Japan Reclaims Top Ranking on Latest TOP500 List of World’s Supercomputers

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The New Number One

The K Computer, built by Fujitsu, currently combines 68544 SPARC64 VIIIfx CPUs, each with eight cores, for a total of 548,352 cores—almost twice as many as any other system in the TOP500. The K Computer is also more powerful than the next five systems on the list combined.

via Japan Reclaims Top Ranking on Latest TOP500 List of World’s Supercomputers | TOP500 Supercomputing Sites.

Here is another article about this.

Protecting the pre-OS environment with UEFI

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Quick summary

  • UEFI allows firmware to implement a security policy
  • Secure boot is a UEFI protocol not a Windows 8 feature
  • UEFI secure boot is part of Windows 8 secured boot architecture
  • Windows 8 utilizes secure boot to ensure that the pre-OS environment is secure
  • Secure boot doesn’t “lock out” operating system loaders, but is a policy that allows firmware to validate authenticity of components
  • OEMs have the ability to customize their firmware to meet the needs of their customers by customizing the level of certificate and policy management on their platform
  • Microsoft does not mandate or control the settings on PC firmware that control or enable secured boot from any operating system other than Windows

Via Protecting the pre-OS environment with UEFI – Building Windows 8 – Site Home – MSDN Blogs.

Copyright Law Can Meet the Needs of Software Developers

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Around 2001, DataTreasury ran out of money and had to lay off most of its staff. For most startups, that would have been the end of the story. But DataTreasury had an ace in the hole: a portfolio of broad patents. One of them covered the concept of attaching a scanner (an “imaging subsystem for capturing the documents”) to a server (a “central data processing subsystem”) via a “communication network.”

It’s hard to see how anyone could build a digital check-clearing system without infringing this patent.

via Patently Absurd – Copyright Law Can Meet the Needs of Software Developers | Timothy B. Lee | Cato Institute: Commentary.

HowTos/KVM

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For the impatient, here is our simple script. We’ll explain it afterwards. This is assuming that you’re on a 192.168.1.0/24 network with no DHCP server.

#!/bin/sh

PATH=$PATH:/usr/sbin:/sbin

sudo brctl addbr br0

sudo ifconfig eth0 0.0.0.0

sudo brctl addif br0 eth0

sudo ifconfig br0 192.168.1.120 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

sudo route add -net 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 br0

sudo route add default gw 192.168.1.1 br0

sudo tunctl -b -u john

sudo ifconfig tap0 up

sudo brctl addif br0 tap0

export SDL_VIDEO_X11_DGAMOUSE=0

sudo iptables -I RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -i br0 -j ACCEPT

qemu-kvm ~/win2k.img -m 512 -net nic -net tap,ifname=tap0,script=no

via HowTos/KVM – CentOS Wiki.

Is VMware’s dominance of the virtualization market under threat?

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But VMware has dominated the virtualization market for so many years that the massive shift found in the survey may take longer than expected, if it happens at all. The virtualization layer, primarily composed of VMware software, has so many hooks into security, backup, automation, disaster recovery and various management tools that swapping hypervisors is no simple matter, argues an analyst who read the results of the survey, but was not involved in conducting it.

via Is VMware’s dominance of the virtualization market under threat?.

And here’s the conclusion.

VMware shops are certainly kicking the tires on Hyper-V and deploying it at least in test and development scenarios, and Microsoft is trying to lay the groundwork for both small businesses and enterprises to switch from VMware to Hyper-V. If 38 percent of businesses do change primary hypervisors within the next year, the folks in Redmond are likely to be the major beneficiary.