Tag: cloud

Toward Confidential Clouds

Imagine a future in which end users have complete and verifiable control over how their data is used by any cloud service. If they want their organization’s documents to be indexed, a confidential indexing service could guarantee that no one outside their organization ever sees that data. A confidential videoconferencing service could guarantee end-to-end encryption without sacrificing the ability to record the session or provide transcripts, with the output sent to a confidential file-sharing service, never appearing unencrypted anywhere other than the organization’s devices or confidential VMs. A confidential email system could similarly protect privacy without compromising on functionality such as searching or authoring assistance. Ultimately, confidential computing will enable many innovative cloud services, while allowing users to retain full control over their data.

AWS Ground Station

Amazon EC2 made compute power accessible on a cost-effective, pay-as-you-go basis. AWS Ground Station does the same for satellite ground stations. Instead of building your own ground station or entering into a long-term contract, you can make use of AWS Ground Station on an as-needed, pay-as-you-go basis. You can get access to a ground station on short notice in order to handle a special event: severe weather, a natural disaster, or something more positive such as a sporting event. If you need access to a ground station on a regular basis to capture Earth observations or distribute content world-wide, you can reserve capacity ahead of time and pay even less. AWS Ground Station is a fully managed service. You don’t need to build or maintain antennas, and can focus on your work or research.

Google Cloud

Having invested $30b over the last 3 years in its infrastructure from hardware to submarine cables, Google has bought itself a seat at the adult’s table. The question at Next wasn’t, then, whether Google belongs in a conversation with the likes of AWS, Azure and, increasingly, Alibaba. The question is where Google is choosing to invest that capital, and how those investments are paying off. To explore that question, here are 5 brief takeaways from Google Next.

  • Google Goes on Premises
  • Diverse Assets
  • Enterprise Ready
  • Serverless
  • Serverless

Let’s build a modern Hadoop

This is interesting, as a timestamp of what’s generally possible now.

If you’ve been around the big data block, you’ve probably felt the pain of Hadoop, but we all still use it because we tell ourselves, “that’s just the way infrastructure software is.” However, in the past 10 years, infrastructure tools ranging from NoSQL databases, to distributed deployment, to cloud computing have all advanced by orders of magnitude. Why have large-scale data analytics tools lagged behind? What makes projects like Redis, Docker and CoreOS feel modern and awesome while Hadoop feels ancient?

Exaflop

Exaflop supercomputer. Petaflop machines don’t even ship yet.

Another problem for the institute is to reduce the amount of power needed to run a future exascale computer. “The electrical power needed with today’s technologies would be many 10s of megawatts — a significant fraction of a power plant. 1 megawatt can cost as much as $1m a year. We want to bring that down.”

2014-11-14: Towards the high petaflops

DOE has commissioned “Summit“, designed to peak at 150-300 petaFLOPS, 5x faster than the 54 petaFLOPS Tianhe-2.

2020-11-16: Fugaku has become the first 2 exaFLOPS system
2023-02-23: Zettaflop roadmap

AMD talked about getting to a Zettaflop in 2030-2035. It would need about 500 Megawatts of power. Exascale systems today consume 21MW of power.