Friday, September 23, 2016

[Links of the day] 23/09/2016 : Intel's 3dxpoint vanishing performance, VLDB16, Core to Core HW queue engine

  • 3dxpoint performance evaporate : seems that Intel is heavily scaling back its xpoint NVM performance claim. From 1000x to 10x ( still good but a far cry from what was promised). It seems that Intel had to push the technology early in order to counter a potential acquisition of its partner, Micron, by a competitor. Announcing the technology surely propped the share price making an acquisition difficult. 
  • VLDB : very large databases 2016 proceedings are out. Sadly its one big zip file and didn't have time to go through it.
  • CAF : the authors propose a hardware core to core communication offloading engine. Providing an efficient queuing mechanism for transferring data between cores. I am not sure 100% of the value but the concept is interesting, let see if it catch on and if it can plays well in heterogeneous environment of today's datacenter. As core to core is slowly replaced with cored to GPU or core to FPGA or core to NVM.

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

[Links of the day] 21/09/2016 : NAS 16 , cloud optical interconnect, Netmiko

  • NAS : 2016 networking, architecture and storage conference, selected papers: 
    • CircularCache : storage wide cache system using virtual queue mechanism for load balancing usage and performance accross the cluster.
    • Active Burst-Buffer : when storage is not fast enough you start to move your processing int he buffers to save time
  • Emerging Optical interconnect Technology for the Cloud : Finisar presentation , the largest fiber optic transceivers provider in the world, on the trend in cloud interconnect technology. Like HPC and other system its all about power / bits / seconds. Power decrease while bandwidth needs to increase. What is interesting is the impact of the topology used on the fabric requirement ( HPC vs hyperscale datacenter). What is impressive is that aggregate bandwidth doubles every 3 years but that cost per Gbps is lower for higher channels counts at the same point in time.
  • Netmiko : paramiko wrapper simplifying SSH connections to network device

Monday, September 19, 2016

[Links of the day] 19/09/2016 : #AI bias, Incremental consistency , Customizable datacenter

  • Stuck in a Pattern : as predictive policing tools are being widely adopted in corporation and public organisation. There is little transparency as how these systems have been configured. It seems that the current set of software designed and deployed may reinforce discrimination and inequality under a veil of marketing publicizing intelligent solution. 
  • Incremental consistency guarantees : The authors propose a system that instead of providing a single "hard" consistent answer to a query a system that will provide multiple reply with incremental consistency guarantee albeit with incremental latency cost. This allow system to make decision based on their consistency requirement as well as performance needs. This is interesting as it would allow some application to take decision based on consistent enough information while being able to revise their decision if needed once receiving a higher level of consistency response.
  • Customizable Computing at Datacenter Scale : NAS 16 keynote , it seems that HPC and exascale system are slowly converging toward an hybrid model with heterogeneous resources, FPGA, GPGU , CPU , etc.. 

Friday, September 16, 2016

[Links of the day] 16/09/2016 : Sigcomm 16 conference papers , Golang Numa scheduler, ICML videos

  • Sigcomm 2016 conference : schedule, paper and slides. I already mentioned Microsoft paper yesterday on RDMA at scale over Ethernet fabric. Here is a few more selected paper: 
    • Real-time Distributed MIMO Systems : MIT achieved the feat to create a distributed MIMO system operating across devices with independent clocks. This allow system to clearly maximize bandwidth usage while maintaining fairness. 
    • Globally Synchronized Time via Datacenter Networks : Authors proposed to use a hardware solution leveraging low level network fabric for maintaining synchronous clock across data-center. Basically they embed within the fabric extra information for maintaining coherent time. It allow a 200ns clock skew within a 6 hops data-center. Which is quite impressive even if it comes at the cost of requiring HW modification.
    • Evolve or Die: High-Availability Design Principles Drawn from Google's Network Infrastructure : Google approach to network infrastructure management and more specifically how they look at incident resolution and mitigate risk. The main goal of their effort described in this paper is to treat a change to the network as business as usual and not exceptional events.
  • Numa-aware scheduler for go : as machines get bigger, Numa optimization start to creep up as a requirement. Especially with language using garbage collection and automatic scheduling like go. This proposal show a possible approach for Golang to handle Numa setup.
  • ICML 2016 conference : international machine learning conference videos


Wednesday, September 14, 2016

[Links of the day] 14/09/2016 : Ethic in AI , Survey of fully homomorphic encryption, RDMA over Ethernet at scale at Microsoft

  • Ethical Preference-Based Decision SupportSystems : when AI and other autonomous agent start to be more ubiquitous in the human environment. As the decision of these systems will start to have a greater impact on our daily life, trust will need to be build and to achieve that these system will need that they are perceived to act in a moral and ethical way. 
  • A brief survey of Fully Homomorphic Encryption, computing on encrypted data : fully homomorphic encryption allow you to manipulate encripted data without decrypting it. This is great for database and other systems as it allow service to modify and update information without the need to know its content. Effectively partitioning operation from knowledge. However this comes at a cost (but its going down). Might finally end up with the security pipe dream where the data is immediately encrypted and is only manipulated in this form until it is finally consumed.
  • RDMA over Commodity Ethernet at Scale : It is interesting to see that RDMA start to slowly permeate hyper-scale data-center. However it is even more interesting to see that Microsoft decided to go for the RoCE version of it instead of infiniband. It make sens as there was a lot of investment in scaling the Ethernet for their cloud infrastructure and allow a lot of reuse and collocate normal and RDMA traffic on a single underlying fabric.


Monday, September 12, 2016

[Links of the day] 12/09/2016 : Multi Hash libs, Papers we love and Goto Conference

  • OmniHash and Rhash : Omni hash is a Python multi hash library , RHash provide similar functionality but in C . They are both small and versatile.
  • Goto Chicago , Amsterdam , and Stockholm conference 2016 videos : loads of good content and some rehashed one.
  • Papers we love conference : I am so jealous of the people who can attend. This looks like an amazing conference, I will link to the slides deck / video as soon as they are up.

Tuesday, September 06, 2016

[Links of the day] 06/09/2016 : KVM forum 2016, Beginner's guide to neural net, Seeing with Wi-Fi

  • KVM forum 2016 : KVM forum videos are up, notable talk on vGPU by NVDIA. This is really interesting as it pave the way to multi tenant GPU in virtual environment. Which allow resource sharing and hence RoI of such device. 
  • A Beginner's Guide To Understanding Convolutional Neural Networks : 3 part blog post explaining neural network, this is a really good introduction. [part-1 , part-2, part-3]
  • We Can "See" You via Wi-Fi : researcher devise a way to identify action using Wi-Fi. Their method allow to some extend the recognition of human interaction. This is really interesting as Wi-Fi is pretty much ubiquitous. It would allow anybody to have the capability to peek into environment without the need to costly setup. 

Monday, September 05, 2016

[Links of the day] 05/09/2016 : Neural Net Architectures, MIT 100 years of AI report, Queuing theory textbook

  • Neural Network Architectures : this article provide an overview of the evolution of the neural network architecture and the different breakthrough that lead us to the current deep learning approach. The authors provide detail overview of the deep learning architecture and the logic behind their evolution and implementation. 
  • One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100) : MIT report on AI, where does it fit and where it will be. This is a excellent high level overview of the implication of the current boom in machine learning, deep learning, agent, AI trend. This report presents insights in the impact of daily life and business. 
  • Introduction to Queueing Theory andStochastic Teletraffic Models : textbook providing everything you want to know about queuing theory. 

Friday, September 02, 2016

[Links of the Day] 02/09/2016 : Row Hammer in the cloud , Usenix Security conf and Agile IT Book

  • USENIX Security '16 : usenix security conference proceedings are out, there is two notable paper in there: 
    • Off-Path TCP Exploits: Global Rate Limit Considered Dangerous : it seems that there is a flaw in current TCP sepcificatin and implementation that  allows a blind off-path attacker to infer if any two arbitrary hosts on the Internet are communicating using a TCP connection. This could allow large scale denial of service or worse . 
    • One Bit Flips, One Cloud Flops: Cross-VM Row Hammer Attacks and Privilege Escalation : this one sound scarier than the precedent paper. However the inherent limitation of the approach reduce the potential scope of attack. It basically leverage Row Hammer procedure to attack neighbor VM within a cloud system. However, the caveat is that it requires that the cloud provider allow to run paravirtualised guest, can only target PV guest. And is easily defeated if the RAM used is non ECC. Which is the default RAM used in any decent data-center. 
  • Agile IT Management: From Startup to Enterprise really good book providing a well documented set of observations on IT’s current challenges that can orient you for more effective decisions and actions in your journey toward IT excellence. But beware of buying too much of the hype of one solution fits all. Agile is just one part of the solution, old waterfall still has its place as well as intermediary one. The makes the difference between wisdom and knowledge. 


Thursday, September 01, 2016

[Links of the Day] 01/09/2016 : Cloud reference model, Scaling with Threads and economyics of response time

  • Economic Value of Rapid Response Time : classic 1989 paper demonstrating that lower software response time yield significant economic benefit with 
  • ClouNS : A Cloud-native Application Reference Model for Enterprise Architects. The authors propose a reference model for cloud-native applications that relies only on a small subset of well standardized IaaS services. The reference model can be used for codifying cloud technologies. It can guide technology identification, classification, adoption, research and development processes for cloud-native application and for vendor lock-in aware enterprise architecture engineering methodologies.
  • Scaling to Thousands of Threads : excellent blog post looking at the misconception that thread based system are inherently flawed when it comes to availability.