But if you really dig down into Asgardia’s terms and conditions, you’ll find that those privileges are still subject to earthly copyright laws — they’re set up under the laws of Austria.
Source: The first ‘nation in space’ has officially left Earth – CNET
“We’ve been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning. This is roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future (three generations of Moore’s Law),” the blog said. “TPU is tailored to machine learning applications, allowing the chip to be more tolerant of reduced computational precision, which means it requires fewer transistors per operation. Because of this, we can squeeze more operations per second into the silicon, use more sophisticated and powerful machine learning models, and apply these models more quickly, so users get more intelligent results more rapidly.”
Source: Google’s Tensor Processing Unit could advance Moore’s Law 7 years into the future | PCWorld
Therefore Brewer’s group proposes increasing the height of the standard HDD, currently established at an average of one inch for 3.5” disks and 15mm for 2.5” drives, in order to store more platters per HDD – an economical approach from the point of view of packaging, optimal use of printed circuit boards and the drive’s motor actuator.
This week we’ll look at Amazon’s mighty cloud infrastructure, including how it builds its data centers and where they live (and why).
Facebook is now experimenting with a storage prototype that uses racks of Blu-ray discs instead of hard drives. The discs are held in groups of 12 in locked cartridges and are extracted by a robotic arm whenever they’re needed.
One rack contains 10,000 discs, and is capable of storing a petabyte of data, or one million gigabytes.
via Why Facebook is stockpiling Blu-ray discs – Aug. 21, 2014.
Bitcoin mining equipment company KnC Miner has begun construction on its new facility in Boden, about 10 miles down the road from Facebook’s server farm in Lulea. The data center is being built in a facility previously used as a helicopter hangar for the Swedish armed forces. It will be retrofitted to house thousands of custom Bitcoin mining rigs built by KnC Miner, one of a host of new vendors that has emerged to serve the growing market for Bitcoin hardware.
KnC Miner is based in Stockholm, Sweden and has established a leadership position in Bitcoin mining rigs powered by ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) to crunch data for creating and tracking bitcoins. The company says it has sold $75 million in hardware since June, with customers in 120 countries.
via Bitcoin Miners Building 10 Megawatt Data Center in Sweden.
The top key finding of the 451 Research report: “Cloud computing once promised simple, usage-based charging for resources, similar to other utilities such as electricity; unfortunately, the current reality is far from this ideal.”
The vendors further muddy the water by not being out front about their pricing; 451 Research found that only 64 percent of providers publish their pricing online.
via Confirmed: Cloud infrastructure pricing is absurd | ITworld.
Thus, the scale and agility of modern data centers put data center networking at odds with the existing network models. Some problems, such as the number of virtual networks, required the development of new technologies such as VXLAN, while others have required a redesign of the network architecture deployed in the data center. But the problem of managing the network is not rooted in any failure of networking, rather in the design of the network OS.
via Your next network operating system is Linux | Networking – InfoWorld.
Essentially, we can write the equivalent of a device driver to synchronize the kernel state of these data structures with the hardware. Silicon switching ports can be made to appear like NICs to the OS. Thanks to Linux’s Netlink model, a device driver can sit by the side and listen to everything that’s going on with the kernel state — interface up/down, routing entries added/deleted either by user or routing protocols, netfilter entries added or deleted — and synchronize that state with the hardware. Furthermore, the driver can sync the state of counters from the hardware with the kernel state allowing native Linux tools such as ethtool, iptables, or /proc/net/dev to display the correct information, completely unaware that these values are coming from the hardware. Cumulus Networks has developed the first such solution, but others with a similar model may not be far away.
The design of the Zumwalt solves that problem by using off-the-shelf hardware—mostly IBM blade servers running Red Hat Linux—and putting it in a ruggedized server room. Those ruggedized server rooms are called Electronic Modular Enclosures (EMEs), sixteen self-contained, mini data centers built by Raytheon.
Measuring 35 feet long, 8 feet high, and 12 feet wide, the 16 EMEs have more than 235 equipment cabinets (racks) in total. The EMEs were all configured and pre-tested before being shipped to Bath, Maine, to be installed aboard the Zumwalt.
via The Navy’s newest warship is powered by Linux | Ars Technica.
Putting all of the pieces together is a collection of middleware running on those IBM blade servers. Many of the shipboard systems use a commercial publish/subscribe middleware platform to send updates to operator consoles. But for other systems that need to be more tightly coupled (like, for example, missile launch commands), the Navy has specified the use of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)—the military’s favorite mission-critical middleware model. (The software for the Joint Tactical Radio System’s software-defined radios was also developed using CORBA.)
Microsoft Corp. plans to raise the price of the Datacenter edition of the upcoming R2 release of Windows Server 2012 by 28 percent, adding to what analysts call a record number of price increases for enterprise software products from Redmond.
According to licensing data sheets available for download from the Windows Server 2012 R2 Website (PDF), the price of a single license of Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter will be $6,155, compared to $4,809 today—plus the cost of a Client Access Licenses (CAL) for every user or device connecting to the server.
via Microsoft to Squeeze Datacenters on Price of WinServer 2012 R2.