Seriously … no more cheap switches as the central point of information flow in storage or computing clusters. The money you save will be blown in the first hour you pay for down time or architectural changes you need to actually move your data without tossing packets on the ground … … because while standard network codes don’t care so much if they need to retransmit or lose data, cluster file systems get very … very … testy when data doesn’t arrive when and where it is supposed to, in the right order, because the cheap-ass switch was too busy tossing packets on the floor.

See here. Very good conference, lots of good discussion.

TL;DR: Run, as in now, before you finish reading this, to update vulnerable OpenSSL packages. Restart your OpenSSL using services (ssh, https, openvpn). Then nuke your keys, and start all over again. Yeah, its that bad. I had hoped, incorrectly, that no one would start asking, “hey, can we exploit this in the wild?” any time soon. Unfortunately … exploits are live and out there. Have a look at this session hijacking done using the bug.

The day job builds a storage product which integrates Ceph as the storage networking layer. What happened was, in idiomatic American English: We made very tasty lemonade out of very bitter lemons. For the rest of the world, this means we had a bad situation during our setup at the booth. 3 boxes of drives and SSDs. 2 of them arrived. The 3rd may have been stolen, or gone missing, or wound up in a shallow grave somewhere.

I had an opportunity to review an old post I had written about playing with prime numbers. In it, I wrote out an explicit formula for a number, expressed as a product of primes. This goes to the definition of a composite or a prime number. Whats interesting is what leaps out at you when you look at something you wrote a while ago. Looking at the formula I wrote down, there is a very easy way to define if a number is prime or composite.

I am lucky. I fully admit this. There are people out there whom will tell you that its pure skill that they have been in business and been successful for a long time. Others will admit luck is part of it, but will again, pat themselves on the back for their intestinal fortitude. Few will say “I am lucky”. Which is a shame, as luck, timing (which you can never really, truly, control), and any number of other factors really are critical to one being able to have the luxury of doing what we are doing.

I’ve been thinking for a while that our obsession with reduction of latency in computing and storage could be ameliorated by exploiting a negative latency design. A negative latency design would be one where a hypothetical message would arrive at a receiver before the sender completed sending it. There are a few issues with this. First off is how on earth, or elsewhere, is this possible? Second, aren’t there issues with causality violations?

See here for the program sheet. The session is here: HPC on Wall Street Flyer Description is this: Wall Street and the global financial markets are building low latency infrastructures for pro- cessing and timely response to information content in massive data flows. These big data flows require architectural design patterns at a macro- and micro-level, and have implications for users of cloud systems. This panel will discuss, from macro to micro, how new capabilities and technologies are making a positive impact.

From Dan Primak’s Term Sheet email

Last year, Intel started building its own distro of Hadoop. Their argument was that they were optimizing it for their architecture (as compared to, say, ARM). Today came word (via InsideHPC.com) that they are switching to Cloudera. This makes perfect sense to me. Intel couldn’t really optimize Hadoop by compiler options to use new instruction capability (part of their selling point), as Hadoop is a Java thing. And Java has its own VM, and many performance touch points that have nothing to do with processor architecture.