Forget the arms race, it's all about supremacy in super computers and math skills. I saw a desktop CRAY computer running the simulations for certain DSP solution for Matlab and Simulink, and it got me thinking, well what if I had a business case and I could ask my boss to buy me one? First off though, I would have to clearly explain what is 786 gigaflops, and if it will run Linux.
A teraflop is a measure of a computer's computing speed or processing power, based on the acronym FLOPS - Floating Operations Per Second. A teraflop is a trillion or 10 to the 12th-power flops (Note the use of the plural, no need for an additional "s"), available on the market for most affordable parallel computing solutions. And of course, within the realm of possibility or imagination is a computer capable of petaflops, a thousand teraflops or a quadrillion (thousand trillion) flops.
Supercomputers are capable of so many amazing tasks, previously to discover new elements, detect dark matter components. simulate nuclear chain reaction or particle collisions. At present, they can model climate change, crack codes, model protein behaviours and drug reactions. Therefore it's obvious that the top buyers include the biosciences, computer aided engineering and defense industries. Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM are all competitors in the market. This CRAY system came out in 2008, so I'm a bit 2000-and-late but in this world, by the time you've already built and deployed the number one system, someone has already imagined something 20 times better.
Canada
As of Nov 2011, Canada did not have a system listed within the public top 500 supercomputer list. Boo.
However we do see Supercomputers on the trading floor at the Toronto Stock Exchange (perhaps the server room) called electronic traders. Math geeks design the algorithms (users input parameters like selling or holding thresholds) or dark pools (when trades have to be hidden from algorithms).
Computation resource allocation on the SciNet, another system at the University of Toronto is very competitive though. The Compute Canada's Resource Allocation Committees are in charge of connecting researchers with computational and personnel resources to run calculations for biomedical research, climate change modeling and even galaxy formation simulations.
Japan
Japan ranks number one. As of Nov 2011, the K Computer, based at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Japan was the first to clear 10 petaflops, beating its own record. Hardware includes 705,024 Fujitsu Sparc64 processor cores.
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-57324194-264/japanese-supercomputer-first-to-clear-10-petaflops/#ixzz1mwp3L6yU
US
The Blue Gen/L can do 0.5 Quadrillion operations per second, the most powerful in 2005-2008. The Blue Gen is deployed at Livermore, San Francisco where 263 supercomputers from the Top 500 list also reside.
The up and coming Sequoia is being built by IBM, for end 2012, capable of 20 quadrillion operations per second, that's 20 petaflops. The main challenges being to write software to run across all the chips amounting to 1.6 million processors 96 racks of 32 slim servers
I like the supercomputer made from many old model Sony PS3's in parallel used by the US Air Force for satellite imagery analysis, demonstrated years ago. Many researchers have already done the same though this is no longer possible with newer generation PS3.
China
In Nov 2010 China was number one with the Tianhe-1A doing 2.5 Quadrillion operations per second
by Dawning Information Industry Ltd. Tianhue means "The Milky Way", although surpassed within six weeks by Japan. Another amazing fact, China owns 74 of the 500 biggest supercomputers in the world
By 2020 the Chinese have something in the works to rival 500x Sequoia and 8x power of Tianhe
Cisco
Anyway it's not supercomputing but here is the fastest Cisco switch ever. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps5718/ps6021/product_data_sheet0900aecd8017a72e.html I'm bringing this up simply because one has to consider connectivity to these super computers and all the glorious applications.
Monday, February 20, 2012
Cisco Self Defending Network Strategy
I found a CCNA test question on the Cisco Self Defending Network Strategy so I looked it up.
Cyber Security
Trust and Identity Management, responsible for security of critical assets
Threat Defence, respond to problems caused by security outbreaks
Physical Security
Potential security breaches should be evaluated.
Asses the potential impact of stolen netwokr resources and equipments
Secure Connectivity, ensures privacy and confidentiality
Properties of a Self Defending Network
Network Availability: remain active when under attack
Ubiquitous Access: provide secure access from any location
Admission Control: authenticate all users, devices and their posture
Application Intelligence: extend application visibility controls into the network
Day-Zero Protection: ensure endpoints are immune to new threats
Infection Containment: rapidly identify & contain virulent attacks
Network Monitoring:
Monitoring Analysis Response System (MARS) provides security monitoring for networks and hosts
Key Components and Necessary Behaviours
Summary of Cisco Threat Detection Technologies
IPS Sensor Application
Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA)
Cisco Security Agent (CSA)
Cisco PIX Firewall
FWSM Catalyst 6500 Firewall Services Module
IOS Firewall (feature of Cisco IOS)
IPS (feature of Cisco IOS)
Movies on Network Security
War Game (script kiddies break into the Pentagon computers)
Hackers (Angelina Jolie, 1995. Hacking, dial-up modems, social engineering, dumpster diving)
The Net (not so much hacker movie, but privacy issues online)
Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol (breaking network security and halting a nuclear disaster)
Cyber Security
Trust and Identity Management, responsible for security of critical assets
Threat Defence, respond to problems caused by security outbreaks
Physical Security
Potential security breaches should be evaluated.
Asses the potential impact of stolen netwokr resources and equipments
Secure Connectivity, ensures privacy and confidentiality
Properties of a Self Defending Network
Network Availability: remain active when under attack
Ubiquitous Access: provide secure access from any location
Admission Control: authenticate all users, devices and their posture
Application Intelligence: extend application visibility controls into the network
Day-Zero Protection: ensure endpoints are immune to new threats
Infection Containment: rapidly identify & contain virulent attacks
Network Monitoring:
- Syslog maintans a lot of data, feature of Cisco IOS
- Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) Cisco IOS feature for network management
Monitoring Analysis Response System (MARS) provides security monitoring for networks and hosts
- Netflow provides packet level stats
- Cisco Traffic Anomaly Detector Module - detects high speed DoS attacks
- Firewall and IDS - IPS Sensor Application, Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Cisco Security Agent (CSA)
Key Components and Necessary Behaviours
- 100% Network Up Time. Keep functioning in the presence of viruses and related infections.
- Network Admission Control (NAC) program. NAC allows customers to determine what level of network access to grant to an endpoint based on its security posture
- Infection Containment as a third-order dampener to the virus and worm propagation effect.
- Adaptive Threat Defense (ATD) capabilities, which enhances the ability of a network to respond to threats based on a new set of Anti-X technologies.
- Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS), integrate NIDS into its router and switching platforms and transforms aspects of into an intrusion prevention system (IPS) with inline filtering capabilities.
- Beyond endpoints, apply to points of presence (POPs) in the network (firewalls, network intrusion detection systems -NIDS, routers, switches, and hosts) with context while learning the L2 and L3 network topology.
Summary of Cisco Threat Detection Technologies
IPS Sensor Application
Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA)
Cisco Security Agent (CSA)
Cisco PIX Firewall
FWSM Catalyst 6500 Firewall Services Module
IOS Firewall (feature of Cisco IOS)
IPS (feature of Cisco IOS)
Movies on Network Security
War Game (script kiddies break into the Pentagon computers)
Hackers (Angelina Jolie, 1995. Hacking, dial-up modems, social engineering, dumpster diving)
The Net (not so much hacker movie, but privacy issues online)
Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol (breaking network security and halting a nuclear disaster)
Friday, February 17, 2012
HOW TO do Remote Access to Computers
There are several commands to do remote access to computers.
Telnet - The least secure, unencrypted.
SSH - Secure Shell
Putty - SSH emulator for Windows.
VNC and RDP will be discussed in more detail below.
VNC
Virtual Network Computing. You have to use the vnc viewer to emulate a workstation display over a remote login connection.
The local machine will run the vnc server
vncserver is used to start a VNC (Virtual Network Computing) desktop. vncserver is a Perl script which simplifies the process of starting an Xvnc server.
The remote computer will run vnc viewer
At the pop up the command is issued, local ip: channel ID
Launching vncviewer
This is a good summary of using vnc from the real authors.
To close the vnc window
usage: service vncserver stop
To port the display over
setenv DISPLAY server2:1.0
setenv DISPLAY localhost:1.0
RDP
Remote Desktop Protocol. More to follow!
Telnet - The least secure, unencrypted.
SSH - Secure Shell
Putty - SSH emulator for Windows.
VNC and RDP will be discussed in more detail below.
VNC
Virtual Network Computing. You have to use the vnc viewer to emulate a workstation display over a remote login connection.
The local machine will run the vnc server
vncserver is used to start a VNC (Virtual Network Computing) desktop. vncserver is a Perl script which simplifies the process of starting an Xvnc server.
The remote computer will run vnc viewer
At the pop up the command is issued, local ip: channel ID
Launching vncviewer
This is a good summary of using vnc from the real authors.
To close the vnc window
usage: service vncserver stop
To port the display over
setenv DISPLAY server2:1.0
setenv DISPLAY localhost:1.0
RDP
Remote Desktop Protocol. More to follow!
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Are you ready for Rsync?
How many times have you set up a file transfer by FTP over the weekend because it was a massive file that would take four days, and you find out that somwhere along the way there was an unexplained drop in the network connection, and your file transfer is incomplete with bits lost in the ether.
Enter rsync and you'll be much happier with the delivery guarantee. What do you call this UDP or TCP? Tricky... must be TCP because you're looking for better late than never, as opposed to be never than late.
Rsync is actually a backup/mirroring tool, but I suppose it is also good for a one time transfer. Step by step instructions are here.
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/09/rsync-command-examples/
http://everythinglinux.org/rsync/
Enter rsync and you'll be much happier with the delivery guarantee. What do you call this UDP or TCP? Tricky... must be TCP because you're looking for better late than never, as opposed to be never than late.
Rsync is actually a backup/mirroring tool, but I suppose it is also good for a one time transfer. Step by step instructions are here.
http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/09/rsync-command-examples/
http://everythinglinux.org/rsync/
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