The attack, dubbed BlackNurse, involves sending Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets of a particular type and code. ICMP is commonly used for the ping network diagnostic utility, and attacks that try to overload a system with ping messages -- known as ping floods -- use ICMP Type 8 Code 0 packets.BlackNurse uses ICMP Type 3 (Destination Unreachable) Code 3 (Port Unreachable) packets instead and some firewalls consume a lot of CPU resources when processing them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DoS technique lets a single laptop take down an enterprise firewall

At a time when the size of distributed denial-of-service attacks has reached unprecedented levels, researchers have found a new attack technique in the wild that allows a single laptop to take down high-bandwidth enterprise firewalls.The attack, dubbed BlackNurse, involves sending Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets of a particular type and code. ICMP is commonly used for the ping network diagnostic utility, and attacks that try to overload a system with ping messages -- known as ping floods -- use ICMP Type 8 Code 0 packets.BlackNurse uses ICMP Type 3 (Destination Unreachable) Code 3 (Port Unreachable) packets instead and some firewalls consume a lot of CPU resources when processing them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

DoS technique lets a single laptop take down an enterprise firewall

At a time when the size of distributed denial-of-service attacks has reached unprecedented levels, researchers have found a new attack technique in the wild that allows a single laptop to take down high-bandwidth enterprise firewalls.The attack, dubbed BlackNurse, involves sending Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) packets of a particular type and code. ICMP is commonly used for the ping network diagnostic utility, and attacks that try to overload a system with ping messages -- known as ping floods -- use ICMP Type 8 Code 0 packets.BlackNurse uses ICMP Type 3 (Destination Unreachable) Code 3 (Port Unreachable) packets instead and some firewalls consume a lot of CPU resources when processing them.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: ITSM evolution on display at FUSION

Trends in enterprise IT are an interesting thing. Can you think of any other industry where hype has its own lifecycle?Whether it is because of the large budgets at stake or that enterprise IT professionals are uniquely susceptible to them, it seems the enterprise IT market is always awash in “hot new trends.” And as fast as they arise, most fizzle out.At least from that perspective, the IT service management (ITSM) space has had a pretty good run. It’s been over 20 years since the British government first introduced Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), creating the ITSM market.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Inside Six of the Newest Top 20 Supercomputers

The latest listing of the Top 500 rankings of the world’s most powerful supercomputers has just been released. While there were no big surprises at the top of the list, there have been some notable additions to the top tier, all of which feature various elements of supercomputers yet to come as national labs and research centers prepare for their pre-exascale and eventual exascale systems.

We will be providing a deep dive on the list results this morning, but for now, what is most interesting about the list is what it is just beginning to contain at the top–and what

Inside Six of the Newest Top 20 Supercomputers was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.