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Will Facebook Go Open-Source
December 29, 2015 by admin
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Facebook has unveiled its next-generation GPU-based systems for training neural networks, Open Rack-compatible hardware code-named “Big Sur” which it plans to open source.
The social media giant’s latest machine learning system has been designed for artificial intelligence (AI) computing at a large scale, and in most part has been crafted with Nvidia hardware.
Big Sur comprises eight high-performance GPUs of up to 300 watts each, with the flexibility to configure between multiple PCI-e topologies. It makes use of Nvidia’s Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform, and as a result is twice as fast as Facebook’s previous generation rack.
“This means we can train twice as fast and explore networks twice as large,” said the firm in its engineering blog. “And distributing training across eight GPUs allows us to scale the size and speed of our networks by another factor of two.”
Facebook claims that as well as better performance, Big Sur is also far more versatile and efficient than the off-the-shelf solutions in its previous generation.
“While many high-performance computing systems require special cooling and other unique infrastructure to operate, we have optimised these new servers for thermal and power efficiency, allowing us to operate them even in our own free-air cooled, Open Compute standard data centres,” explained the company.
We spoke to Nvidia’s senior product manager for GPU Computing, Will Ramey, ahead of the launch, who has been working on the Big Sur project alongside Facebook for some time.
“The project is the first time that a complete computing system that is designed for machine learning and AI will be released as an open source solution,” said Ramey. “By taking the purpose-built design spec that Facebook has designed for their own machine learning apps and open sourcing them, people will benefit from and contribute to the project so it can move the entire industry forward.”
While Big Sur was built with Nvidia’s new Tesla M40 hyperscale accelerator in mind, it can actually support a wide range of PCI-e cards in what Facebook believes could make for better efficiencies in production and manufacturing to get more computational power for every penny that it invests.
“Servers can also require maintenance and hefty operational resources, so, like the other hardware in our data centres, Big Sur was designed around operational efficiency and serviceability,” Facebook said. “We’ve removed the components that don’t get used very much, and components that fail relatively frequently – such as hard drives and DIMMs – can now be removed and replaced in a few seconds.”
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Big Sur announcement is Facebook’s plans to open-source it and submit the design materials to the Open Compute Project. This is a bid to make it easier for AI researchers to share techniques and technologies.
“As with all hardware systems that are released into the open, it’s our hope that others will be able to work with us to improve it,” Facebook said, adding that it believes open collaboration will help foster innovation for future designs, and put us closer to building complex AI systems that will probably take over the world and kill us all.
Nvidia released its end-to-end hyperscale data centre platform last month claiming that it will let web services companies accelerate their machine learning workloads and power advanced artificial intelligence applications.
Consisting of two accelerators, Nvidia’s latest hyperscale line aims to let researchers design new deep neural networks more quickly for the increasing number of applications they want to power with AI. It also is designed to deploy these networks across the data centre. The line also includes a suite of GPU-accelerated libraries.
Courtesy-TheInq
Darkode Hacking Forum Shut Down
Law enforcement agencies from 20 countries collaborated to cripple a major computer hacking forum, and U.S. officials filed criminal charges against a dozen people associated with the website, the U.S. Department of Justice announced.
Darkode.com on is displaying a message saying the site and domain had been seized by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
Darkode, a password-protected online forum for criminal hackers, represented one of the gravest threats to the integrity of data on computers across the world, according to David Hickton, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania. “Through this operation, we have dismantled a cyber hornets’ nest of criminal hackers which was believed by many, including the hackers themselves, to be impenetrable.”
Five of the defendants face charges in Hickton’s district.
Darkode allowed hackers and other cybercriminals to sell, trade and share information and tools related to illegal computer hacking, the law enforcement agencies alleged.
Before becoming a member of Darkode, prospective participants were allegedly vetted through a process that included an invitation by a member, the DOJ said in a press release. The prospective member then pitched the skill or products he or she could bring to the forum.
Darkode members allegedly used each other’s skills and products to infect computers and electronic devices of victims around the world with malware, the DOJ said.
The takedown of the forum and the charges announced Wednesday came after the FBI’s infiltration of Darkode’s membership.
Africa To Lead Global Bandwidth Demand
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Africa’s demand for Internet access to the rest of the world will grow by an average of 51 percent every year until 2019, ahead of all other regions, according to a forecast by research company Telegeography.
Rapid economic growth and wider Internet use will drive the increase in demand, which will be met mostly by turning on unused capacity in existing cables, according to Telegeography analyst Erik Kreifeldt. Terrestrial links are in demand partly because much of Africa still relies on satellite, which is far more expensive per bit than wired broadband, he said.
Most Internet bandwidth between continents is provided by undersea cables built and financed by groups of service providers. From Africa, most of those links go to Europe. Other carriers pay to tap into those cables and link their customers to the Internet. In some parts of Africa, running cables from coastal areas to the interior is a challenge so satellite remains the major Internet source, Kreifeldt said.
The capacity of international cables landing on African shores is just a fraction of the bandwidth available between Europe, the U.S. and Asia. After seven years of the growth that Telegeography forecasts, from 2012 through 2019, Africa will have 17.2Tbps (bits per second) of links to the outside world. That’s up from just 957Gbps in 2012 but will still be only about one-quarter of the international capacity of Latin America and less than that of Canada, according to Telegeography.
The hunger for the Internet varies among African countries. Through 2019, bandwidth demand is expected to grow fastest in Angola, at 71 percent per year; Tanzania, at 68 percent; and Gabon, at 67 percent.
Many new cables have been built to Africa and around the continent in the past several years, giving service providers excess fiber capacity that can be turned on when needed, Kreifeldt said. As that fiber gets lit up and supply rises, prices should fall for enterprises and other users in African countries, he said. However, due to relative scarcity, a given amount of bandwidth between Africa and Europe costs about 10 times as much as the same size connection between Europe and North America, he said. Africa’s bandwidth gains aren’t expected to shrink that gap.
Bonets Attack U.S. Banks
January 18, 2013 by admin
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Evidence collected from a website that was recently used to flood U.S. banks with junk traffic suggests that the responsible parties behind the ongoing DDoS attack campaign against U.S. financial institutions — thought by some to be the work of Iran — are using botnets for hire.
The compromised website contained a PHP-based backdoor script that was regularly instructed to send numerous HTTP and UDP (User Datagram Protocol) requests to the websites of several U.S. banks, including PNC Bank, HSBC and Fifth Third Bank, Ronen Atias, a security analyst at Web security services provider Incapsula, said Tuesday in a blog post.
Atias described the compromised site as a “small and seemingly harmless general interest UK website” that recently signed up for Incapsula’s services.
An analysis of the site and the server logs revealed that attackers were instructing the rogue script to send junk traffic to U.S. banking sites for limited periods of time varying between seven minutes and one hour. The commands were being renewed as soon as the banking sites showed signs of recovery, Atias said.
During breaks from attacking financial websites the backdoor script was being instructed to attack unrelated commercial and e-commerce sites. “This all led us to believe that we were monitoring the activities of a Botnet for hire,” Atias said.
“The use of a Web Site as a Botnet zombie for hire did not surprise us,” the security analyst wrote. “After all, this is just a part of a growing trend we’re seeing in our DDoS prevention work.”
Is HP Getting Sued?
HP is in the process of being sued by an angry investor who claims the company knew statements about its Autonomy acquisition were misleading and led the stock to fall.
A proposed class action lawsuit was filed in a San Francisco federal court. HP bought British software firm Autonomy for a $11.1 billion last year but made an $8.8 billion write-down on its acquisition claiming the company inflated sales with improper accounting.
Autonomy co-founder Mike Lynch has denied any wrongdoing. The lawsuit, one of the first to be filed by investors on the Autonomy mess, said HP hid the fact it gained control of Autonomy based on financial statements that could not be relied upon.
It claims HP had not revealed to investors that it tried to undo the Autonomy agreement before it closed because of the accounting issues.
I.T. Spending On The Rise
Worldwide IT spending remains on track to increase by 6% in 2012 despite the grim economic conditions in Europe, thanks to strong software, storage, smartphone and tablet sales, according to IDC.
While 2012 has been a tough year for many IT vendors, they have done better overall than many expected in the first half of the year, IDC said.
For example, software spending has been robust, even in parts of the world where the economy has been weakest, as businesses hope software tools and applications will help them implement cost-reduction strategies.
The 6% growth compares to a 7% increase in worldwide IT spending last year. IDC expects 6% growth in 2013.
Software, storage, enterprise network and mobile device markets have offset weaker sales in servers, peripherals and PCs. However, the launch of Windows 8 during the fourth quarter should help the PC market recover next year, IDC said.
U.S. IT spending will grow by 5.9% in 2012, compared to 8.5% last year. However, the strength of the dollar during the first six months of the year means that IT spending in dollar terms will grow just 4% for the full year.
Will Samsung Overtake Apple
February 3, 2012 by admin
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Yesterday, DigiTimes released its comprehensive Global Smartphone Industry 2012 forecast report, which entails the total number of global smartphone shipments in 2011 along with estimates of smartphone manufacturer ranking by volume in 2012.
According to the report, global smartphone shipments are projected to top 464 million units in the entirety of 2011, with Apple being the top ranking vendor in terms of shipment volume, followed by Samsung Electronics and Nokia. On the Google Android side of matters, it is expected that Samsung will overtake Apple in 2012 as the “world’s largest smartphone vendor by volume.” In addition, HTC will overtake Nokia for the third-place spot.