IBM Shows Off AI And HPC Oomph On Power8 Tesla Hybrids
While the machine learning applications created by hyperscalers and the simulations and models run by HPC centers are very different animals, the kinds of hardware that help accelerate the performance for one is also helping to boost the other in many cases. And that means that the total addressable market for systems like the latest GPU-accelerated Power Systems machines or the alternatives from Nvidia and others has rapidly expanded as enterprises try to deploy both HPC and AI to better run their businesses.
HPC as we know it has obviously been around for a long time, and is in a …
IBM Shows Off AI And HPC Oomph On Power8 Tesla Hybrids was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Cray’s New Pascal XC50 Supercomputer Points to Richer HPC Future
Over the course of the last five years, GPU computing has featured prominently in supercomputing as an accelerator on some of the world’s fastest machines. If some supercomputer makers are correct, GPUs will continue to play a major role in high performance computing, but the acceleration they provide will go beyond boosts to numerical simulations. This has been great news for Nvidia’s bottom line since the market for GPU computing is swelling, and for HPC vendors that can integrate those and wrap the proper software stacks around both HPC and machine learning, it could be an equal boon. …
Cray’s New Pascal XC50 Supercomputer Points to Richer HPC Future was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Reliability of Clustered Solutions: Another Data Point
A while ago I wrote:
I haven’t seen any hard data, but intuition suggests that apart from hardware failures a standalone firewall might be more stable than a state-sharing firewall cluster.
Guillaume Sachot (working for a web hosting company) sent me his first-hand experience on this topic:
Read more ...Testing ovirt-engine changes without a real cluster
The ovirt-engine component of oVirt is the brain of oVirt and is responsible for managing attached systems; providing the webadmin UI and REST interfaces; and other core tasks. The process of setting up a real cluster on which to deploy the project is a time-consuming task that greatly increases patch turnaround time and can provide a significant barrier of entry to those wanting to contribute to the project.
Development Environment
There are couple of preparation steps you must take to create your development environment. I am using CentOS 7 as my development machine so I will use that system to describe everything, but it should be pretty straightforward to adapt the article to Fedora.
We first need the source code for the ovirt-engine itself. You can get it from the project's code review tool: gerrit.ovirt.org. Just execute the following command and wait for it to finish:
# git clone git://gerrit.ovirt.org/ovirt-engine.git
You will also need a directory for the development deployments, so create a directory somewhere. Mine is in ~/Applications/ovirt-engine-prefix. I have set the$OVIRT_PREFIX environment variable to point to that path, so when you see it used throughout this article, substitute the path for your own Continue reading
SC16 for HPC Programmers: What to Watch
An event as large and diverse as the annual Supercomputing Conference (SC16) presents a daunting array of content, even for those who specialize in a particular area inside the wider HPC spectrum. For HPC programmers, there are many sub-tracks to follow depending where on the stack on sits.
The conference program includes a “Programming Systems” label for easily finding additional relevant sessions, but we wanted to highlight a few of these here based on larger significance to the overall HPC programming ecosystem.
HPC programmers often have special considerations in how they program that other fields do not. For example, nothing …
SC16 for HPC Programmers: What to Watch was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Scoring the DNS Root Server System
The process of rolling the DNS Root’s Key Signing Key of the DNS has now started. During this process there will be a period where the root zone servers’ response to a DNS query for the DNSKEY resource record of the root zone will grow from the current value of 864 octets to 1,425 octets. Does this present a problem? Let’s look at the DNS Root Server system and score it on how well it can cope with large responses. It seems that awarding stars is the current Internet way, so let’s see how many stars we’ll give to the Root Server System for their handling of large responses.SC16 live real-time weathermaps
From the SCinet web page, "The Fastest Network Connecting the Fastest Computers: SC16 will host the most powerful and advanced networks in the world – SCinet. Created each year for the conference, SCinet brings to life a very high-capacity network that supports the revolutionary applications and experiments that are a hallmark of the SC conference."
The real-time weathermap leverages industry standard sFlow instrumentation built into network switch and router hardware to provide scaleable monitoring of the SCinet network. Link colors are updated every second to reflect operational status and utilization of each link.
Connect to http://inmon.sc16.org/sflow-rt/app/OSiRIS-weather/html/ to see an animated diagram of the SC16 OSiRIS demonstration connecting SCinet with University of Michigan, Michigan State, Wayne Continue reading
Unable to access Cisco ASA through AnyConnect VPN?
How Does Internet Work - We know what is networking
I stepped on this issue few weeks ago. I was implementing a new ASA Firewall solution, first time for me with software newer than version 8.4.2 It seems that all those stories about changes in the NAT logic after that version were true. This is what I found out about ASA packet processing. Configuration was really straightforward and everything worked fine except one thing. When connected remotely using Cisco AnyConnect I was able to access all devices inside the network (inside ASA firewall), but not the ASA itself. I wasn’t able to connect with SSH nor with ASDM. I, of course,
Pascal GPUs On All Fronts Push Nvidia To New Highs
Chip maker Nvidia was founded by people who loved gaming and who wanted to make better 3D graphics cards, and decades later, the company has become a force in computing, first in HPC and then in machine learning and now database acceleration. And it all works together, with gaming graphics providing the foundation on which Nvidia can build a considerable compute business, much as Intel’s PC business provided the foundation for its Xeon assault on the datacenter over the past two and a half decades.
At some point, Nvidia may not need an explicit link to PC graphics and gaming …
Pascal GPUs On All Fronts Push Nvidia To New Highs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Brocadecom
The news is public: Broadcom is acquiring Brocade, my employer. Official announcement here, and some (unofficial) commentary here. What’s happening, and what does it mean for me? There’s limits to what I can say - either because I don’t have the answers, or because it’s not public. But here’s a little bit of info for readers wondering what will happen to me.
Update: We now have news: It’s Extreme Networks
What’s Happening?
Broadcom has announced its intention to acquire Brocade for approximately $5.5 billion:
This morning we announced a definitive agreement under which Broadcom will acquire Brocade. Broadcom believes the SAN business is a strong complement to its portfolio of enterprise storage and networking solutions, and its intention is to continue to deliver the market-leading storage networking solutions and innovation for which Brocade is so well known.
When will this happen?
Closing of the transaction is presently expected in the second half of Broadcom’s fiscal year 2017, which ends in October 2017, and is subject to regulatory approvals in various jurisdictions, customary closing conditions as well as the approval of Brocade’s stockholders.
What about the IP business?
This is the tricky bit. Broadcom is well-known as a maker Continue reading