Blog – Page 2

Levono gets green light for IBM x86 purchase

It seems that Levono are extremely happy with the continuing acquisition of IBM’s hardware. After the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment approved the $2.3 billion purchase, Levono announced their new offices in Danbury, Connecticut.

Lenovo, which has locations in China and North Carolina, leased more than 10,000 square feet worth of office space in the Lee Farm Corporate Park in June. Company officials said at the time that the location would be used for sales and marketing efforts in anticipation of future business needs and brings the company closer to its customers in the northeast.

Company officials declined to comment Monday on the level of staffing in the office or whether those future business needs could include the x86 server business.

Lenovo, which has annual sales of more than $34 billion, acquired IBM’s personal computing division including the ThinkPad brand in 2005 for a deal reportedly worth more than $1.2 billion in cash and stock.

Officials with IBM also declined to comment Monday on the pending deal or what it could mean for the area. The company has a major data center located in four buildings on a campus in Southbury as well as executive offices in Somers, N.Y.

“Teenager” supercomputer fools a Turing Test Panel

IDG News Service – A supercomputer has achieved an artificial intelligence milestone by passing the Turing Test, according to the University of Reading in the U.K.

At an event on Saturday at the Royal Society in London, a conversation program running on a computer called Eugene Goostman was able to convince more than a third of the judges that it was human.

The result is a first for the Turing Test, proposed in 1950 by Alan Turing, regarded as the father of artificial intelligence (AI).

Experts still view this result as just one step in the evolution of intelligent machines.

The Turing Test is an experiment that focuses on whether people can tell whether they are communicating with a person or a machine. If the machine is able to fool people into thinking it’s human during a series of text conversations, it’s considered to have passed the test.

The program, dubbed Eugene, was developed by Vladimir Veselov and Eugene Demchenko and competed against four other supercomputers at the Royal Society event. Eugene is designed to simulate the responses of a 13-year-old boy.

Eugene convinced 33 percent of the human judges that it was human, and the results were independently verified, the university said.

“Our main idea was that he can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn’t know everything,” Veselov said in a statement.

Warwick described the Turing test as an iconic and controversial milestone in artificial intelligence. “Now we move on to the full Turing test — creating a robot and we cannot tell the difference between the robot and a human,” he wrote in an email.

IBM announce New Power Systems

Big Data is a big deal for IBM, and Wednesday Big Blue announced new Power Systems servers to handle the load. The new products are built on an open server platform, based on the Power8 processor.

The company’s new machines are the culmination of a $2.4 billion investment, more than 3 years of development and the exploitation of hundreds of IBM patents. New Power8 processor measures one square inch, houses more than four billion transistors and uses over 11 miles of high-speed copper wiring.

Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of the IBM Systems and Technology Group, stated that the new product line is “the first truly disruptive advancement in high-end server technology in decades, with radical technology changes and the full support of an open server ecosystem [designed for] massive data volumes and complexity.”

No downtime for VM migration, faster reboot are new capabilities

Unix may have been shouldered aside by Windows as the main operating system in data centres, but a number of manufacturers remain loyal to the versions of it still in their portfolio.

Hewlet Packard are one such manufacturer. The outline their new products on the following page

“Because your business is always on

When you need continuous computing for workloads vital to the enterprise, HP-UX is the answer. It provides a dynamic, highly secure and unified environment, built on the always-on resiliency demanded in mission-critical servers. The result is a proven infrastructure that accelerates business value and lowers your risk.

Mission-critical application availability for continuous operations
Stability and investment protection with decades of support
Highly-integrated UNIX for resiliency and ease of management”

Microsoft opens new cybercrime centre to make the Web a safer place

Microsoft recently opened a new cybercrime centre on their Richmond campus. This world-class laboratory hosts a team of seasoned cybercrime investigators who are trying to stay one step ahead of the world’s worst Internet criminals.

This team have been involved in some notable successes in the past 12 months including helping to stop the Citadel botnet and bring down the spambot Rustock.

Zombie computers don’t eat your flesh but your cash

Citadel activated 5 million zombie computers across 90 countries. These were home and office based systems that had unwittingly become infected with malware. Once activated Citadel it recorded the keystrokes of the unsuspecting user, capturing passwords and other sensitive information. This was then passed back to the people who launched Citadel so that it could be sold onto crooks who could then empty bank accounts and buy goods online fraudulently.

Over 18 months Citadel stole half a billion dollars from businesses and individuals. So the FBI teamed up with Microsoft and bank investigators to stop it. Working together they managed to shut down 90% of the zombie computers.

Restraining order

Rustock was brought down by legal means. By asking a judge for a temporary restraining order against the spammers, they would have to show up in court to defend themselves. When they didn’t, Microsoft were able to take control of the hundreds of domains that the spammers were using to infect computers. They then notified the infected customers and gave them tools to clean their computers.

The majority of these infections for both botnets and spambots are caused by people downloading what can only be termed ‘dodgy’ free software or music. Although it looks a good deal, typically it contains a hidden danger that can cost thousands of pounds.

It has been estimated that there are nearly 400 million victims of cybercrime each year that costs consumers $113 billion. So to avoid becoming part of this statistic, be careful what you download.

IBM Intelligent Cluster solutions power new university supercomputer

In October the University of Southampton switched on the most powerful University-based supercomputer in England and the third largest academic facility in the UK. Named Iridis4 the machine is designed to meet the demand for the use of supercomputing power for research purposes and it will allow more academics to work on a greater number of projects at faster speeds.

Over 12,000 processor cores

Worth £3.2 million, Iridis4 is powered by IBM Intelligent Cluster solutions integrated and supported by HPC. It is four times more powerful than its predecessor Iridis3 and has 12,200 Intel Xeon E5-2670 processor cores, one-million gigabytes of disc space, with 50 terabytes of memory.

The new machine is one of very few in the UK to include to Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, which can take control of some of the most demanding mathematical calculations to significantly increase its processing power. The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors are each capable of running at one teraflop, (one trillion calculations per second).

Supporting more than 350 research projects

Iridis4 will mainly be used for research by University staff and students across a wide variety of disciplines, from Engineering to Archaeology – Medicine to Computer Science. 350 projects are likely to run on the machine in the first year.

Meanwhile, Iridis3 will remain in operation, providing an important resource for industrial research through the e-Infrastructure South Consortium. This group of research intensive universities; Southampton, Bristol, Oxford and University College London, operate a ‘Centre of Innovation for the Application of High Performance Computing’– set up in 2012 with £3.7 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to upgrade Iridis3 and install resources at Rutherford Appleton Laboratories near Oxford.

Microsoft data centre expansion points to a cloud future

Microsoft's Boydton Virginia Azure data centre expansion.

After adding more wholesale data centre space than any other company in 2012, Microsoft recently increased its investment in data centres across the globe to $15 billion, making it one of the major players. This is to support the growth in its Xbox Live gaming service and the switch of emphasis to its cloud platform Azure and online applications like Office365.

This massive expansion is being undertaken in 2 ways. Firstly, it is building its own data centres across the globe and this is being supplemented by buying in turn-key space in existing data centres.

Hybrid strategy decides whether to build or buy

This strategy of building where land and power are cheap and leasing third party space in populated areas like California and Virginia is underpinned by 35 weighted criteria to determine which is the best option to choose for a particular location.

These criteria include: availability and affordability of reliable power and fibre optic networks, the skills of the local workforce and the number of customers in close proximity to the site. This has led to more than 21 Megawatts of wholesale space being leased in the last 15 months while building in places as diverse as Singapore and Finland.

Such a massive investment is needed with the growth of Xbox and their online platform Azure. Currently, 15,000 servers look after Xbox Live, but this is planned to grow to more than 300,000 by the end of the year. Similarly, the massive push Microsoft is putting on other online services will mean this investment is needed.

How your Smartphone can help cure disease

You may have read some years ago about a project that was able to utilise the spare computing power on your desktop or laptop computer to search for life amongst the stars. Well, with the number of number mobiles devices in the world now surpassing traditional PCs the emphasis has switched to being able to utilise the surplus computing power from the millions of these devices across the globe.

The dawn of volunteer computing

IBM’s World Community Grid (helping to develop new AIDS treatments) and the Einstein@Home project (searching the cosmos for new stars) recently announced the launch of “volunteer computing”. This enables scientists to utilise a pool of donated processing power from Android based Smartphones to carry out their simulations and data analysis.

“Volunteer computing” enables individuals and organisations to contribute toward scientific progress and provides researchers with what are essentially very powerful, globally distributed supercomputers.

Get going with a BOINC

Is it reckoned that there are nearly 900 million Android devices in use across the world and as a result their combined computing power is bigger than that of the largest supercomputer. Using the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), owners of Smartphones that are running Android V2.3 or higher can download the BOINC app from the Google play site to participate. Then you just choose the projects you want to help out.

The app only runs when the Smartphone is being charged, the battery life is greater than 90% or you are on WiFi. So, you don’t need to worry about having your monthly data allowance swallowed up by BOINC or your battery needing charging every 10 minutes. These are default settings and you can customise them further if you require.

So, if you own a Smartphone running Android and want to help find a cure for AIDS or life in another galaxy, go the Google Play store and download BOINC now from here

IBM’s small movie is perfect for Big Data

Why the world’s smallest movie is good news for big data

You wouldn’t think that IBM’s announcement that is had made the world’s smallest movie using atoms would have much impact on the business world – but you couldn’t be more wrong!

Using an IBM-invented scanning tunnelling microscope the individual atoms were moved to create 242 single frames that were rendered into still images to create the movie. This study of materials at the nanoscale does have a serious impact though as it helps to explore the limits of data storage.

Computer circuits have been shrinking towards atomic dimensions for years (in accordance with Moore’s law) but chip designers are now coming up against physical imitations with traditional techniques of design and manufacture.

All the movies ever made on a finger nail size device

By using a single atom (the smallest object available for data storage) the same team of IBM researchers who made this movie also recently created the world’s smallest magnetic bit.

They were able to work out it takes 12 atoms to reliably store one bit of magnetic information. By comparison, it takes roughly 1 million atoms to store a bit of data on a modern computer or electronic device.

If commercialised, this atomic memory could one day store all of the movies ever made in a device the size of a fingernail. The same techniques are also being used to come up with new computing architectures all of which is good news for those of us involved in big data.