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The WAVE Report on Digital Media 3D --- Media Creation --- Shared Space ---Published by 4th Wave, Inc.--- Issue #0547------------------11/25/05 |
The WAVE Report is Searchable on
http://www.3dlinks.com
http://www.wave-report.com
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0547.2 Fraud & Phishing Protection
New Software for FireFox and Internet Explorer Blocks Fraud and Phishing
0547.3 C/C++ Programming Libraries
NAG announces major new release of its numerical library for C and C++ programmers
0547.4 Broadband in Space
0547.5 Email Worm Alert
MX Logic Reports One in Eight Email Messages Infected by Sober.Z Worm
0547.6 Blackberry Accessories
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***Processor Forum 2005
By John Latta
San Jose, CA
October 25 – 26. 2005
This used to be called the Micro Processor forum. A single conference would have 10’s of new processors announced and now there may be 2 or 3 processors announced. The day of a new GP processor has largely faded as the realities of competing against Intel, IBM and ARC have become near impossible. One result has been the expansion of specialized processors such as the network processor. But even in the graphics processor space, there are effectively only two companies: nVidia and ATI. Through all of this innovation in processor development continues, it is with a different pace and certainly shared on a global basis with design efforts taking place everywhere. This Processor Forum has at its theme The Road to Multicore. This transition has clearly created excitement in the design community. It also has brought with it more attendees than seen at the processor forum for a number of years.
The Implications of Multi-Core
Microprocessors, and in particular, the X86 family, have hit a brick wall with power dissipation when clock speed is the means to increase processor performance. In particular, it is power density on the chip not just average power. Power densities are at 300 to 400 W/sq cm. The solution is to put more processor cores, at lower clock speeds on the same die, to effectively provide greater computational power at lower power densities. With this comes a penalty that requires increased software complexity to take advantage of the multi-core architecture. One of the issues is Where will this play out in the number of cores? A compelling case was made by Azul that there is also a thermal barrier with multi-core. Effectively a many core architecture will face the same limits as single core does today. Today’s current issue is: what are the benefits of multi-core to users of traditional desktop PCs? The answer which emerged from the WAVE probing:
2X - Users will see a significant improvement
4X - Users will only see a slight improvement
>4X - Uncertain if Users will see any improvement, especially given the current state of software
As Scott Sellers from Azul Systems stated, software developers have become lazy in optimizing their products for performance when could rely year after year of 40% performance improvement. Thus, the rationale for the performance improvement implied above is the following:
A multi-threaded OS will be able to readily take advantage of 2 cores and thus the user will see an immediate improvement. But without a shift in the development of applications to utilize multi-core the gains will rapidly erode. Yet, even here there will be limitations due to the serial processing nature of many applications. Thus, the user benefit of multi-cores as the number of cores rises will erode with time and the desire to put more and more cores on a die.
The value proposition of multi-to-many core is an ecosystem issue. In spite of the fact that today this is being driven by the power density limitations of the designs of a single core faced by processor companies, the solution to how to use the resulting designs lies with the OS, applications and users.
Azul Systems – Bringing Disruption to Enterprise Computing
Scott Sellers, VP of Hardware Engineering and CTO of Azul Systems, made a case that mulitcore processors carried to the many core levels provides significant value. His presentation included the following:
The server market in the enterprise is approximately $50B but only grows about 3% per year. The Fortune 1000 companies spend $7 to $8B per year on servers for VM based applications but this market is growing at 20% to 30% per year as the VM model is dominate. Using largely J2E as the development foundation, applications are being developed which are distributed. But the problem is that the traditional servers multiply at rapid rates to support the growth in applications. One of the results is that the effective TCO also rises rapidly.
Azul Systems provides a network computing appliance which has as a close parallel with NAS. At the center of their appliance is the Azul Vega 1 processor which is capable of scaling to 384 coherent threads per system – well beyond even the Intel IA64 Montecito.
It is estimated that 50% of the enterprise applications are today being developed in Java and by 2006 80% will migrate to Java. With J2E being fully multi-threaded it can be effectively employed on a virtual machine targeted to executing the Java VM.
The Azul Vega processor does not expose its instruction set because it executes the Java VM code. A major improvement made with the Vega is “pauseless” garbage collection. The processor has 24 cores per chip. The design supports multi-chip SMP where each processor has complete and equal access to memory.
An appliance which is 11RU has up to 384 cores and 256GB of memory. The appliance can respond to spikes in processor demand in 10ms. The implementation requires no changes to existing Java applications and the appliance is OS agnostic. The appliance can just be plugged into the data center and it runs.
One of the first commercial installations is in travel industry for reservations – the company is Pegasus. They had 8 X 8 SPARC and 4 X 2 way SPARC servers – 72 CPUs which were running at 70% utilization. When an Azul appliance was added, 15 cores, its utilization was only 3%. The system still included a 3 X 2 SPARC server running at 70% utilization. The net result was a reduction in CPUs from 72 to 6.
One of the major issues is how to license software. Traditional software licensing based on the number of CPUs and applying this directly to the Azul processors would make software costs prohibitive. Azul is working the those that provide the enterprise software, and BAE is the first one,to have a more reasonable license strategy. The approach is to license the host server and not the pool of processors.
In summary, Azul stated that by 2010:
No one computer architecture will fit all.
That enterprise compute architecture will separate from the client architecture.
The WAVE spoke with Scott Sellers and asked – how does this architecture extend downstream to the workstation to the client? The problem lies with the software architecture today. Even if some applications can benefit from significant performance improvements from thread level parallelism it may not be economical to rewrite the applications. Thus, extending the benefits of many core to the client may be many years off.
Is there a Magic Solution to Using Multi-core?
The problem is uniform, decrease thermal density by going to multi-core with lower clock speeds, but the solution on how to use these multi-core processors is diverse. Solutions presented included: programming to support parallelism, virtualization, an OS per core, and many core.
We describe these solutions as:
Concurrency in software.
Virtualize the software and hardware
Implement one OS per core and
Create a many core processors.
Here is a sample.
Microsoft – Herb Sutter
Herb gave a compelling presentation that the hardware and software community needs to work together to address the multi-core issue. His theme was captured in the first and last slides:
The need for currency is here now. “the future is now, everybody is doing it (concurrency) because they have to.”
Concurrency will affect the way we write software. “The Free Lunch” is over. Only applications with lots of latent concurrency will regain the performance free lunch.
The software industry has lots of work to do and we estimate that the hardware industry vastly underestimates this.
The problem with concurrency lies on the client. There are many threads per user “request.” The client has not been optimized to run on a multi-core computer.
An appeal was made to
Not underestimate the programming problem.
Focus hardware semantics and operations on programmability first and speed second.
Herb then outlined his work on Concur, a set of Object Oriented extensions to support concurrency.
XenSource – Simon Crosby
The value of Xen is that it decouples the OS software and applications from the underlying hardware.
Xen is capable of live relocation which enables a running virtual machine to be moved in 50ms.
The hypervisor is less than 50K lines of code. One of its advantages is that it virtualizes only the base platform of the CPU, MMU and low level interrupts. It also supports the native OS device drivers.
XenSource is an open source initiative.
When run on the Pacifica extensions by AMD Xen can run Windows XP/s003 with any paravirtualization modifications.
AMD – Kevin McGrath
AMD described, with some glee, the innovation they feel is present in “Pacifica” technology. This allows for virtualization extensions to the X86 64bit AMD processors to support hypervisors.
These features include:
Processors Guest Mode
New Instruction – VMRUN
New Data Structure – Virtual Machine Control Block
(VMCB)
Enhanced Memory Management for virtualization
Interrupt architecture enhancementsFreescale – Toby Foster
Freescale was advocating the use of an OS per core in embedded applications. The chip which supports this architecture is the MPC8641D. It is based on the PowerPC e600 core. There is 1MB of L2 cache per core. It was claimed that this approach supports many of the embedded applications which have dedicated processing requirements per core.
IBM – David Krolak and Alex Chow
IBM made it sound easy to program its cell processor. Yet, the processes to realize the application development flow seem not quite as easy.
An overview was given of the Cell processor and then some of its programming considerations in this two part talk.
The cell computer implements 9 cores which run at a 3 – 4 GHz clock. It is called the Broadband Engine (BE). Control is done with the PPE (Power Processor Element) and 8 Synergistic Processor Elements (SPE) that use Synergistic Memory Flow Control (SMF). There is a high bandwidth Element Interconnect Bus (EIB). It is claimed that the BE can support:
Game console systems
Blades
HDTV
Home Media Servers
SupercomputersThe performance of the EIB is impressive:
4 16 Byte data rings
Operates at ½ processor core frequency
Peak rate 300GB/s at 3.2GHz processor clock with
200GB/s sustainedEach EIB Bus supports 25.6GB/sec in each direction.
Each cell has two Rambus I/O controllers which are capable of 30GB/s outbound and 35GB/s inbound.
In terms of programming, the data level parallelism is SIMD. The task level parallelism is 8 SPEs and 2 PPE SMT. The cell programming model is:
Local Store resident multi-tasking
Self-managed multi-tasking
Kernel-managed SPE scheduling and virtualizationIn order to realize the power of the BE this application development flow was recommended:
Iterative Development Steps
Complexity study of new or legacy algorithm
D ata traffic analysis
Experimental partitioning and mapping of the algorithm and program structure to the architecture.Additional hints were given:
Start simple – Develop PPE Control, PPE Scalar code
Develop PPE Control, partitioned SPE scalar code
Transform SPE scalar code to SPE SIMD code
Re-balance the computational data movementThe thrust of the IBM presentation was that the BE is easy to program.
WAVE Comments
When it comes to multi-core, hardware processors are well ahead of the software to fully utilize them. As the WAVE heard at Processor Forum, in spite of increasing the number of cores, the gains are not assured. Yet, several speakers spoke of the poor state of enterprise server utilization – 15%. The data center has specific thermal and power limitations. Thus, an improvement in performance for a given power usage is a large win.
Today, the market value for effective use of multi-core lies in the enterprise. This is the low hanging fruit. Yet, we learned that there is a limit to the gain from highly parallel architectures.
If applications continue to migrate away from the desktop to services it is not clear that the client will continue to need the benefits of Moore’s Law on the desktop. Thus, the gains in improving performance lies in the data center – which is already the focus of multi-core processors and virtualization. A good example of this is Google. Yes, the desktop cannot do Internet crawling and then searching but Google has shown how a massively parallel implementation can do what the desktop cannot via an Internet service.
IBM was emphatic that the cell is easy to program. Yet, we wondered if the cell is supercomputing all over again which has stumbled because it can only solve specific classes of problems. The cell has the advantage of a major application – the Sony PS3 – but it remains to be seen if the technology can go beyond specialized processing. What is important about the cell is that it is one look into the future of many core processors (At present the cell has only 8 processors). The cell has a very fast interconnect bus which supports its fast processors. Thus, we already see multiple architecture approaches to multi and many core. It remains to be see if processing will fragment or nest around a single solution like what happened with the X86.
0547.2 Fraud & Phishing Protection
***New Software for FireFox and Internet Explorer Blocks Fraud and Phishing
Santa Clara, CA
November 17, 2005
FraudEliminator Co. has released FraudEliminator Pro 2.4, an advanced tool to fight the growing tide of fraudulent websites on the internet. FraudEliminator Pro defends against all kinds of online fraud, including phishing, pharming, and DNS exploits, and also shows information about each site visited, including where it is hosted and when the domain name was registered. Version 2.4 adds more warning options based on website creation date and location and greatly advanced anti-fraud protection.
FraudEliminator is an advanced tool for FireFox and Internet Explorer to help protect users by automatically finding and blocking online fraud; it is like an anti-virus program for the web, retrieving new fraud definitions and fraudulent site lists on a constant basis, and using advanced detection algorithms to classify possible fraud. In addition, FraudEliminator gives users an opportunity to fight back against online fraud by letting them report fraud incidents back to FraudEliminator's central database.
How FraudEliminator Works
FraudEliminator maintains a real-time threat database that tracks every known online fraud threat. To keep the database up to date, FraudEliminator has built a network of fraud incident collection points and a team of fraud analysts. In addition, users are encouraged to report fraud incidents to the central monitoring center by clicking a "Fraud Report" button on their web browser when they suspect foul play. These fraud reports, once reviewed and verified, are in turn distributed back to defend users. Adding yet another layer of protection, FraudEliminator has also developed a proprietary set of statistical algorithms designed to recognize signs of fraud. For example, a website claiming to be CitiBank but based in Moldova would be blocked as fraud.
FraudEliminator requires a Windows-compatible PC running Windows 95, 98, Me, 2000 or XP, and Internet Explorer 5+ or FireFox 1.0 or higher. The basic version of FraudEliminator is completely without charge; FraudEliminator Pro, available for $19.99, delivers users more frequent fraud database updates and helps support the ongoing development of the product.
http://www.fraudeliminator.com
0547.3 C/C++ Programming Libraries
***NAG announces major new release of its numerical library for C and C++ programmers
Downers Grove, Illinois
November 21, 2005
The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) has announced its new release of the globally renowned NAG C Library. Extensive new functionality added to the NAG C Library at the latest release provides programmers with over 1000 easily embedded numerical routines. The new developments at Mark 8 make it far and away the largest commercially available numerical library for the C language. In addition to the considerable new functionality, Mark 8 will be available for 64-bit and 32-bit applications alike and feature compatibility with the latest compilers.
For over 15 years developers around the world have trusted the NAG C Library for highly accurate answers, robust code and comprehensive documentation. They also know that technical support from NAG means talking to one of our expert developers. NAG C Library users also benefit from the fact that the library code has been applied to some of the toughest application requirements in finance, engineering, research, energy, life sciences, and business analytics. The flexible structure of the NAG C Library enables it to be called from many environments and packages such Microsoft .NET, Excel, MATLAB and various popular statistical packages making it ideal for a wide range of application environments.
With the increased strength in terms of size and functionality, the NAG C Library, Mark 8 will benefit anyone needing to add mathematical and statistical functionality to their applications. Of particular interest to those working within the finance industry will be the extended optimization chapter, which now incorporates enhanced sparse matrix techniques, critical for efficiently solving problems that involve a very large proportion of zeros in the constraint or objective functions. A typical example is in a portfolio optimization problem where a constraint exists on the percentage of the portfolio invested in stocks within a given country. In such a problem there will be holdings specified for many stocks but most will be zero making the problem large but also predominantly sparse in nature.
Mark 8 will also provide a number of new modules and techniques in fields such as linear algebra and copulas. There is currently great interest in the mathematics of copulas from financial engineers and the modules for this branch of statistics within the new release will be a vital numerical tool for those wanting to use Gaussian or Student-t or other copula techniques to model multivariate statistical relationships on computers. Copulas are also frequently applied to any form of stochastic simulation where a more flexible multivariate covariance structure is required.
The already extensive linear regression chapter in the NAG C Library has been further enhanced with the inclusion of routines for stepwise linear regression and mixed effects regression. Stepwise regression allows for the automatic selection of subsets of independent variates and is ideal for analyzing datasets with a large number of independent variates. The mixed effects regression routines allow the fitting models that contain both random and fixed variates; a type of modeling that is currently used in a wide range of disciplines. In addition to the widespread enhancements to the statistical area of the NAG C Library the Time Series Analysis chapter has been enlarged with the addition of routines for the fitting of and prediction from a vector autoregressive moving average (VARMA) model.
The flexibility of the software allows it to be used independently or as part of a wider application in all areas of scientific numerical computation. Indeed, a growing number of software partners (e.g. Oracle, MapleSoft, Manugistics) are embedding NAG functionality into their own software packages in order to exploit the quality, reduced maintenance requirements and faster time-to-market offered by NAG’s algorithms. Because every algorithm is subject to NAG’s stringent testing, users can have complete confidence in the product.
NAG’s C Library is available in a wide range of implementations, from PCs to supercomputers, covering Windows, Linux and major Unix platforms, ensuring that NAG’s users are not constrained to a particular environment. In addition, users subscribing to NAG’s Customer Support Service can have access via the Response Centre to the technical experts responsible for this software.
About NAG
NAG is dedicated to making world-class cross-platform mathematical, statistical, data mining components and tools for developers as well as 3D visualization application development environments. NAG serves it customers from offices in the UK (Oxford), Chicago and Tokyo, supporting over 10,000 customer sites worldwide in finance, engineering, and scientific research. NAG software is the choice of over 25 independent software vendors including Oracle, IBM, DemandTec and many others.
***AMC-23 Satellite Slated for December 6 Launch; Hybrid Spacebus 4000 Spacecraft to Deliver Mobile Broadband and Network Services
PRINCETON, N.J.
Nov. 22, 2005
The AMERICOM-23 (AMC-23) satellite, of SES AMERICOM, an SES GLOBAL Company, was delivered to Baikonur, Kazakhstan on November 4 to be readied for its Proton/Breeze M launch scheduled for the morning of December 6 local time (evening of December 5 EST). The Spacebus 4000 spacecraft was built by Alcatel Alenia Space and is being launched by International Launch Services (ILS) for service at the 172 degrees East longitude orbital position.
The spacecraft, along with an array of testing equipment and systems, was packed into nine crates weighing more than 85 metric tons and then loaded on a special purpose Antonov cargo plane. The flight left Nice, France on November 3, 2004 and arrived the following day. The plane's cargo was unloaded and the combined satellite program teams from AMERICOM and Alcatel immediately began a rigorous sequence of pre-launch preparations. These preparations include launch site testing, spacecraft fueling, integrating the satellite into the fairing, mating the fairing with the Proton/Breeze M, a final set of tests, and roll-out of the rocket to the launch pad.
AMC-23 is an advanced, high-powered hybrid C/Ku-band satellite, from which signals can be received and sent from California to Bangladesh, from as far north as Alaska in the U.S. and as far south as Australia and New Zealand, and all points in between. This spacecraft will serve local, transcontinental and transoceanic customers across the Pacific region, including Western North America, East Asia, the South Pacific, Alaska and Hawaii, and provide links to the world's premier regional satellite systems.
The design of AMC-23 combines a conventional C-band landmass coverage payload with an innovative Ku-band oceanic coverage payload. The satellite's Ku-band payload, comprised of 20 high-powered transponders with varied bandwidths from 27 to 36 MHz, has been tailored to the long-haul airline routes over the Pacific Ocean to ensure consistent and constant broadband connectivity requirements of our customer, Connexion by Boeing. In comparison, the 18 transponder C-band payload will be used by broadcasters, cable programmers, Internet service providers, government agencies, educational institutions, carriers and private networks for next generation distribution solutions within, and connectivity to, North America and Pacific Rim.
***MX Logic Reports One in Eight Email Messages Infected by Sober.Z Worm; Blocking Port 25 Will Assist in Stopping Mass-Mailing Worm Propagation
DENVER
Nov. 22, 2005
MX Logic Inc. reports that as of noon MT on Tuesday, Nov. 22, the MX Logic Threat Center had blocked over 1 million email messages infected with the latest variant of the prolific Sober worm, W32/Sober.Z -- or one in every eight emails.
MX Logic first detected Sober.Z on Monday, Nov. 21, and began blocking it immediately on behalf of its 6,600 customers worldwide.
Sober.Z (aka W32.Sober.X@mm, W32/Sober@MM!M681,WORM_SOBER.AG, Sober.Y, and W32/Sober-{X, Z}) is a mass-mailing worm spread through a .zip file attached to an email. Once the attachment is opened, the worm uses its own email engine to send itself to addresses harvested from the infected computer.
Port 25 is an Internet gateway that is used for the sending of email traffic on the Internet. As a globally recognized best practice, ISPs can choose to block this port to prevent malicious outbound email, such as the Sober.Z worm which used its own SMTP engine to propagate.
As with other recent variants of the Sober worm, Sober.Z uses a number of different subject lines and message bodies. Spoofed email addresses suggest that the attachment was sent by a government authority such as the FBI or CIA and request that the attachment be opened to verify charges brought against the email's recipient. Examples of Sober Z subject lines include:
-- "Your IP was Logged"
-- "hi, ive a new mail address"
-- "You visit illegal web sites"
-- "Paris Hilton & Nicole Richie"
-- "Registration confirmation"
Earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) provided service providers best practices to stop outbound email abuse. These include:
-- Blocking port 25
-- Applying rate-limiting controls for email relays
-- Identifying computers that are sending atypical amounts of email, taking steps to determine if these computers are acting as spam zombies and, when necessary, quarantining the affected computers until the source of the problem is removed
-- Providing plain-language information for customers on how to keep their home computers secure
***Think Outside Inc. Announces Blackberry Support; New Portable Keyboard for Enterprise CRM Users Addresses 'Blackberry Thumb'
SAN JOSE, Calif.
Nov. 22, 2005
Think Outside Inc. announced the availability of the Stowaway Shasta, a portable keyboard designed specifically for Blackberry users.
Think Outside Inc. observed that Until now, Blackberry users could only compose messages using the integrated thumb keypad which may lead to 'Blackberry Thumb', a repetitive motion injury that was recently documented by researchers at Cornel University. Those small keyboards are great for quick messages, but present a problem for heavy text users. With the Shasta, users can comfortably compose messages and take notes using a normal size keyboard.
The new Stowaway Shasta Bluetooth Keyboard and driver offer several unique and revolutionary features, including:
-- Full size foldable keyboard -- Shasta uses key switch technology that is on par with the best notebook keyboards. It folds into a compact size that is 5.7 x 3.87 x .055 inches and is available in an English QWERTY layout with a 5th row of number keys.
-- Over-the-Air Driver installation -- Blackberry users can surf to Think Outside's web site, which will automatically download the latest driver thus removing the need to sync with a PC.
-- Hot keys -- Shasta has a dedicated key layout for Blackberry users. Users can use hot keys to launch the most common Blackberry applications.
-- Bluetooth -- Shasta uses Bluetooth technology that removes the need for cumbersome wires.
The Stowaway Shasta supports a wide variety of Bluetooth-enabled devices from RIM, including the 7100, 7500 and 7200 series, and will be available from leading retailers in November 2005.
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