Data Center Links: October 27, 2017

Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting:

• NVIDIA and Amazon Simplify Machine Learning.  Amazon and NVIDIA announced new Machine Learning software stacks in the NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC), and a new 8 Volta GPU EC2 instance. 

• IBM's Blockchain solution for global payments.  IBM announced a new blockchain banking solution that will, with partners Stellar.org and KlickEx Group improve the speed in which banks both clear and settle payment transactions on a single network in near real time. IBM says the solution is run from the IBM Blockchain Platform on Hyperledger Fabric and that they will continue to advance the solution with the goal of expanding capabilities in order to support central bank-issued digital currencies, securities, bonds and structured financial assets.

• Arm launches security framework IoT at scale. At the annual Arm TechCon conference this year Arm introduced a common industry framework for building secure connected devices, called Platform Security Architecture (PSA). The company said PSA will deliver representative IoT threat models and security analyses, hardware and firmware architecture specs, and a reference open source implementation of the firmware specification called Trusted Firmware-M.

• Cisco acquires Perspica. Cisco announced that it is acquiring machine learning-driven operations analytics firm Perspica for an undisclosed amount. Cisco will fold the company staff into AppDynamics, which it purchased earlier in the year for $3.7 billion. 

• Intel doubles down with $60M on startups. At its annual conference Intel Capital revealed 19 new investments in startups, totaling more than $60 million. Intel Capital's Wendell Brooks focused on the data explosion, noting that "by 2020, every autonomous vehicle on the road will create 4TB of data per day. A million self-driving cars will create the same amount of data every day as 3 billion people.  Company investments in startups were from all over the world and included such companies as Trace, Bossa Nova Robotics, Horizon Robotics, Echo Pixel, TileDB, LeapMind and AdHawk Microsystems.

• U.S. warns about attacks on energy, industrial firms.  This seems almost like a template announcement... that has happened, and will probably keep happening.  The U.S. government issued a public warning last week that hackers are targeting energy and industrial firms. Homeland Security warned that nuclear, energy, aviation, water and critical manufacturing industries have been targeted along with government entities in attacks dating back to at least May.

Bonus item:  Here is a Really cool drone video - from Rotor Visual

Data Center Links: May 11, 2017

Between company conference season and a lot of M&A activity recently, it is hard to keep up with the news.  Here are a few things I found interesting:

• Facebook breaks ground on 1M sq ft Altoona data center.  Because Iowa is the best place for data centers.... Facebook broke ground on its fourth building in Altoona - a 1 million square foot data center. With this building the Facebook data center campus will total 2.5 million square feet.

• Cisco acquires AI company MindMeld.  Just like many years ago when you had to keep a running list of who Cisco was buying, they are keeping a fast pace in 2017. Making it their third acquisition in two weeks Cisco dives deeper into AI by buying MindMeld, a San Francisco company that has developed a conversational platform based on natural language understanding (NLU). The NLU functionality will be integrated with Cisco's Spark platform. MindMeld, besides being on my own 'cool tech' list, has been recognized as one of the top companies leading the AI revolution.
• Could Cisco possibly acquire Nutanix, vArmour or SnapRoute next?

• Cray launches Supercomputers built for AI.  Cray has launched new CS-Storm supercomputers that are purpose-built for the most demanding AI workloads.  New CS-Storm 500GT and CS-Storm 500NX systems leverage NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators, which foster "up to 187 TOPS (tera operations per second) per node, 2,618 TOPS per rack for machine learning application performance."   I'll take two.  :)

• NVIDIA GPU conference.  AI, self-driving cars, healthcare, Volta GPU platform, deep learning software tools.....   Too many to mention; check it out here.

• Microsoft debuts Cosmos DB. At the Microsoft Build 2017 developer conference Microsoft introduced Azure Cosmos DB, a globally distributed database with five consistency choices. As a superset of DocumentDB Cosmos models include Strong, Bounded Staleness, Session, Consistent Prefix, and Eventual. 

• Apple announces $1B data center expansion in Reno. 9to5Mac reports that the Reno city council approved Apple's proposal for a $1 billion expansion to its existing data center. 

Data Center Links, August 23, 2016

Data Center Links for 8/23/2016.

Here are some (mostly) recent things I found interesting:

• Avere and Cycle Computing integrate for hybrid HPC in the cloud.  Avere Systems and Cycle Computing announced a technology integration that enables hybrid high performance computing in popular public cloud computing environments. By combining the CycleCloud with Avere's vFXT Edge filer users can launch an Avere tiered file system on demand linked directly with the CycleCloud managed scalable compute nodes through cloud providers like AWS, Google and Microsoft Azure.

• U.S. DOE awards $34 million to protect power grid.  The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded $34 million to help protect critical infrastructures, specifically the smart grid. The funds cover 12 projects in the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability's Cybersecurity of Energy of Delivery Systems (CEDS), and is intended to help develop new solutions to protect critical infrastructure in the energy industry.

• U.S. approves handover of IANA to ICANN. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has approved a plan to hand control of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) contract to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN has run IANA functions - DNS, IP addresses and protocols - since incorporation in 1999. 

• NVIDIA Parker - SoC for autonomous vehicles. At the #hotchips conference NVIDIA announced Parker, a new mobile processor that the company hopes will power the next generation of autonomous vehicles. Built around the Pascal GPU architecture and NVIDIA's Denver CPU architecture, the company says it will deliver "up to 1.5 teraflops of performance for deep learning-based self-driving AI cockpit systems." NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang delivered a supercomputer to OpenAI, a non-profit founded by Tesla's Elon Musk. 

• SKA Science Data Processor (big data meet big compute). A prototype part of the software system to manage data from the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) telescope has run on the Tiahnhe-2 supercomputer - currently the second best supercomputer in the world.   Deemed the world's largest science project, the SKA data processing system will ingest data from more than a quarter of a million antennas. 

• CyrusOne and the REIT sector. Seeking Alpha has a nice look at data center REIT CyrusOne and their record leasing quarter - and a bullish thesis on the company and its future. 

• Intel to Fab ARM.  I had to check that headline a few times - but yes, Intel Custom Foundry will now "offer access to ARM Artisan physical IP, including POP IP, based on the most advanced ARM cores and Cortex series processors. Intel also told of several foundry success stories from LG Electronics, Spreadtrum, Achronix Semiconductor, Netronome and Altera.