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Cool Yule Tools 2016: Digital disruption at Santa’s Workshop

Things are hopping at Santa 2.0 (S2) – the new name for Santa’s Workshop. The North Pole toy factory has undergone a serious digital transformation, with centuries-old processes giving way to new and more efficient methods. Even the sleigh has gone digital – it’s now a self-driving, self-flying gift distribution system. Initially the S2 team wanted to hire Uber drivers to deliver presents, but after some more tinkering the autonomous system kicked in. But don’t worry – the reindeers are all doing just fine in their retirement.While good girls and boys might still be handwriting their wish lists and delivering them via the post office, once the S2 team gets a hold of the requests, they’re quickly scanned, digitized and processed through the new ecosystem. Collaboration elves all work hard together (via a dedicated private Slack channel) to guarantee that production is on top of their game as well. Drones, robots, virtual reality and other emerging technologies are all being used to make sure that the S2 has another successful holiday season.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

As Watson matures, IBM plans more AI hardware and software

Just over five years ago, IBM's Watson supercomputer crushed opponents in the televised quiz show Jeopardy. It was hard to foresee then, but artificial intelligence is now permeating our daily lives.Since then, IBM has expanded the Watson brand to a cognitive computing package with hardware and software used to diagnose diseases, explore for oil and gas, run scientific computing models, and allow cars to drive autonomously. The company has now announced new AI hardware and software packages.The original Watson used advanced algorithms and natural language interfaces to find and narrate answers. Then, Watson was one supercomputer, but now AI systems are deployed at a grander scale. Mega data centers run by Facebook, Google, Amazon, and other companies use AI on thousands of servers to recognize images and speech and analyze loads of data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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:

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

Best Xbox Black Friday 2016 bundles $50 cheaper than last year

Xbox One bundles can be had at a slew of big name retailers, from GameStop to Walmart, and what the deals lack in variety they make up for in being $50 cheaper than last year.Xbox One bundles are generally going for $250 this holiday shopping season, $50 off the regular price and $50 off the going price last holiday season. (Compare vs. 2015 Xbox Black Friday deals here.)But not all the deals are exactly alike, and if you shop around, you’ll find some are a bit better when you take into account gift cards and other goodies thrown into the packages.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

412 million FriendFinder Network accounts said to be exposed in hack

Over 412 million accounts on dating and entertainment network FriendFinder Networks have reportedly been exposed, the second time that the network has been breached in two years, according to a popular breach notification website.The websites that have been breached include adultfriendfinder.com, described as the "world's largest sex and swinger community," which accounted for over 339.7 million of the 412 million accounts exposed, LeakedSource said Sunday.Other network sites that had user accounts exposed were cams.com with 62.6 million exposed, penthouse.com with 7 million, stripshow.com with 1.4 million, icams.com with about 1 million and an unidentified website adding 35,372 users whose accounts were exposed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

412 million FriendFinder Network accounts said to be exposed in hack

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.

Best Deals of the Week, November 7th – November 11th – Deal Alert

Best Deals of the Week, November 7th - November 11th - Deal AlertCheck out this roundup of the best deals on gadgets, gear and other cool stuff we have found this week, the week of November 7th. All items are highly rated, and dramatically discounted.35% off Oster Cordless Electric Wine Bottle Opener with Foil CutterThis cordless electric wine opener from Oster removes the cork in seconds with one-button operation, and opens up to 30 bottles before needing to be recharged. It features a foil cutter for easily removing seals and a comfortable soft-grip handle. Currently averages 4 out of 5 stars from over 4,000 people (read reviews). It's discounted 35% on Amazon, so you can get it right now for just $12.99. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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

Connect to https://inmon.sc16.org/sflow-rt/app/sc16-weather/html/ between now and November 17th to see a real-time heat map of the The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC16) network.

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.

Clicking on a link in the map pops up a 1 second resolution strip chart showing the protocol mix carried by the link.

OSiRIS (Open Storage Research Infrastructure) is a "distributed, multi-institutional storage infrastructure that lets researchers write, manage, and share data from their own computing facility locations."

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

BlackNurse attack: 1 laptop can DoS some firewalls, bring down big servers

An attacker doesn’t need an IoT botnet or massive resources for a denial of service attack to knock large servers offline; researchers warned that all it takes is one laptop for a “BlackNurse” attack to bring vulnerable Cisco, SonicWall, Palo Alto and Zyxel firewalls to their knees.Danish researchers at the Security Operations Center of telecom operator TDC described BlackNurse as a low bandwidth Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) attack that “is capable of doing a denial of service to well-known firewalls.”In their report (pdf), the researchers wrote:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

BlackNurse attack: 1 laptop can DoS some firewalls, bring down big servers

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,

Unable to access Cisco ASA through AnyConnect VPN?

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.

Amazon, Newegg go all out on Black Friday 2016 tech deals

Online retailers Amazon.com and Newegg are getting a jump on Black Friday 2016 with a slew of tech deals, including from Amazon some big cuts on its Echo, Kindles and tablets.Black Friday watchers such as BFads and Best Black Friday have been tracking new ads such as these closely and we've been watching them closely.MORE: 40-plus Eye-Popping Black Friday 2016 tech dealsAmazon really wants you to buy its own stuff Amazon has already begun its Black Friday countdown and is attempting to lure shoppers via Lightning deals that can last for only a few hours, until items being offered at cut-rate prices are gone.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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