There’s a shake-up – and a scandal – in the Top500 ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
The U.S. has retaken first place in the Top500 list after five years of dominance by China. Computers built by IBM for the U.S. Department of Energy have pushed the previous two record-holders, both Chinese, into second and fourth place.
But the previous fourth placeholder, Japan’s Gyoukou, is nowhere to be found, after one of its creators was arrested on suspicion of fraud.
The team designing Oak Ridge National Laboratory's new Summit supercomputer correctly predicted the rise of data-centric computing – but its builders couldn't forecast how bad weather would disrupt the delivery of key components.
Nevertheless, almost four years after IBM won the contract to build it, Summit is up and running on schedule. Jack Wells, Director of Science for Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), expects the 200-petaflop machine to be fully operational by early next year.
"It's the world's most powerful and largest supercomputer for science," he said.
Spreading bad routing information to your neighbors on the internet isn’t just bad manners, it could be bad for business.
That, at least, is the message that the Internet Society (ISOC) wants to spread, as it calls on internet exchange points (IXPs) to help eliminate the most common threats to the internet’s routing system.
If they do so, then it’s good news for their members, the ISPs that interconnect there, and for those ISPs’ customers, who will benefit from more secure and robust internet access.
IBM正在扩大其大型机范围内具有一些窄模型 - ZR1和跳岩II - 是瘦足以安装在一个标准的19英寸机架，这将回答的潜在批评客户在2017年太大7月推出的笨重Z14以适应他们的数据中心（见上面的照片）。
除了新的，更小，包装以其Z14硬件，IBM还推出了安全服务容器2020欧洲杯预赛技术。这使得使用Z14的加密加速器和其他安全功能来保护集装箱化应用免受不必要的干扰。 <抛开类=“fakesidebar”> [查看的REVIEW: VMware’s vSAN 6.6 and hear IDC’s top 10 data center predictions . | Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ]
When IBM introduced the z14 last July, with an accelerator to make encrypting information standard practice in the data center, there was one problem: The mainframe's two-door cabinet was far too deep and too wide to fit in standard data center aisles.
The Open Compute Project began in 2011 when Facebook published the designs of some homebrew servers it had built to make its data centers run more efficiently.
Facebook hoped that other companies would adopt and adapt its initial designs, pushing down costs and improving quality – and they have: Sales of hardware built to Open Compute Project designs topped $1.2 billion in 2017, double the previous year, and are expected to reach $6 billion by 2021.
Those figures, from IHS Markit, exclude hardware spending by OCP board members Facebook, Intel, Rackspace, Microsoft and Goldman Sachs, which all use OCP to some degree. The spend is still a small part of the overall market for data-center systems, which Gartner estimated was worth $178 billion in 2017, but IHS expects OCP’s part to grow 59 percent annually, while Gartner forecasts that the overall market will stagnate, at least through 2019.
Supercomputing is becoming super-efficient. The highest climber in the latest Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers is also one of the highest scorers on the Green500 ranking of the world's most efficient.
But the November 2017 edition of the Top500 and Green500 is also remarkable in other ways, as it marks a tipping point in U.S. dominance of the list.
[ See these top supercomputers at our slideshow 10 of the world’s fastest supercomputers. ]
Chinese systems now outnumber U.S. systems on the list by 202 to 144, a reversal of the situation just six months ago, when the U.S. had 169 systems in the Top500 vs China's 160. It will still be a long while before third-placed Japan overtakes the U.S.: It has 35 systems in the list, followed by Germany with 20, France with 18, and the UK with 15.
What if every package shipped contained a $0.20 tracker chip that could report when and approximately where the package was opened?
That's a service that internet-of-things wireless network operator Sigfox thinks its partners could offer over the next year.
It demonstrated a prototype wireless module contained in a cardboard envelope at its partner meeting in Prague on Tuesday, triggering the sending of a text message when the envelope was opened.
Ripping open the envelope, Sigfox scientific director Christophe Fourtet showed off what he described as "an ultra-thin battery, ultra-thin contacts, and an ultra-low cost module, a few tens of cents." Seconds later, his phone buzzed to report delivery of the package.
Google is offering enterprises a new way to build hybrid infrastructure, with a service that extends corporate networks into its cloud platform.
Called Dedicated Interconnect, it allows companies to treat servers in Google's cloud as if they were part of their own private address space. This can be useful for businesses operating in financial services, video editing, or other industries that need to be able to scale up processing capabilities, but want to keep their data on a private network, according to product manager John Veizades.
By buying multiple 10 Gbit/s connections, customers can boost the throughput of the interconnect between the cloud and their on-premises networks, or improve its availability, or both.
Bluetooth is about to get some significant new mesh networking capabilities -- and the best bit is, you may not need new hardware to benefit from them.
Mesh networking will make it simpler to connect sensors across industrial sites, or to create smart home or building automation networks. Rather than wasting energy shouting to be heard by a distant gateway, devices will be able to whisper to their neighbors, asking them to pass messages.
It will offer a new way for devices to join the Internet of Things. Once a building has a mesh network to control lighting, say, other devices can use it as wireless infrastructure for other applications such as asset tracking and wayfinding, said Martin Woolley, technical program manager at Bluetooth SIG, the organization behind the Bluetooth standard.
IBM wants businesses to use its new z14 mainframe to encrypt pretty much everything -- an approach to security it calls pervasive encryption.
Encrypting everything, and restricting access to the keys, is one way to reduce the risk and impact of data breaches. It can reduce the threat surface by 92 percent, according to research commissioned by IBM.
To make such pervasive encryption viable, the z14 has four times as much silicon devoted to cryptographic accelerators as its predecessor, the z13, giving it seven times the cryptographic performance.
In as little as four hours, the bad guys can reverse engineer a software patch for an open-source content management system (CMS) and build an exploit capable of turning millions of websites into spammers, malware hosts or DDoS attackers.
"There's just not enough time for normal site owners to apply the updates," said David Jardin, a member of the German association CMS Garden, which promotes the use of open source CMS software including Drupal, Joomla, WordPress and others.
To help ordinary users patch more quickly, CMS Garden is participating in a government-funded project, Secure Websites and Content Management Systems (Siwecos), to make the websites of SMEs more secure.
Businesses dragging their heels over rolling out TLS 1.2 on their website might have an excuse to delay a little longer: Version 1.3 of the TLS (Transport Layer Security) encryption protocol will be finalized later this year, and early deployments of it are already under way.
TLS, the successor to SSL, is used to negotiate secure connections to web or mail servers, encrypting data on the move.
Six years in the making, TLS 1.2 added new, stronger encryption options -- but retained all the older, weaker encryption schemes that had gone before in the name of backward compatibility. Unfortunately, this meant that someone able to perform a man-in-the-middle attack could often downgrade connections to a weaker encryption system without the user being aware.
Uber is now a driverless vehicle, after CEO Travis Kalanick stepped down Tuesday.
Kalanick had already decided to take an indefinite leave of absence from the company, but now he's leaving for good. The move came at the request of the board of directors, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
The company has already lost Kalanick's right-hand man, Senior Vice President of Business Emil Michael, following a number of gaffes including his suggestion that the company target a journalist who had been investigating the company.