Compute Express Link (CXL) promises high-speed CPU interconnect

Alibaba, Cisco, Dell EMC, Facebook, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, Intel and Microsoft have teamed up to form Compute Express Link (CXL), an open industry standard group for high-speed CPU interconnect.

CXL will maintain memory coherency between the CPU memory space and memory on attached devices, which allows resource sharing for higher performance, reduced software stack complexity, and lower overall system cost. The technology is built upon PCI Express (PCIe) infrastructure, leveraging the PCIe 5.0 physical and electrical interface to provide advanced protocol in three key areas:

• I/O Protocol 
• Memory Protocol, initially allowing a host to share memory with an accelerator
• Coherency Interface

The group has completed work on a CXL Specification 1.0 for interconnect between the CPU and platform enhancements and workload accelerators, such as GPUs, FPGAs and other purpose-built accelerator solutions.

https://www.computeexpresslink.org/

Read More

Cloud Native Computing momentum continues to build

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which sustains and integrates open source technologies like Kubernetes and Prometheus, recently added 59 new members bringing its total to 375 supporting companies and organizations.

“Crossing the 375 mark is an incredible milestone for the Foundation, especially with more than 75 organizations in our end user community,” said Dan Kohn, executive director of Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “Companies like NVIDIA, MemSQL and Mattermost are reaping real value from cloud native technologies, and we only expect this to accelerate as these technologies mature and solidify their place in the market. We remain impressed by the technical innovation and growth in the ecosystem and are happy to work with our members to support the thriving cloud native community.”

Two upcoming events:

• KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU from May 20-23 in Barcelona and

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit in China from June 24-26 in Shanghai

Read More

European Parliament adopts Cybersecurity certification act

The European Parliament voted to adopt an EU Cybersecurity Act that establishes the first EU-wide cybersecurity certification scheme to ensure that certified products, processes and services sold in EU countries meet cybersecurity standards. MEPs also expressed their concern about Chinese IT in the EU, especially allegations that 5G equipment may have embedded backdoors that would allow Chinese manufacturers and authorities to have unauthorised access to private and personal data and telecommunications in the EU.

An official statement expresses concern that third-country equipment vendors might present a security risk for the EU, due to the laws of their country of origin obliging all enterprises to cooperate with the state in safeguarding a very broad definition of national security also outside their own country. In particular, the Chinese state security laws have triggered reactions in various countries, ranging from security assessments to outright bans.

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20190307IPR30694/meps-adopt-cybersecurity-act-and-want-eu-to-counter-it-threat-from-china

Read More

Linux Foundation's CommunityBridge offers funding, security, mentoring, diversity

The Linux Foundation is launching CommunityBridge – a new platform to help open source developers to advance sustainability, security, and diversity as they grow.

The initial launch of CommunityBridge offers open source communities early access to three critical tools:

• CommunityBridge Funding: enabling developers to transparently raise and spend funding;
• CommunityBridge Security: providing transparency into potential vulnerabilities and fixes; and
• CommunityBridge People: enabling easy connections of mentors and prospective mentees interested in getting involved in projects and advancing diversity.

“While large open source projects are often well-resourced, many smaller projects require more funds, talent, security, diversity, and resources to thrive,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “CommunityBridge is the platform to solve critical challenges and fuel open source innovation and sustainability by empowering people — all in one place.”

http://communitybridge.org

Read More

Open19 releases specs for data center racks

The Open19 Foundation has just published its Open19 Project Specifications for any 19” rack environment for servers, storage, and networking.

“I am pleased to make the Open19 Project Specifications available to the public,” said Open19 Foundation President Yuval Bachar. “We will see widespread adoption of the Open19 standard in 2019, and its public release means anyone can develop solutions based upon this technology.”

The Open19 Project defines a cross-industry common server form factor, creating a flexible and economic data center and edge solutions for operators of all sizes. It includes three main common elements — brick cage, power shelf, and network switch — and supports four form factors — brick, double wide brick, double high half-width brick, and double high double-wide brick. Currently, seven Open19 Foundation member companies have developed a total of 17 solutions that support the standard, with more products to be added soon.

Open19 Foundation founding member company LinkedIn contributed the specification to the Foundation last year, and it was previously only available to Foundation members. Learn more and download the specifications on the Open19 Foundation website.

http://www.open19.org

Read More

Calista Redmond appointed CEO of RISC-V Foundation

Calista Redmond has been appointed Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the RISC-V Foundation, which promotes the adoption and implementation of the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA).

Redmond brings more than 20 years of senior-level management and alliance experience, including as Vice President of IBM Z Ecosystem, where she was instrumental in growing the IBM Z Ecosystem. During her 12 years at IBM, she led strategic relationships with chip, hardware, and software providers, system integrators, business partners, clients, and developers, as well as fostered broader industry visibility and engagement.  Redmond was instrumental in the strategic formation of OpenPOWER as the IBM Director of OpenPOWER Global Alliances as well as elected President of the OpenPOWER Foundation in 2016.

“I’ve always understood the potential short- and long-term impact of the RISC-V license-free ISA on the open source community. Having spent a lot of my career working in the open source ecosystem, I’m excited to help RISC-V grow and deliver on  the Foundation’s mission of paving the way for the next 50 years of computing design and innovation,” said Redmond, CEO of the RISC-V Foundation. “From its inception in 2015 until now, the RISC-V Foundation has grown tremendously. I’m ready to leverage that momentum to expand the already impressive RISC-V ecosystem.”

The RISC-V Foundation, which was founded in 2015, now comprises more than 235 members building the first open, collaborative community of software and hardware innovators powering a new era of processor innovation.

Read More

FLY-LION3 subsea cable reaches Mayotte

The 400 km-long FLY-LION3 subsea cable has reached the island of Mayotte, an overseas department and region of France located in the Indian Ocean.

FLY-LION3 has landing stations in Kaweni (Mamoudzou) and Moroni. It will also link to existing cables LION2 and EASSy, offering a direct connection to the east coast of Africa.

Orange Marine, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Orange group, is responsible for laying the cable.

Read More

First edge infrastructure dev platform for 7nm Arm Neoverse

Arm, Cadence Design Systems, and Xilinx introduced a development platform cloud-to-edge infrastructure based on the new Arm Neoverse N1.

The Neoverse N1 System Development Platform (SDP) is based on TSMC’s 7nm FinFET process technology and is also the industry’s first 7nm infrastructure development platform enabling asymmetrical compute acceleration via the CCIX interconnect architecture/

The joint solution is available to hardware and software developers for hardware prototyping, software development, system validation, and performance profiling/tuning. It includes Cadence IP for CCIX, PCI Express (PCIe) Gen 4 and DDR4 PHY IP.

The SDP includes a Neoverse N1-based SoC with an operating frequency of up to 3GHz, full-sized caches and generous amounts of memory bandwidth with the latest optimized system IP. The robustness of the SDP is ideal for development, debug, performance optimization and workload analysis on a wide range of applications including those for machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics.

“The new Neoverse platforms deliver the performance and efficiency required to enable the cloud-to-edge infrastructure for a world with a trillion connected devices. Our ongoing SDP collaboration with Cadence, TSMC, and Xilinx truly enables developers with the system development tools necessary to innovate and deliver optimized Neoverse-based designs,” stated Drew Henry, senior vice president and general manager, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm.

Read More

Sequans teams with Lockheed Martin on LTE satellites

Sequans Communications is working with Lockheed Martin to develop new 4G LTE for satellite technologies for worldwide deployment. The idea is for LTE end user devices to connect directly to geostationary satellites.

“Sequans has expertise adapting LTE technology for special purposes such as this one,” said Scott Landis, a director at Lockheed Martin. “Sequans engineers modified their existing LTE chips to enable a new LTE-to-satellite communication specification developed by Lockheed Martin. LTE to satellite represents an important breakthrough in mobility and connectivity.”

“The work we are doing with Lockheed Martin to integrate LTE with satellite represents a significant evolution as we modify our LTE chips to take advantage of the huge satellite opportunity now developing for M2M and IoT applications,” Georges Karam, Sequans CEO. “Enabling the LTE modem to speak to satellite networks as simply and as easily as possible will have a major impact on handling the huge potential volume of broadband and IoT applications that require space-based, ubiquitous communications, such as connected cars, shipping, and navigation.”

http://www.sequans.com

Read More

Iskratel combines GPON Home Gateway with mesh Wi-Fi

Iskratel introduced its Innbox G78 GPON Home Gateway with mesh Wi-Fi capabilities based on multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO).

The new solution, which provides hardware support for Wi-Fi Alliance’s Easy Mesh, has been launched alongside Iskratel’s new mesh Wi-Fi solution. This further addresses inadequate home broadband and uses a cloud-based TR-069 centralised management system to provide operators such as one of Croatia’s leading fixed broadband provider Optima Telekom with remote control and configuration of customer premises equipment (CPE).

“We are very pleased to launch our two new products which aim to address sub-standard Wi-Fi performance in consumers’ homes,” said Mitja Golja, Head of Solutions for Broadband Networks at Iskratel. “This will become increasingly important for operators as end users increasingly access bandwidth-hungry services at home and any drops or lags in connectivity become unacceptable. Our new solutions will support operators in meeting these expectations, enabling simplified network management and reduced operational costs.”

Read More

Motorola Solutions appoints Saptharishi as CTO

Motorola Solutions named Dr. Mahesh Saptharishi as its new chief technology officer.

Saptharishi previously spent five years as CTO for Avigilon, a Motorola Solutions company and a leading provider of video and analytics solutions. He earned a doctorate degree in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon University and has also authored numerous scientific publications, articles and patents.

Read More