With Vista, TACC Now Has Three Paths To Its Future Horizon Supercomputer

The national supercomputing centers in the United States, Europe, and China are not only rich enough to build very powerful machines, but they are rich enough, thanks to their national governments, to underwrite and support multiple and somewhat incompatible architectures to hedge their bets and mitigate their risk.

With Vista, TACC Now Has Three Paths To Its Future Horizon Supercomputer was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Tech Bytes: Building An Automation-Ready Service Catalog With NetOrca (Sponsored)

Let’s say you’ve built a set of automations for your network infrastructure, and now you want teams or departments within your organization to use those automations. Our Tech Bytes sponsor NetOrca offers a service catalog that provides a simple front-end to make it easy for internal customers to come and consume those capabilities you’ve worked... Read more »

NB464: Juniper Begins AI Push Into The Data Center; VMware Customers Confront Higher Prices

This week we discuss new products from Juniper including synthetic testing software for its Mist wireless networks and its first step toward integrating its Apstra data center software with AI. VMware clarifies its product strategy as customers face rising prices, and undersea cables in the Red Sea face potential threats. Nokia and Chinese mobile device... Read more »

VPP Python API

VPP

About this series

Ever since I first saw VPP - the Vector Packet Processor - I have been deeply impressed with its performance and versatility. For those of us who have used Cisco IOS/XR devices, like the classic ASR (aggregation service router), VPP will look and feel quite familiar as many of the approaches are shared between the two.

You’ll hear me talk about VPP being API centric, with no configuration persistence, and that’s by design. However, there is this also a CLI utility called vppctl, right, so what gives? In truth, the CLI is used a lot by folks to configure their dataplane, but it really was always meant to be a debug utility. There’s a whole wealth of programmability that is not exposed via the CLI at all, and the VPP community develops and maintains an elaborate set of tools to allow external programs to (re)configure the dataplane. One such tool is my own [vppcfg] which takes a YAML specification that describes the dataplane configuration, and applies it safely to a running VPP instance.

Introduction

In case you’re interested in writing your own automation, this article is for you! I’ll provide a deep dive into Continue reading

HN718: Prisma SASE Gets Clever With TCP For Better App And User Experiences (Sponsored)

Remote and hybrid work means network engineers have to grapple with lossy residential networks such as home wireless that your work-from-home folks are using to access company resources. Their Wi-Fi sucks, and so their use of corporate resources sucks. Sure, you’ve got them plumbed into a SASE fabric, but that doesn’t fix their user experience... Read more »

The Tough Road Still Ahead For Intel In The Datacenter

A few years back, when Intel went up on the rocks with its CPU and GPU designs largely because its chip research and manufacturing did not keep pace with the manufacturing and packaging advances made by foundry rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, we said that we were rapidly moving towards a world where Intel might have 40 percent of the CPU market, AMD might have 40 percent, and Arm and RISC-V would fight over the remaining 19 percent and 1 percent remaining for other exotic datacenter compute engine chippery.

The Tough Road Still Ahead For Intel In The Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Hedge 210: Eric Chou and Technical Publishing

Have you ever thought about publishing a book or recording a professional video? It’s not as simple as proposing an idea, doing the work, and becoming famous (or infamous, as the case might be). Eric Chou joins Rick Graziani and Russ to talk about the ins and outs of technical publishing. We are planning a part 2 of this in a few months to cover things we left on the table for later discussion.

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Cyber attacks targeting Jewish and Holocaust educational websites surge by 872% in 2023

Tomorrow is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a mournful occasion to remember those who perished at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators. The Holocaust, a catastrophic event in human history, resulted in the extermination of one-third of the Jewish population in Europe — totaling six million Jews during the Second World War. It also claimed the lives of countless others from minority and disability groups targeted under the Nazis' brutal regime of intolerance.

At Cloudflare, through Project Galileo, we are committed to safeguarding Jewish and Holocaust educational websites. This initiative offers complimentary protection to vulnerable groups worldwide. You can apply for the project using this form.

Combating antisemitism with education and cyber defense

Today more than ever, it’s important to ensure educational websites about the Holocaust are protected and available. Education about the Holocaust helps communities understand the dangers of prejudice and dehumanization, and can play an important role in combating antisemitism. As only 13 countries worldwide have mandated Holocaust education, publicly available resources play an important role in ensuring access to information.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, over 1 billion people globally are reported to hold antisemitic attitudes. In the United States, the Continue reading

Reflecting on the GDPR to celebrate Privacy Day 2024

Just in time for Data Privacy Day 2024 on January 28, the EU Commission is calling for evidence to understand how the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has been functioning now that we’re nearing the 6th anniversary of the regulation coming into force.

We’re so glad they asked, because we have some thoughts. And what better way to celebrate privacy day than by discussing whether the application of the GDPR has actually done anything to improve people’s privacy?

The answer is, mostly yes, but in a couple of significant ways – no.

Overall, the GDPR is rightly seen as the global gold standard for privacy protection. It has served as a model for what data protection practices should look like globally, it enshrines data subject rights that have been copied across jurisdictions, and when it took effect, it created a standard for the kinds of privacy protections people worldwide should be able to expect and demand from the entities that handle their personal data. On balance, the GDPR has definitely moved the needle in the right direction for giving people more control over their personal data and in protecting their privacy.

In a couple of key areas, however, we Continue reading

A Handy Acronym for Troubleshooting

While I may be getting further from my days of being an active IT troubleshooter it doesn’t mean that I can’t keep refining my technique. As I spend time looking back on my formative years of doing troubleshooting either from a desktop perspective or from a larger enterprise role I find that there were always a few things that were critical to understand about the issues I was facing.

Sadly, getting that information out of people in the middle of a crisis wasn’t always super easy. I often ran into people that were very hard to communicate with during an outage or a big problem. Sometimes they were complicit because they made the mistake that caused it. They also bristled at the idea of someone else coming to fix something they couldn’t or wouldn’t. Just as often I ran into people that loved to give me lots of information that wasn’t relevant to the issue. Whether they were nervous talkers or just had a bad grasp on the situation it resulted in me having to sift through all that data to tease out the information I needed.

The Method

Today, as I look back on my career I would like Continue reading

Big Blue Bucks The Datacenter Server Recession

Some patterns are very hard to break. From the very early days of the systems business as we know it, which started six decades ago, the fourth quarter of the calendar year has been the money maker for companies like IBM, and the second quarter has been a relatively big one for those who could not get their budgets together before the end of the prior year.

Big Blue Bucks The Datacenter Server Recession was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.