Project Loon by Google - High altitude balloons to provide internet access to everyone
Introducing the latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access. Project Loon is a network of balloons traveling on the edge of space, designed to connect people in rural and remote areas, help fill in coverage gaps and bring people back online after disasters.
Many of us think of the Internet as a global community. But two-thirds of the world’s population does not yet have Internet access. Project Loon is a network of balloons traveling on the edge of space, designed to connect people in rural and remote areas, help fill coverage gaps, and bring people back online after disasters.
[Project Loon] [read more @BBC & @wired]
Google gets how many are still without network connectivity.
there are choices to be made more sticky than plaster.”
Building a Net! | The Loopback Filter with Truman Boyes
Go read the whole poem. It’s brilliant.
How you and I could become nodes in the internet of things
A group of French researchers believe that the sensors and transmitters we wear will route and relay data, not just collect it. We won’t just be connected to the network. We’ll be the network.
Ever wonder what the network infrastructure of the future will be? Try looking in the mirror.
Some day our bodies — or at least the clothing or accessories that adorn them — could become key network nodes in the internet of things. European researchers think that sensors and transmitters on our bodies can be used to form cooperative ad hoc networks that could be used for group indoor navigation, crowd-motion capture, health monitoring on a massive scale and especially collaborative communications. Last week, French institute CEA-Leti and three French universities have launched the Cormoran project, which aims to explore the use of such cooperative interpersonal networks.
The concept of wireless body area networks (WBANs) isn’t a new one. WBANs could be used to sever the cord between patients and their monitoring equipment. Companies like Apple and Heapslylon are exploring the possibility of connected clothes with embedded sensors. We’ve already begun embracing a new era of wearables, such as Google Glass to Fitbit (see disclosure), designed to become extensions of our senses and movements.
Layer 3 to the elbow…
(via MyESnet : TNC 2013)
100G’s across the Atlantic…
Networking and DevOps - How it’s evolving, from Puppet Camp.
From Server Huggers to Cloud Addicts:
Once upon a time, IT needed to convince application owners to virtualize their servers instead of hanging on to a dedicated physical server. Now, many IT shops have won that battle, with Virtual Machines (VMs) becoming the de facto standard, and old “server hugger” application owners increasingly sold on the benefits of server virtualization.
With the availability of new IT infrastructures and cloud services that are faster than ever before, a new set of expectations around speed, agility, and time to market have been established. Today’s “cloud addict” application owners expect instant provisioning of compute, storage, and network resources, and business managers increasingly cringe at the possibility of infrastructure constraints.
”From Server Huggers to Cloud Addicts This thing I wrote came out decently. It’s a PDF. The rest talks about how the network gets in the way of making this shift work.
Also, this (mp3) classic rant was an inspiration.
(Source: your-daily-dose)
A server with 16 SFF HDDs can give you 16 TB of storage today; 32 TB in the future, probably matched by 32 cores at that time. The IO bandwidth, even with those 16 disks, will be a tenth of what you get from ten such servers. It’s the IO bandwidth that was a driver for MapReduce -as the original Google paper points out. Observing in a 2012 paper that IO bandwidth was lagging DRAM isn’t new -that’s a complaint going back to the late 1980s.
If you want great IO bandwidth from HDDs, you need lots of them in parallel. RAID-5 filesystems with striped storage deliver this at a price; HDFS delivers it at a tangibly lower price. As the cost of SDDs falls, when they get integrated into the motherboards, you’ll get something with better bandwidth and latency numbers (I’m ignoring wear levelling here, and hoping that at the right price point SSD could be used for cold data as well as warm data). SSD at the price/GB of today’s HDDs would let you store hundreds of TB in servers, transform the power budget of a Hadoop cluster, and make random access much less expensive. That could be a big change.
Even with SSDs, you need lots in parallel to get the bandwidth -more than a single server’s storage capacity. If, in, say 5-10 years you could get away with a “small” cluster with a few tens of machines, ideally SSD storage, and lots of DRAM per server, you’d get an interesting setup. A small enough set of machines that a failure would be significantly less likely, changing the policy needed to handle failures. Less demand for stateless operations and use of persistent storage to propagate results; more value in streaming across stages. Less bandwidth problems, especially with multiple 10GBe links to every node. Lots of DRAM and CPUs.
This would be a nice “Hadoop 3.x” cluster.
” Steve Loughran: Nobody ever got fired for using Hadoop on a cluster
New Technique Twists Light Signals to Achieve Theoretically Limitless Bandwidth
These new, high-capacity vortex beams tap a characteristic known as orbital angular momentum (OAM).
Right now, conventional transmission protocols like Wi-Fi or LTE modulate the spin angular momentum (SAM) but not the OAM. You can think of SAM as the spin of a signal, like a bullet (or a tightly spiraling football) twisting as it carves a direct path through the air. …if SAM is the earth rotating on its axis, then OAM is its movement around the sun—not just rotation, but actual movement in space.
This new, previously untapped dimension of movement allows engineers to still manipulate SAM while layering OAM on top. Researchers from Tel Aviv University in Israel, the University of Southern California, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory were able to twist together eight different beams of visible light using OAM resulting in 320 gigabytes per second of data transmission. That’s roughly seven Blu-ray movies per second
