Google Takes Unconventional Route with Homegrown Machine Learning Chips

At the tail end of Google’s keynote speech at its developer conference Wednesday, Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO mentioned that Google had built its own chip for machine learning jobs that it calls a Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU.

The boast was that the TPU offered “an order of magnitude” improvement in the performance per watt for machine learning. Any company building a custom chip for a dedicated workload is worth noting, because building a new processor is a multimillion-dollar effort when you consider hiring a design team, the cost of getting a chip to production and building the hardware and …

Google Takes Unconventional Route with Homegrown Machine Learning Chips was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Cisco patches high severity flaws in its Web Security Appliance

Cisco Systems has fixed four denial-of-service vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to cause Web Security Appliance devices to stop processing traffic correctly.The Cisco Web Security Appliance (WSA) is a line of security devices that inspect Web traffic going in and out of an organization in order to detect malware, prevent data leaks, and enforce Internet access policies for users and applications. The devices run an operating system called Cisco AsyncOS.One of the four DoS vulnerabilities fixed Wednesday by Cisco stems from how the OS handles a specific HTTP response code. An attacker could send a specifically crafted HTTP request in order to consume the entire memory of an affected device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco patches high severity flaws in its Web Security Appliance

Cisco Systems has fixed four denial-of-service vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to cause Web Security Appliance devices to stop processing traffic correctly.The Cisco Web Security Appliance (WSA) is a line of security devices that inspect Web traffic going in and out of an organization in order to detect malware, prevent data leaks, and enforce Internet access policies for users and applications. The devices run an operating system called Cisco AsyncOS.One of the four DoS vulnerabilities fixed Wednesday by Cisco stems from how the OS handles a specific HTTP response code. An attacker could send a specifically crafted HTTP request in order to consume the entire memory of an affected device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco patches high severity flaws in its Web Security Appliance

Cisco Systems has fixed four denial-of-service vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to cause Web Security Appliance devices to stop processing traffic correctly.The Cisco Web Security Appliance (WSA) is a line of security devices that inspect Web traffic going in and out of an organization in order to detect malware, prevent data leaks, and enforce Internet access policies for users and applications. The devices run an operating system called Cisco AsyncOS.One of the four DoS vulnerabilities fixed Wednesday by Cisco stems from how the OS handles a specific HTTP response code. An attacker could send a specifically crafted HTTP request in order to consume the entire memory of an affected device.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Beach Bench

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IBM Extends GPU Cloud Capabilities, Targets Machine Learning

As we have noted over the last year in particular, GPUs are set for another tsunami of use cases for server workloads in high performance computing and most recently, machine learning.

As GPU maker Nvidia’s CEO stressed at this year’s GPU Technology Conference, deep learning is a target market, fed in part by a new range of their GPUs for training and executing deep neural networks, including the Tesla M40, M4, the existing supercomputing-focused K80, and now, the P100 (Nvidia’s latest Pascal processor, which is at the heart of a new appliance specifically designed for deep learning workloads).

While …

IBM Extends GPU Cloud Capabilities, Targets Machine Learning was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.

Advancing Enterprise Networking & Security With SDN

The End Of The Private WAN?

The traditional private WAN is being sidelined in part due to the growth of mobility and the cloud. Plan to increase your use of "Internet as WAN" going forward.

The post The End Of The Private WAN? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The End Of The Private WAN?

The traditional private WAN is being sidelined in part due to the growth of mobility and the cloud. Plan to increase your use of "Internet as WAN" going forward.

The post The End Of The Private WAN? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

How to select ERP for the services industries

Most ERP software was built first for manufacturers. But the services industries (including architecture, engineering, legal and advertising) have a different set of ERP needs, according to a buyer's guide prepared by Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Worth Reading: The death of TRILL

Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) was proposed as a solution to the complexity of spanning tree. Radia Perlman realized that her bridging loop solution wouldn’t scale in modern networks. So she worked with the IEEE to solve the problem with TRILL. We also received Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) along the way as an alternative solution to the layer 2 issues with spanning tree. The motive was sound, but the industry has rejected the premise entirely. —Networking Nerd

The post Worth Reading: The death of TRILL appeared first on 'net work.

Google I/O 2016: In pictures

Welcome to Google summer camp!Google’s annual I/O developer conference and general “give us this news cycle” event usually takes place in downtown San Francisco, but the company has opted for its own back yard this time around. Enjoy this collection of the woodsy sights of Google I/O 2016.RELATED: Follow all the stories coming out of Google I/O 2016To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco Claims It’s Fending Off White Boxes

Arista isn't the only one enticing the cloud titans.

Google I/O 2016: Google’s biggest announcements

The biggest announcements from Google I/O 2016Wednesday marked the beginning of Google I/O, the search giant’s annual developer’s conference where we get a sneak peek at everything the company has been working on over the past few months.Per usual, a number wide-ranging and intriguing announcements were made during the Google I/O keynote, an event that included both compelling hardware and software developments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud security: A mismatch for existing security processes and technology

To use a long-forgotten metaphor, cloud deployment is moving forward at internet speed at many enterprise organizations. According to ESG research, 57 percent of enterprise organizations use public and private cloud infrastructure to support product applications/workloads today, and an overwhelming majority of organizations will move an increasing number of applications/workloads to cloud infrastructure over the next 24 months (note: I am an ESG employee).Now, no one would argue the fact that cloud computing represents a different compute model, but it is really based upon the use of server virtualization for the most part. And since a VM is meant to emulate a physical server, many organizations approach cloud security by pointing traditional security processes and technologies at cloud-based workloads.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cloud security: A mismatch for existing security processes and technology

To use a long-forgotten metaphor, cloud deployment is moving forward at internet speed at many enterprise organizations. According to ESG research, 57 percent of enterprise organizations use public and private cloud infrastructure to support product applications/workloads today, and an overwhelming majority of organizations will move an increasing number of applications/workloads to cloud infrastructure over the next 24 months (note: I am an ESG employee).Now, no one would argue the fact that cloud computing represents a different compute model, but it is really based upon the use of server virtualization for the most part. And since a VM is meant to emulate a physical server, many organizations approach cloud security by pointing traditional security processes and technologies at cloud-based workloads.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Information-centric networking could fix these internet problems

Information-centric networking (ICN) ticks many of the requirements boxes for 5G, driven by the proliferation of software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV). But what are those issues that ICN improves over the current internet? And how does it do it?Today’s internet has seen significant changes. With forecasts for 2020 predicting 50 billion IoT devices, the scale of connectivity is ever increasing with nearly every computing device today providing some form of connectivity option.This will have a tremendous impact on the size of IP routing tables. This is not a problem in your typical home router on the edge of the internet. But as you move up to the core (into the so called Default Free Zone), the nodes in this part of the network literally need to store the whole internet in their routing tables. This is driving up memory costs in each IP router, as well as increasing processing complexity and power consumption. Even in SDN-enabled environments, this trend can be observed through increasing flow matching tables (growing similarly as the IP routing tables in the traditional internet), leading to an arms’ race between vendors for ever larger and costly table memory.To read this Continue reading

Cisco says network spending still hampered by economic jitters

Economic uncertainty is still putting a damper on some network spending, and that won't change in the next few months, Cisco Systems said Wednesday.The dominant networking vendor reported slightly higher sales for the three months ended April 30 but said enterprises remained cautious about replacing LANs that still work. That continues a trend the company identified in February, the last time it posted financial results.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 15 more useful Cisco sites At that time, Cisco cited January's stock-market fluctuations. Stocks have regained ground since then, but orders for campus network gear haven’t rebounded, CEO Chuck Robbins said Wednesday. Overall switching revenue was down 3 percent in the quarter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco says network spending still hampered by economic jitters

Economic uncertainty is still putting a damper on some network spending, and that won't change in the next few months, Cisco Systems said Wednesday.The dominant networking vendor reported slightly higher sales for the three months ended April 30 but said enterprises remained cautious about replacing LANs that still work. That continues a trend the company identified in February, the last time it posted financial results.MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: 15 more useful Cisco sites At that time, Cisco cited January's stock-market fluctuations. Stocks have regained ground since then, but orders for campus network gear haven’t rebounded, CEO Chuck Robbins said Wednesday. Overall switching revenue was down 3 percent in the quarter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Beyond Jenkins: 7 devops tools

The need for speed in the software development cycle has given rise to a number of valuable automation tools for developers. Chief among these tools are those aimed at facilitating the continuous integration and continuous delivery of software projects. Through these CI/CD tools, development teams can keep software up-to-date and quickly put it into production.Jenkins is among the best-known CI/CD systems, and it is fast becoming the engine for devops, managing the dev side. A key benefit of Jenkins is the wealth of plug-ins developed for it, providing capabilities that range from extending the number of version control systems Jenkins supports to accommodations for IBM mainframes. Spun out of the Hudson project first launched by Sun Microsystems, Jenkins recently hit Version 2, with improvements to its usability and security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here