Phoronix Test Suite - Linux Testing & Benchmarking Platform

Phoronix Test Suite - Linux Testing & Benchmarking Platform: "The Phoronix Test Suite is the most comprehensive testing and benchmarking platform available for the Linux operating system. This software is designed to effectively carry out both qualitative and quantitative benchmarks in a clean, reproducible, and easy-to-use manner. This software is based upon the extensive Linux benchmarking work and internal tools developed by Phoronix.com since 2004 along with input from leading tier-one computer hardware vendors. This software is open-source and licensed under the GNU GPLv3. The Phoronix Test Suite consists of a lightweight processing core (pts-core) with each benchmark consisting of an XML-based profile with related resource scripts. The process from the benchmark installation, to the actual benchmarking, to the parsing of important hardware and software components is heavily automated and completely repeatable, asking users only for confirmation of actions."

Super-fast Broadband Spreads Across Bay Area

Super-fast Broadband Spreads Across Bay Area: "Still, if you actually use this high-speed network too much, you’re going be penalized. Remember, Comcast is the chief proponent of metered broadband and imposes a 250 GB cap on the total data you can download over their network every month. Business customers can sign up for the Deluxe 50 Mbps/10 Mbps tier for $189.95/month. Comcast has also launched its WiMAX-based wireless data service in Atlanta, which uses the Clearwire network. Comcast, an investor in Clearwire, started selling wireless data services in Portland in June."

Jumbo frames: Yes

Jumbo frames: Yes: "So how large should an Ethernet frame be? Ethernet's 32-bit cyclic redundancy check is effective for detecting bit errors at frame sizes under 12,000 bytes, thereby drawing a logical upper limit. Within that, the optimum large frame size can be determined by an application's block size. For example, Network File System (NFS) transfers data in 8,192-byte blocks. So adding room for headers, an attractive maximum Ethernet frame size for NFS applications is 9,000 bytes."

RAMdisks, creating under FreeBSD 5.x - FreeBSDwiki

RAMdisks, creating under FreeBSD 5.x - FreeBSDwiki: "To use this script, you would type makeramdisk.sh start or makeramdisk.sh stop to create and mount, or dismount and delete, respectively, a 256MB RAMdisk on /dev/md10. (Note: the script as written depends on the prior existence of a directory at /mnt/ramdisk. If that directory does not exist, you're going to have problems.)

You should be able to figure out from the examples what you'd need to do different to change the size of the drive, where you mount it, etc."

Kernel Tuning - NICPB HEP Group

Kernel Tuning - NICPB HEP Group: "Though my understanding of what is somewhat clearer now based on three weeks of observations and hacking of the storage systems, I'm not quite sure how good or bad these settings can be for your system in some other situations. The systems which used to be able to live no more than 2-6 hours have been performing magnificiently for 6 days now (at the time of writing) doing a lot more transfers and having orders of magnitude smaller load (it actually remains less than number of cpu-s, which means the machines could do even more). So I personally am happy about these settings, but I must remind you, use these settings at your own risk."

Matt Mathis

Matt Mathis: "We want to explore the possibility of readjusting how the network and end-systems balance the responsibility for allocating network capacity. In particular we want to look at the use of some form of Fair Queuing or similar mechanisms in the network, combined with a change to TCP congestion control, to make it easier for the network to more accurately regulate the traffic. In the long run these changes would eliminate the need for the 'TCP-friendly' property which is currently required for all transport protocols. Although this might seem like a huge paradigm shift for the Internet, independent forces are already driving the most difficult part of these changes: the vast majority of end systems (home users with DSL, cable and FTTH service) are likely to already have their traffic managed by some form of Fair Queuing. We expect this trend to continue, and as a consequence, we believe that these changes can be deployed incrementally, on an as-needed basis.

We want to explore the merits of this paradigm change to identify and investigate areas that need additional research. Our goal is to introduce a compelling argument that the IETF should further relax its requirement that all protocols be TCP-friendly under all conditions. Even a minor weakening of the IETF position will facilitate the Internet evolving along this path."

The Web100 Project

The Web100 Project: "While the national high-performance network infrastructure has grown tremendously both in bandwidth and accessibility, it is still common for applications, hosts, researchers and other users to be unable to take full advantage of this new and improved infrastructure. Without expert attention from network engineers, users are unlikely to achieve even 10 Mbps single stream TCP transfers, despite the fact that the underlying network infrastructure can support data rates of 100Mbps or more. On unloaded networks, this poor performance can be attributed primarily to two factors: host system software (principally TCP) that is optimized for low bandwidth environments, and the lack of effective instrumentation and tools to diagnose performance issues."

Nissan Unveils IT System, iPhone App for New Networked Car

Nissan Unveils IT System, iPhone App for New Networked Car: "Using Nissan’s planned iPhone app, for example, drivers will be able to remotely monitor and control their vehicle’s battery charging, air conditioning and heating."

Stay Tuned for Bluetooth on Your TV

Stay Tuned for Bluetooth on Your TV: "Bluetooth on the TV gives consumers the ability to use their cell phones as a remote control, connect wireless headsets to the TV, and stream music from an iPod or other MP3 player to their television or speakers attached to their TV, all without a wire. A representative for the Bluetooth Special Interest Group expects to see more Bluetooth TVs coming to market later this year or early next year."

Virtualized I/O Takes Cloud Computing to the Next Level

Virtualized I/O Takes Cloud Computing to the Next Level: "The folks behind PrimaCloud, a cloud computing and storage product that offers a service-level agreement that it claims delivers 99.99 reliability (that means it can go down 53 minutes each year), said today it will save $1 million by virtualizing its network and will spend 50 percent less to deliver its high reliability cloud. The company has installed boxes from Xsigo Systems that sit between the servers and switches and create a cloud through which the network traffic from the virtual machines loaded on the servers is routed. The network can handle traffic destined for other servers or for the storage network without requiring separate cables."

Will P2P Soon Be the Scourge of Mobile Networks?

"What is most noticeable from the data gathered in this report is that subscribers are treating their mobile networks much the same as they treat their fixed networks. This is particularly true for heavy data users who seem to expect the same service from the Internet, irrespective of their access method."

Home Wireless Networks Aren’t Yet Ready for Video

Home Wireless Networks Aren’t Yet Ready for Video: "Wireless networks in their current form can’t support efforts by service providers trying to deliver video inside the home. That’s according to Joe Del Rio, a senior marketing manager at Broadcom with whom I chatted yesterday; he said service providers are still inclined to trust wired networking standards such as Home PNA or MoCA to deliver video and entertainment content around the home. Carriers are asking for between 30 Mbps and 36 Mbps, he said — enough to deliver three uncompressed HD video streams to televisions."

Documentation for /proc/sys/vm/*

"The files in this directory can be used to tune the operation of the virtual memory (VM) subsystem of the Linux kernel and the writeout of dirty data to disk. Default values and initialization routines for most of these files can be found in mm/swap.c."

redhat.com | Choosing an I/O Scheduler for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and the 2.6 Kernel

redhat.com | Choosing an I/O Scheduler for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and the 2.6 Kernel: "The Linux kernel, the core of the operating system, is responsible for controlling disk access by using kernel I/O scheduling. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 with a 2.4 kernel base uses a single, robust, general purpose I/O elevator. The 2.4 I/O scheduler has a reasonable number of tuning options by controlling the amount of time a request remains in an I/O queue before being serviced using the elvtune command. While Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 offers most workloads excellent performance, it does not always provide the best I/O characteristics for the wide range of applications in use by Linux users these days. The I/O schedulers provided in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, embedded in the 2.6 kernel, have advanced the I/O capabilities of Linux significantly. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, applications can now optimize the kernel I/O at boot time, by selecting one of four different I/O schedulers to accommodate different I/O usage patterns..."

Compiling the Linux Kernel – CentOS 5.3 « Milton Paiva’s Weblog

XFS Filesystem performance tweaking on Linux « Kernel-Panik.com

4 1/2 Ways to Deal With Data During Cloudbursts

4 1/2 Ways to Deal With Data During Cloudbursts: "Cloudbursting is an approach to handling spikes in demand that overwhelm enterprise computing resources by acquiring additional resources from a cloud services provider. It’s a little like having unexpected houseguests and not enough beds for them to sleep in; some of them will have to be put up in a hotel. While such “peaking through the clouds” promises to maximize agility while minimizing cost, there’s the nagging question of what exactly to do about the data such distributed applications require or generate. There are several strategies for dealing with cloudbursts, each of which have different implications for cost, performance, and architecture. One of them may fit both your application’s unique requirements and your enterprise’s overall business model."

Changing the World With Open Translation

Changing the World With Open Translation: "While there are some pretty nifty machine-based language tools out there, no machine will ever trump human translation. Machine-based tools are fine for simple greetings and pleasantries. However, only human translators can help us understand the political and cultural nuances inherent in foreign texts. This is important on two accounts. Firstly, rather than bouncing ideas off a culturally insular echo-chamber, we have a chance to learn from others with distinctly different view points. And secondly, for the first time ever, world history moves from being a confined regional fact to an evolving and diverse discussion.

Human translation lets us address collective global issues while also seeing the negative and positive impact of our choices. For this reason a number of groups have come forward to produce open translation (or crowd sourced translation) projects. Here are just a few of those efforts:"

The Hidden Cost of the Cloud: Bandwidth Charges

The Hidden Cost of the Cloud: Bandwidth Charges: "The trick will be moving your application from the cloud to your own infrastructure and dedicated bandwidth and then finding the expertise to manage this environment. Cloud service providers are counting on that being a difficult trick to perform."

Racing to 100 GB: Alcatel-Lucent Boosts Speeds on Routers, Switches

Racing to 100 GB: Alcatel-Lucent Boosts Speeds on Routers, Switches: "The explosion of online video and the rising tide of all kinds of data are only going to put more demands on our networking infrastructure — 100 GB is seen as a way to meet that growing need."

HP Buys IBRIX to Keep Up With Storage Trends

HP Buys IBRIX to Keep Up With Storage Trends: "This scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) file software had to provide access to millions of files, with, for example, more than 17 million in a single rendering working set. In the event, the parallelised file serving software enabled DreamWorks’ artists to do things up to five times faster."

Op-Ed Contributor - Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Contributor - Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me - NYTimes.com: "Maybe they’ll leave for the startup that finally topples Microsoft ... or Google. But until then these companies will posture, spend a little money on research and development, and keep each other in check, while reporters and publications pretend that it matters."

BlazeBand

BlazeBand: "Blazeband provides an alternative which overcomes these limitations of TCP. Blazeband utilizes UDP for bulk packet delivery. UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is the standard mechanism for delivering packet-based data over IP networks. UDP does not provide mechanisms for bandwidth control or reliability, but UDP packets can be sent very quickly. Blazeband protocols provide bandwidth and congestion control through UDP messages, using intelligent algorithms which distinguish congestion losses from other types of packet losses. These algorithms prevent Blazeband bandwidth utilization from dropping off in the presence of occasional packet loss.

Blazeband achieves reliability through the use of KenCast's (patented, other patents pending) Fazzt Forward Error Correction (Fazzt FEC®) technology, Validation algorithm, and Missed Packet Collector algorithms."

Download files to the iPhone with new plugin (how-to guide) | iPhone Atlas - CNET Reviews

Download files to the iPhone with new plugin (how-to guide) | iPhone Atlas - CNET Reviews: "By default, the iPhone can access and play MP3, QuickTime, PDF and other files, but cannot store them for later use. This new plug-in makes it possible."

iPhone 3GS limited to 384 Kbps upstream | Phones | iPhone Central | Macworld

iPhone 3GS limited to 384 Kbps upstream | Phones | iPhone Central | Macworld: "On the downstream side, all is well. The iPhone 3G handles up to 3.6 Mbps HSDPA, and the 3GS can use the newer 7.2 Mbps HSDPA flavor. AT&T is building out the 7.2 Mbps service, which will start being available in some metropolitan areas later this year."

Online Backups Could Use Google’s Expertise - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Online Backups Could Use Google’s Expertise - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com: "Backup in general is an essential technology which is not keeping up with demand,” said Garth Gibson, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and one of the world’s top storage experts. “It’s not keeping up in the home, in the small office or the large office."

Should We Force Marriage Between Broadband and Power Cos?

Should We Force Marriage Between Broadband and Power Cos?: "After reading about innovation in Germany where an electric company uses a customer’s broadband connection to help deliver intelligence about power use, I called my local utility, Austin Energy, which is considered an innovator in green energy. I wanted to find out how broadband and utility companies would deliver such services without using the same network, and why Austin Energy isn’t eager for any marriage of networks."

Google Freebie Puts School System in the Apps Cloud - NYTimes.com

Google Freebie Puts School System in the Apps Cloud - NYTimes.com: "Google Apps Education Edition is expected to remain free into the foreseeable future, Swidler says. The Google Message Discovery service, in which Google provides up to 10 years of e-mail retention, costs $11 per user per year for education, a discount off the Business Edition price."

Bandwidth chart | web.forret.com

Bandwidth chart | web.forret.com: "This is a list of standard or common bandwidths. Clicking on one will bring you to the Bandwidth calculator, who will translate the speed into Mbps, MB/s, GB/month, ..."

Singing A New Tune: The Imeem Music Store.

Singing A New Tune: The Imeem Music Store.: "Apple used music as low-margin bait to sell high-margin iPods and computers. Now imeem is going back to 2002? What’s that quote about those who don’t know history being doomed to repeat it?"

Aspera: Today Super-Fast Video File Transfers for the Media Industry. Tomorrow Super-Fast Video Downloads for Consumers?

Aspera: Today Super-Fast Video File Transfers for the Media Industry. Tomorrow Super-Fast Video Downloads for Consumers?: "When the company was started 5 years ago, Aspera's co-founders' premise was that the traditional approach for moving files, primarily by using FTP ('File Transfer Protocol'), was inherently inefficient because it was optimized for text and used TCP, the underlying protocol that most Internet traffic relies on. Rather than trying to improve FTP or TCP as others have done, they instead designed their own protocol called 'fasp' (Fast and Secure Access Protocol). By installing Aspera's fasp software at the file's send and receive points, large files can be sent over existing network infrastructure. fasp can send files 10 to 100s of times faster than FTP (there are charts here that show Aspera's tests)."

America’s Secret Innovation Weapon - Immigration - NYTimes.com

America’s Secret Innovation Weapon - Immigration - NYTimes.com: "Immigrants come to the United States and take menial jobs so that their children have a chance at a better future, he told me. While the jobs they take are below their intrinsic capabilities, they’re focused on giving their children a better life, not personal job satisfaction. Second-generation children, seeing how hard their parents work to give them an opportunity, in turn work hard at school, where, he noted, they often focus on mathematics and science in pursuit of the economic returns promised by careers in engineering and medicine. Third-generation kids figure the economic return on effort expended is better for business and legal professionals and pursue those professions instead of technical ones. By the fourth generation, any immigration-related incentives to work hard are largely nonexistent."

Google's Next Target - Unified Communications - NYTimes.com

Google's Next Target - Unified Communications - NYTimes.com: "If a Google Voice service, to link all your phones to one number with a variety of add-ons such as turning voice mail into text, can be offered to millions of users for free, isn't it likely to also be used by workers?"

Review - Firefox 3.5 Makes Browsing Faster, Easier and More Fun - NYTimes.com

Review - Firefox 3.5 Makes Browsing Faster, Easier and More Fun - NYTimes.com: "For many people, the browser wars are all about one thing: speed. There's no doubt that version 3.5 of Firefox is significantly faster than version 3. Pages load noticeably more quickly for a number of reasons, not least because Mozilla built a new JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey for this version of Firefox."

Akamai to Make iPhone Video Streaming Smooth

Akamai to Make iPhone Video Streaming Smooth: "Adaptive streaming adjusts the video content to a lower or higher bit rate, depending on how robust the web connection is. Akamai offers a similar service for Microsoft’s Silverlight for video on PCs. Adobe Flash and Move Networks also offer adaptive bit-rate streaming, although Adobe uses a proprietary method that requires special servers."