RadioFreeHPC

IO500 Benchmark Gets TractionStorage is complicated and benchmarking it has too many complexities for the traditional kernel-like or application-specific approaches. Thanks to a few experienced and tenacious researchers, and the community that supports them, the IO500 has managed to put a credible stake in the ground, and is getting traction, with 101 entries on the current list and expecting many more by SC19. ReadioFreeHPC hosts the IO500 Steering Committee to do a deep dive. "The steering committee is the decision body ensuring the development and curation of the benchmark and its results but also responsible to resolve ethical issues." Henry and Shahin ask the hard questions, or so they think! John Bent (Seagate), Julian Kunkel (University of Reading), and George Markomanolis (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) join RadioFreeHPC's virtual studio. We missed the fourth member of the team, Jay Lofstead (Sandia National Laboratories) due to scheduling conflicts. We also missed Dan once more as he was navigating airports and planes coming back from Australia. "The IO-500 has been developed together with the community and its development is still ongoing. The benchmark is essentially a benchmark suite bundled with execution rules. It harnesses existing and trusted open source benchmarks. The goal for the benchmark is to capture user-experienced performance. Henry Newman's Feel-Good Security CornerThe segment that is rapidly establishing itself as the go-to place for why being online is just too dangerous. Our spirits are lifted again as Henry describes a ransomware attack on a back-up site for dental offices in Wisconsin. There go insurance data, contact information, etc. Ransomware Bites Dental Data Backup FirmPerCSoft, a Wisconsin-based company that manages a remote data backup service relied upon by hundreds of dental offices across the country, is struggling to restore access to client systems after falling victim to a ransomware attack.Catch of the WeekMining cryptocurrencies is compute intensive. The high levels of required electricity has made the topic visible and controversial. So where would you go if you want a lot of electricity? Why, the nearest nuclear power reactor, of course. Shahin talks about crafty folks who have done just that! Employees connect nuclear plant to the internet so they can mine cryptocurrencyUkrainian authorities are investigating a potential security breach at a local nuclear power plant after employees connected parts of its internal network to the internet so they could mine cryptocurrency.Henry describes a few ISPs who ended up stealing communication spectrum from, guess where, the airport, obviously. And here's the thing about at least some of these incidents: the whole thing is so complex now that it can be hard to tell incompetence from malice. American ISPs fined $75,000 for fuzzing airport's weather radar by stealing spectrumThree ISPs will be fined $25,000 apiece by America's broadband watchdog, the FCC, for interfering with weather signals in Puerto Rico. Boom Solutions, Integra Wireless, and WinPR were all found to be using devices for their point-to-point broadband that were “misconfigured,” according to the regulator this week. This caused interference with a doppler weather radar station at San Juan international airport.Listen in to hear the full conversation.Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

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The 31st Hot Chips ConferenceShahin reports from the Hot Chips conference with Henry and new guest Glenn Heinle, a veteran of AI, HPC, and Storage worlds and currently at Keeper Tech. The team discusses and debates the highlights of the conference and the hottest of the Hot Chips. Here are a few notes and images to prepare you for the podcast. AMD CEO Dr. Su's talk was all about High Performance Computing, used more in its English meaning than a market segment. The evidence that HPC is going mainstream is mounting. TSMC took a perhaps overly literal definition of Moore's law and talked about transistor density and the killer apps that have driven the fabrication industry. The giant wafer-scale chip from Cerebras is definitely a head turner, and solving a lot of cool problems along the way, but "is it a monument or a market?" as Shahin put it. Upmem showed what it sees as a practical approach to processor-in-memory, producing standard-interface DIMMs with embedded processors and a novel programming model. Jintide showed a cool behavioral analytics approach to actual full CPUs, aiming to monitor its traffic in real time and flagging misbehavior.  Shahin calls this general approach "Wide Packet Inspection" as a contrast to the traditional "Deep Packet Inspection." So, car companies and other manufacturers may just have enough volume and interest to roll their own. Tesla talked about their Full Self Driving inference chip, the what-is-the-word?, bespoke AI chip that meets only their requirements and nothing else and comes in at 40 Watts. Henry Newman's Feel-Good Security Corner"Turn off your Bluetooth", says Henry as he talks about the now-famous KNOB vulnerability, which is obviously serious enough to have its own web site! Shahin points out how the equivalent of VPN for Bluetooth and other protocols are out there and references the company he works with, Afero, who has developed this and is thus not affected. KNOB Attack Weakens Bluetooth EncryptionIt turns out Bluetooth might have more in common with doors than we thought. Researchers disclosed a new attack they called Key Negotiation of Bluetooth (KNOB) that affects every device released before 2018 (and potentially some released after) because of an issue with the Bluetooth protocol itself. This attack can be used to make it easier to brute-force the encryption keys used by the devices.Catch of the WeekGlenn talks about a 1-inch (cubed) full Linux computer: This Linux computer plus router is the size of a ring boxIf there's one thing that stayed consistent through the last decade or so of tech industry turmoil, it's the love affair between techies and Linux. There's just a ton you can do with the OS, and its open-source format means you can customize your rig from the ground up.Bluetooth is not enough! Henry asks us to cancel our credit card too if we have shopped at Hy-Vee: Breach at Hy-Vee Supermarket Chain Tied to Sale of 5M+ Stolen Credit, Debit CardsOn Tuesday of this week, one of the more popular underground stores peddling credit and debit card data stolen from hacked merchants announced a blockbuster new sale: More than 5.3 million new accounts belonging to cardholders from 35 U.S. states. Multiple sources now tell KrebsOnSecurity that the card data came from compromised gas pumps, coffee shops and restaurants operated by Hy-Vee, an Iowa-based company that operates a chain of more than 245 supermarkets throughout the Midwestern United States. Shahin puts in a plug for a meetup group he has formed called Enterprise IoT. Sharing insights about the challenges and successes in Enterprise IoTWe will discuss all aspects of building and scaling commercial IoT products. Topics include building a business case, assessing end-user benefits, selecting connectivity hardware, software development for embedded-mobile-cloud including multi-product mobile apps, security, privacy, cloud back-end, analytics and AI, remote control, commerce, governance, the relevance of cryptocurre

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Cray Pulls an Exascale Hat TrickGuess who's having a great year? Think Aurora, Frontier, and El Capitan. Cray has put some nice numbers on the accounts receivable ledger, and these are not ordinary numbers. The Exascale era is being defined substantially by the DOE Coral program and the commercial markets are watching as their computing needs start looking like those of the national labs. In that context, Cray's clean sweep makes its leadership in this area very important. All of this is happening as Cray gears up to become what we hope to be an important part of HPE. The last time Cray sold anything like this to anyone was Cray BSD going to Sun, and that ended up being a multibillion dollar juggernaut. Exascale is a bigger deal, especially as supercomputing goes mainstream because of AI and data science. Exciting times. And kudos to HPE for snapping up Cray at the right time. The impact of AI on ScienceSpeaking of AI, there is a series of town halls is being held around the nation by Argonne National Labs "aimed at collecting community input on the opportunities and challenges facing the scientific community in the era of convergence of High Performance Computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and the expected integration of large-scale simulation, advanced data analysis, data driven predictive modeling, theory, and high-throughput experiments. The term we are using to represent the next generation of methods and scientific opportunity is 'AI for Science'." Co-chairing the town halls are Rick Stevens of Argonne, Kathy Yelick from Berkeley Labs, and Oak Ridge Labs' Jeff Nichols. Dan references a very good interview with Rick Stevens. Henry Newman's Feel-Good Security CornerHenry delights us all once again by describing how your camera can be an "Enter Here" sign for malware: Canon DSLR Camera Infected with Ransomware Over the AirVulnerabilities in the image transfer protocol used in digital cameras enabled a security researcher to infect with ransomware a Canon EOS 80D DSLR over a rogue WiFi connection. A host of six flaws discovered in the implementation of the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) in Canon cameras, some of them offering exploit options for a variety of attacks.Catch of the WeekIt was a pretty full episode and so we skip Catch-of-the-Week segment this week. Listen in to hear the full conversation.Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

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AMD Victory LapAMD mojo continues as it pushes Moore's law one more time. RadioFree looks into the AMD Rome CPU, a beast that brings back the glory days of Opteron and establishes itself as the chip to have, and establishes AMD as the company to beat. New Segment: Henry Newman's Feel-Good Security CornerHenry typically looks out for you by tracking the week's most interesting cybersecurity stories. This calls for a new segment on the show. Shahin thinks Henry has deftly branded his "Catch of the Week" and getting himself off that segment. Certainly looks like it this time. AT&T workers took $1 million in bribes to unlock 2 million phones, DOJ saysAn indictment alleges that "Fahd recruited and paid AT&T insiders to use their computer credentials and access to disable AT&T's proprietary locking software that prevented ineligible phones from being removed from AT&T's network," a DOJ announcement yesterday said.Catch of the Week Shahin:Shahin wants you to check out a cool event and the excellent talks that are posted. This is the meeting on the future of computing held by the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program: "among the oldest and largest of formal Federal programs that coordinate the activities of multiple agencies to tackle multidisciplinary, multitechnology, and multisector R&D needs. The 24 NITRD member agencies now invest approximately $5 billion annually in R&D programs that identify, develop, and transition to practical use the advanced networking and IT capabilities needed by the Federal Government and the Nation." Future Computing Community of Interest Meeting, August 5-6, 2019, NITRD NCOGoal: The Future Computing (FC) Community of Interest Meeting will explore the computing landscape for the coming decade and beyond, along with emerging and future application drivers, to inform agencies and to identify potential opportunities as well as gaps. It will also examine new software concepts needed for the effective use of advances that come with the future computing systems to ensure that the federal government is poised to respond to unanticipated challenges and opportunities.Dan:Dan's Catch of the Week is Rant of the Week as he complains about the complexity of creating a professional web site. Shahin agrees. Henry is not so sure but then he hasn't tried it himself yet. 30 years after the web was created, the complexity of using it for anything with reasonable complexity is still so cumbersome. What's up with that? Listen in to hear the full conversation.Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

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Spoofing the SpoofersHenry has a brilliant idea to weaponize his password generator against phishing attacks. Intel Drops Omni-PathHenry and Shahin take a close look at the history of High Performance Interconnects, recent news, and how the market is changing profoundly. The departure of Intel from this segment is good news for some, and it remains to be seen what strategy Intel will adopt for the HPC market. Catch of the Week Henry:Henry brings up one his favorite topics (going all the way back to our very first episode): the dreaded Silent Data Corruption, this time as part of the testing that the 737 MAX is undergoing. As he's wont to do, Shahin puts this in the context of our collective transition from the Industrial Age to Information Age. He thinks the series of issues with the plane prove just how difficult it is for manufacturers to go more and more digital. Another rewrite for 737 Max software as cosmic bit-flipping tests glitch out systems – reportTesting focused on flipping five bits, said to control some of the most crucial parameters: positioning of flight controls and activation state of flight control systems, such as the infamous MCAS anti-stall system.Shahin:Shahin thinks the mention of building an AI supercomputer by Microsoft is intriguing. They already offer Cray capability in Azure and inquiring minds want to know more. Microsoft to invest $1 billion in OpenAI, will jointly develop new supercomputer technologiesMicrosoft and OpenAI also plan to work together on new AI supercomputing technologies to solve the world’s hardest problems. “The companies will focus on building a computational platform in Azure of unprecedented scale, which will train and run increasingly advanced AI models, include hardware technologies that build on Microsoft’s supercomputing technology, and adhere to the two companies’ shared principles on ethics and trust..."Listen in to hear the full conversation.Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

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