Robust HPC

If you’re one of the thousands who’s looking for answers, we hope this whitepaper would aid you to learn how to deal with these prominent threats and work out a plan to prevent them ahead of time. Prevention Is Better Than Cure. Download it FREE today: http://bit.ly/robusthpc-download-130718

A recent report by Krebs on Security showed that more than 89,000 employees at Google have not been victims of phishing attacks since 2017, thanks to their implementation of 2FA security keys. 2FA or Two-Factor Authentication is a recommended secure method that requires you to provides a password to your online services and also come up with another piece of proof that you are who say you are to log in successfully.

The most common 2FA methods we see is the 6-digit codes that are sent to your mobile devices via text messages or push notifications. A 2FA security key like YubiKey basically takes it up a notch because no matter how strong a password or how complex the authentication is, seasoned hackers will always find a way to compromise any system that sends codes in text messages.

Shape like a metal/plastic key about the size of a USB stick, instead of unlocking a door, a 2FA security key unlocks your digital life online. All you need to do is plug it into your laptop when you’re trying to access your online services like Google, Dropbox, Facebook, or even Windows and MacOS itself, the key adheres to industry standards like U2F and FIDO2 that provides a secure, easy-to-use and durable authentication for your organization, effectively against phishing attacks. Even if you lose the key or forget it somewhere, you can still use a secure code generator on your phone to complete any 2FA logins.

We are proud to announce that our solution, Raysync, has been awarded as the ‘Best Virtualisation Support’ in Data Mover Challenge (DMC) 2021 at Supercomputing Asia 2021.

The news is up and it’s finally here! NVIDIA announced the new H100 GPU which will be replacing the famous A100 GPU.

 H100 is called Hopper GPU – named after the US pioneer of computer programming, Grace Hopper. H100 will be useful for AI Compute & High Performance Compute (HPC) in data centres. It is designed to deliver outstanding performance and brings the next generation of exascale high-performance computing (HPC) and trillion-parameter AI within the reach of all researchers. H100 GPU is up to 9X faster training over the A100 for mixture-of-experts (MoE) models.

 According to NVIDIA 20x units of H100 GPU could sustain the entire internet traffic as of today. NVLink technology is used by GPU to communicate with other GPU in the Cloud, without need to go through PCIe Express. This will allow GPU to exchange data 7x faster than the latest PCIe 5.0.

 The new NVIDIA Hopper 100 GPU that was said will be released in the 3rd Quarter of 2022, will be the most powerful GPU  ever that sets the new benchmark for AI accelerators.

In an effort to further enhance a company’s cyber defences, we want to highlight a common cyber-attack that everyone should be aware of – phishing.

“Phishing” is the most common type of cyber-attack that affects organizations like ours. Phishing attacks can take many forms, but they all share a common goal – getting you to share sensitive information such as login credentials, credit card information, or bank account details.

Although we maintain controls to help protect our networks and computers from cyber threats, we rely on you to be our first line of defence.

We’ve outlined a few different types of phishing attacks to watch out for:

Phishing: In this type of attack, hackers impersonate a real company to obtain your login credentials. You may receive an e-mail asking you to verify your account details with a link that takes you to an imposter login screen that delivers your information directly to the attackers.

Spear Phishing: Spear phishing is a more sophisticated phishing attack that includes customized information that makes the attacker seem like a legitimate source. They may use your name and phone number and refer to [Your Company Name] in the e-mail to trick you into thinking they have a connection to you, making you more likely to click a link or attachment that they provide.

Whaling: Whaling is a popular ploy aimed at getting you to transfer money or send sensitive information to an attacker via email by impersonating a real company executive. Using a fake domain that appears similar to your client (hallandleepartnerss.com), they look like normal emails from a high-level official of the company, typically the management, and ask you for sensitive information (including usernames and passwords).

Shared Document Phishing: You may receive an e-mail that appears to come from file-sharing sites like Dropbox or Google Drive alerting you that a document has been shared with you. The link provided in these e-mails will take you to a fake login page that mimics the real login page and will steal your account credentials.

To avoid these phishing schemes, please observe the following email best practices:

·        Do not click on links or attachments from senders that you do not recognize. Be especially wary of .zip or other compressed or executable file types.

·        Do not provide sensitive personal information (like usernames and passwords) over email.

·        Watch for email senders that use suspicious or misleading domain names.

·        Inspect URLs carefully to make sure they’re legitimate and not imposter sites.

·        Do not try to open any shared document that you’re not expecting to receive.

·        If you can’t tell if an email is legitimate or not, please forward it to [email protected].

·        Be especially cautious when opening attachments or clicking links if you receive an email containing a warning banner indicating that it originated from an external source.

It is essential for everyone to keep each other safe from cyber threats by following these tips. Hope you find them useful!

Imagine this…

You just spent a lot on a rack of servers and multiple GPUs to solve your computational problems.

You don’t know it yet, but your GPUs are mostly left untouched even with finely tuned models and servers, so you end up wasting space, energy, and well. your power bills.

GigaIO™ solves this problem with FabreX – the highest performance, lowest latency rack-scale network you can get.

With FabreX, you can now increase utilisation and eliminate over provisioning of resources, which helps reduce cooling expenses. On top of that, you’re also able to save space with fewer power-consuming servers and accelerators for the exact same performance.

You must be wondering…

What is GigaIO™?

GigaIO™ provides Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure solutions, which comes in both hardware and software.

The hardware consists of:

·        FabreX Top of Rack (TOR) Switch

·        FabreX PCIe Gen4 Adapter

GigaIO™ FabreX™ Network Adapter Card enables non-blocking low-latency PCIe Gen4 which gives AI/ML, HPC, and Data Analytics users the flexibility to create exactly the system they need for optimised performance and reduced total cost of ownership.

·        Accelerator Pooling Appliance

The GigaIO™ Gen4 Accelerator Pooling Appliance is the industry’s highest performing PCIe accelerator appliance fully supporting PCIe Gen4 with up to 1Tb/sec bandwidth into and out of the box. Support up to 8 double-width PCIe Gen 4.0 x16 accelerator cards with up to 300W delivered to every slot; and 2 PCIe Gen 4.0 x16 low-profile slots.

 Besides GPUs, it also supports FPGAs, IPUs, DPUs, thin-NVMe-servers and specialty AI chips.

 The software offered:

 ·        FabreX Software

A Linux-based, resource-efficient software layers engine that drives the performance and dynamic composability of GigaIO’s Software-Defined HardwareTM (SDH).

It integrates with Bright Cluster Manager that supports popular HPC workload schedulers such as SLURM, PBS Pro & OpenPBS, LSF, Altair Grid Engine, Kubernetes.

For infrastructure integration it supports Bright Cluster Manager VMware vSphere integration and Supermicro SuperCloud Composer.

What solution does GigaIO™ offer?

Through an all-new architecture, GigaIO™ offers a hyper-performance network that enables a unified, software-driven composable infrastructure.

In other words, GigaIO™ allows CPU, GPU Accelerator, and NVMe drives that are installed in any server or in an external chassis to be shared among multiple servers. As a result, you no longer have to detach drives from the initial physical server to be reinstalled in another server.

 Namely, GigaIO™ FabreX enables you to connect 32 GPUs with only 1 server. Not only does this reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO), the infrastructure management is simpler too. Additionally, the low latency interconnection also provides superior performance.

What do we mean by reducing TCO?

By implementing GigaIO solution, you can:

1.      Spend less to get the same performance and capacity as compared to other solutions.

2.      Get ROI (Return on Investment) faster because it allows the customer to do exactly the same things but with lower cost. The GigaIO solution enables you to achieve ROI in half the standard time.

3.      Do more things with GigaIO, for example, GigaIO supports orchestration of ANY Compute, Acceleration (CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs), Storage, Memory (3D-XPoint) or Networking resource for any workload using an Enterprise-Class, Easy-To-Use and Open Standards high-performance network.

How does it work?

FabreX is the only fabric which enables complete disaggregation and composition of all the resources in your server rack. Besides composing resources to servers, FabreX can also compose your servers over PCIe (and CXL in the future), without the cost, complexity and latency hit from having to switch to Ethernet or InfiniBand within the rack.

With any workload that needs more than one server and more resources (storage, GPUs, FPGAs, etc.), FabreX is exactly what you need. Typical workloads centre around the use of GPU and FPGA accelerators, including AI/ML/DL, visualisation, High Performance Computing and Data Analytics.

For more use cases visit our solutions page.

In Robust HPC, we use GigaIO’s FabreX universal dynamic fabric to enable true rack-scale computing, breaking the limits of the server box to enable the entire rack the unit of compute.

 Resources such as GPU, FGPAs, ASICs and NVMe are connected via low latency FabreX switches (less than 110ns with non-blocking ports) and can be configured in various ways depending on your needs.

Long story short, you get the flexibility and agility of the cloud, but with the security and cost control of your own on-prem infrastructure.

Get in touch with Robust HPC – an authorised reseller of GigaIO in Southeast Asia, to know more about how organisations use GigaIO and find the right use case to address your computing needs.

If you were on social media lately (who doesn’t), you’ve probably noticed a lot of old faces, young faces, weird faces, altered faces of your friends, colleagues and strangers on your news feed. So what is actually happening?

FaceApp, the AI-powered selfie-editing app that’s been going viral for the past few weeks, has now responded to a privacy controversy. Concerns had been raised that FaceApp, a Russian startup called Wireless Lab, uploads users’ photos to the cloud — without making it clear to them that processing is not going on locally on their devices.

FaceApp recently confirms that most of the processing needed to power its app’s beautifying/gender-bending/age-accreting/-defying effects are indeed accomplished in the cloud. Though FaceApp claims that the app only uploads photos users have specifically selected for editing, security tests so far have also not found evidence that the app uploads a user’s entire photo gallery.

FaceApp goes on to specify that it “might” store the photos users have chosen to upload in the cloud for a short period, claiming this is done for “performance and traffic” — to make sure that a user doesn’t repeatedly upload the same photo to carry out another edit. It claims that most images are deleted from the FaceApp servers within 48 hours from the upload date.

It also claims no user data is “transferred to Russia”, even though its R&D team is based there. So the suggestion is that storage and cloud processing is being performed using the infrastructure based outside Russia (Possible AWS and Google Cloud).

FaceApp also says users can request their data is deleted. Though it doesn’t yet have a very smooth way to do this — instead it asks users to send delete requests via the mobile app using “Settings->Support->Report a bug” with the word “privacy” in the subject line, adding that it’s “working on a better UI for that”.

It also points out that the vast majority of FaceApp users don’t log in — making the point that it’s not able to link photos to identities in most cases.

We’ve pasted the company’s full statement at the bottom of this post:

 1. FaceApp performs most of the photo processing in the cloud. We only upload a photo selected by a user for editing. We never transfer any other images from the phone to the cloud.

2. We might store an uploaded photo in the cloud. The main reason for that is performance and traffic: we want to make sure that the user doesn’t upload the photo repeatedly for every edit operation. Most images are deleted from our servers within 48 hours from the upload date.

3. We accept requests from users for removing all their data from our servers. Our support team is currently overloaded, but these requests have our priority. For the fastest processing, we recommend sending the requests from the FaceApp mobile app using “Settings->Support->Report a bug” with the word “privacy” in the subject line. We are working on the better UI for that.

4. All FaceApp features are available without logging in, and you can log in only from the settings screen. As a result, 99% of users don’t log in; therefore, we don’t have access to any data that could identify a person.

5. We don’t sell or share any user data with any third parties.

6. Even though the core R&D team is located in Russia, the user data is not transferred to Russia.

Additionally, we’d like to comment on one of the most common concerns: all pictures from the gallery are uploaded to our servers after a user grants access to the photos (for example, https://twitter.com/joshuanozzi/status/1150961777548701696).  We don’t do that. We upload only a photo selected for editing. You can quickly check this with any of network sniffing tools available on the internet.

NVIDIA GRID T4-4Q Remote Video Play Performance

In the video, we compared the display's performance and quality of three remote access protocols: 1) Horizon View 2) RDP 3) Anydesk

The connection is made via ROBUSTvpn, over a 300Mbps-to-300Mbps bandwidth.

The specifications of the virtual desktop are: - 8 vCPU with Intel Xeon Silver 4208 - 16GB RAM - NVIDIA Tesla T4 with T4-4Q profile

When tasked with keeping track of the network devices in an organization, many IT professionals instinctively open a fresh Excel sheet, punch in their assets, and build from there. Others will search for “IT inventory Excel template” or “Managing hardware in Excel” to give them a head start. Spreadsheets are familiar, easy to whip up and scalable… right? But Hold on.

System Administrators who had swapped their spreadsheets for a dedicated IT Asset Management solution rarely look back. Here are four reasons to look at.

Let Humans Do What Humans Do Best

Ask yourself this:

·        Do you ever find yourself copying or typing those software license keys manually?

·        Tired of tracking warranty statuses by digging up the serial number from an old receipt or boxes?

·        Do you sometimes spend hours on editing an inventory task? And are you sure it’s 100% accurate?

·        Is the official version of your network inventory doc named Asset_List v2_(copy)(copy)(3).xlsx?

If all this sounds familiar, you have been doing machine work all this time. An automated network discovery solution can gather a wealth of knowledge in minutes, while you focus on actual work. Inventory won’t take hours, and there’s no chance of typo’s when entering that OID or serial number.

More importantly, it keeps your data up-to-date, so you don’t have to edit your records after every maintenance. With a database full of information that you hadn’t even thought of tracking, you can bring up a report that suits your needs on the spot. No need to plan ahead for every possible challenge, and no lost time on entries you never even use.

People make mistakes, and their time is valuable. Your server can collect detailed information for you, without human errors. Focus on managing your IT, rather than your spreadsheets filled with inaccurate network info.

Up-to-date Asset Data at your Fingertips

Some information changes too rapidly to manage in spreadsheets. Our ITAM (IT Asset Management) Solution allows you to stay up to date with what’s going on at all times. Besides, it informs you when anything, in particular, requires your attention.

It allows you to manage the entire life cycle and history of an asset, along with a complete audit trail. Keep track of who borrowed which laptop, when they were online, and when the warranty expires. Spreadsheets equal limitations, and at best, help you to list your devices. With an automated solution, you own your network.

Centralized ITAM System of Record

It’s very hard to keep spreadsheets standardized. Everyone has their own ideas, tastes and methods for them. Even with shared workbooks, you can’t be sure that the info stored in these documents is accessible to other staff and is maintained properly.

 Our ITAM Solution lets different users access the information they need, in one central system. The database is always consistent, and users with different skill levels and permissions can access that data in a way that suits them.

—

One Spreadsheet to Rule Them All?

If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If your only tool is a spreadsheet, everything looks like a table. Why should the way you interact with your network be dictated by the format of a spreadsheet?

An ITAM solution is built for the job and will serve you a custom view, depending on whether you need to find local admins, view the percentage of remaining disk space on a hard drive, or get an overview on a specific asset or user.

Are you tired of using Excel spreadsheets and CSVs to track and manage your entire IT network? Start your free Lansweeper trial today and make time for what you do best. If you don’t know how to start, feel free to contact us at Robust HPC, our consultants are happy to show you how.

Reasons to Choose ESET

ESET Business Solution provides you with a simple and straightforward way to help mix and match your endpoint protection according to your needs while deploying it on a range of platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux & Android). ESET is designed with ease of use that allows you to easily deploy, configure, and manage your security software from a single console. Just one person, using ESET Security Management Center, can oversee all of your IT security cost-effectively in real-time, from a single location.

What could ESET bring to your organisation?

Full Protection

HIPS monitors system activity and uses a pre-defined set of rules to recognise suspicious system behaviour. It is highly effective against aggravating malware threats and remove them immediately. ESET will also provide email protection which provides anti-phishing and anti-spam features to your inbox.

Web Control

Web Control can help prevent users from accessing pages with inappropriate or harmful content, or pages that may have a negative impact on work productivity, e.g. Facebook, YouTube, Netflix, and others.

Device Control

Device Control allows you to scan, block or adjust extended filters and/or permissions and define a user’s ability to access and work with a given device. This is useful if the computer administrator wants to prevent the use of devices containing unsolicited content. Thus preventing data loss by human behaviors.

Low System Demand

ESET takes out very minimum resources in the background, making them suitable for older hardware, thus saving IT-related costs while ensuring your computers are always running at their peak performance without interruptions.

Centralized Management

Easily deploy, configure, and manage not just ESET security but 3rd party software as well from our web console. Monitor and respond to all your security-related events, including logs from antivirus, firewall, web/device control, and others, all-in-one place.

Unilicense

ESET Unilicense lets you mix & match your endpoint protection to a different OS (Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android) anytime with just a few clicks without having to purchase additional licenses, thus saving a substantial amount of your company budget.

 If we’ve got your attention, we are happy to set up a free consultation session with your company to talk about:

·        Company Introduction

·        Your current challenges and vision

·        Our feasible solutions for you

·        Free Trial

·        Happy ending! (We hope)

Thanks for taking your time reading this and we are eager to receive your feedback. Hear from you soon!

Article Source:

In this live demo video, we show the performance of running various AEC software on an NVIDIA RTX vWS - 3dsmax, Unreal Engine, CAD, Photoshop and an interactive app done with Unity3D.

We also compared using Anydesk and vWS for remote working. You can see the difference in frame per second and how vWS empowers you to do work much more efficiently.