Year: 2013

October 21, 2013 Leave a Comment
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5th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2014)

The International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) is a leading forum focusing on the integration of theory and experience in various disciplines of performance engineering. The conference has been bringing together experts from industry, academia and research to share and discuss ideas, challenges and solutions – work-in-progress and state-of-the-art – in performance analysis, measurement  and optimizations of hardware and software systems.

The 5th ICPE is supported by ACM and SPEC, will take place from March 23 to 26 in Dublin. Submission deadline for the industry and experience track is November 7th.

Additional Information is available at Conference Site, Industry and Experience Track.

Thank you

Raghunath Nambiar
(Chair, Industry Track)



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Raghunath Nambiar

No Longer with Cisco

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Cisco@SCTE Expo 2013: Seven Papers and a Breakfast

It wouldn’t be an SCTE Cable-Tec Expo without a stellar lineup of technical papers and workshops – even better because each one happens twice, to alleviate trade show schedules.

This year’s program features seven papers and presentations by my engineering colleagues, and a breakfast. Food first: Please join us at 6:30A on Tuesday for a Light Reading breakfast session titled “Monetizing Wi-Fi,” featuring Jared Headley, Senior Director of SP Mobility for Cisco. Here’s a link for more info.

In papers and presentations, here’s what Cisco’s technologists are contributing to the 2013 SCTE Cable-Tec Expo:

  • A deep-dive on DOCSIS 3.1 and “downstream convergence layers,” researched and written by John Chapman, SCTE Cable ‘Hall of Famer’, Cisco Fellow and CTO of its Cable Access Business Unit. It’s part of the Pre-conference DOCSIS 3.1 Symposium, which runs all day (10A-4:15P) on Monday, October 21. (In room 309, if you’re going.) John’s a DOCSIS pioneer, and always worth seeing, especially if you harbor any curiosity about how MAC-layer data will get onto the PHY layer – and lots of other 3.1 detail.
  • The amount of video distributed over IP is growing fast. John Horrobin focuses on this phenomenon in a session, titled “Implementing End-to-End IP Video Solutions,” drawing from lessons learned in field deployments to compare multicast to unicast and switched techniques. His paper and presentation, titled “Pioneering IP Video in Cable Networks,” also explores current events in the combining network, and how it will evolve in step with CCAP deployments.  Gateways with 16 and 24 tuners, that can deliver signals to connected devices over Ethernet, MoCA and Wi-Fi, are also detailed.  John’s on at 1:15-2:30 on Monday, 10/21, and again on Thursday from 2:30-3:45.
  • The decades-old old engineering challenge – how much to store, vs. how much to stream – is Continue reading “Cisco@SCTE Expo 2013: Seven Papers and a Breakfast”


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David Yates

as Director of Service Provider Video Marketing at Cisco

SP360

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A Practical Path to Gigabit Services Over Cable

By John Mattson, Senior Director of Marketing, Cisco Cable Access Business Unit

By now you’ve heard from AT&T, Google Fiber, Verizon, and the mainstream media, about their plans to offer Gigabit services in over14 states that’ll get wired for 1 Gig next year. Will Gigabit become a “New Norm”?

And if you’re a broadband service provider, you’re thinking, “okay, so, my fastest tiers are my lowest subscribed – tell me again why I need to rush to get this done right now?”

Far be it from me, or us, to pile on to this particular viewpoint, when it comes to Gigabit DOCSIS. Naturally, we see a reason for it. We sell the equipment. But I do think there’s a more plausible way to look at it, which is timely, because it’s a technical discussion, and this is the week of the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers’ annual Cable-Tec Expo in Atlanta.

We propose the following question to our cable operator customers: What if there was a way to profitably offer very high-speed services in your upper service tiers, while increasing speeds in your lower tiers, without massive disruption and the dreaded “forklift upgrade”? We believe there is. Think about it: Continue reading “A Practical Path to Gigabit Services Over Cable”



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David Yates

as Director of Service Provider Video Marketing at Cisco

SP360

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Check out the Cisco Security Blog

My posts will be focused on bringing topics of interest to government and business decision makers and explaining topics that could be very technical at level to allow good business decisions.  As a company, Cisco is blessed with some very smart and technical people who can go into much greater depth than I would even attempt.  We also have many more prolific bloggers than me.  If you would like more information and for good reading on Cybersecurity topics, I recommend you take a look at the Cisco Security Blog – especially this month.  Since October is National Cyber Security Awareness Month, they are posting a blog every day on cyber topics.  Check it out!



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Peter Romness

Cybersecurity Principal, US Public Sector CTO Office

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Security Is Pervasive in the Cisco Blog Community

As we pass the halfway point of National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM), I wanted to call attention to some of our colleagues over on the Cisco Government Blog. Patrick Finn and Peter Romness have been busy this month espousing the need for security and we thought it would be beneficial to expose our readers to their thoughts on security that have been published on the Cisco Government Blog space. Continue reading “Security Is Pervasive in the Cisco Blog Community”



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John Stuppi

Technical Leader

Cisco Security Research & Operations

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Defensive Security: The 95/5 Approach

Many organizations make the error of thinking that basic defensive software is sufficient to protect critical data and infrastructure. When in reality, in order for government and enterprise organizations to keep their data protected from increasingly advanced cyber threats, comprehensive defensive security approaches are critical. And even with advanced, comprehensive solutions, there are still risks.

No organization is ever going to be able to protect 100 percent of its assets 100 percent of the time, which is why I work on the 95/5 principle. No matter how many security solutions are deployed, if attackers are determined enough, they will find a hole. Humans make mistakes and without fail, attackers will take advantage of them.

With comprehensive security approaches, we can regularly block at least 95 percent of threats—but there is always going to be a margin of error—the other 5 percent. A proactive, continuous approach can help ensure the vast majority of offensive moves are rejected.

Continue reading “Defensive Security: The 95/5 Approach”



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Steve Martino

No Longer with Cisco

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Mobile Devices Will Transform Your Business IT

There’s no question that more people around the world are connecting to wireless networks at home, work and play via mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. This rise in mobile device usage begs the question: How soon will it be (if not already) before these mobile devices dominate the mobile network, especially in the workplace?

Chris Spain - with header FINALJust recently, I read an article in Forbes, by Louis Columbus, that addresses the issue of increased mobile devices and unprepared network infrastructures. The article examines a study by IDC that predicts that 87% of sales for connected devices will be tablets and smartphones in next four years. As many employees prefer working from their own mobile devices, corporate networks, as they’re currently designed, will not be capable of successfully managing such a large volume of mobile data traffic generated by these mobile devices. With such expansive growth expected, the majority of businesses will either need to adapt an existing strategy to support this increase in mobile devices or adopt a new strategy.

Currently, there is a clear need for enterprises to better prepare and invest in their IT infrastructure. As more employees use their own devices at work for business and personal use, it’s imperative that business organizations require a secure mobile device and BYOD strategy to accommodate their business needs and employee preferences. However, the decision to adopt BYOD comes with a set of challenges for IT organizations.

Many of the benefits of BYOD, such as having the choice of device and anywhere, anytime access, are somewhat adverse to traditional IT requirements for security and support. In the past, IT pre-determined a list of approved workplace devices, typically a prescribed desktop, laptop, and perhaps even a small, standardized set of mobile phones and smartphones. Employees could choose among these devices, but generally were not permitted to stray from the approved devices list. With BYOD, IT has to approach the problem differently. Continue reading “Mobile Devices Will Transform Your Business IT”



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Chris Spain

VP Product Management

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The Promise of an Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)

At Cisco live! Orlando in June, Cisco unveiled its vision for an Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), a next-generation, secure data center fabric design. At the time, we were only able to unveil key conceptual aspects of ACI, but as we lead up to more detailed product announcements later this fall, we want to bring a little more clarity to the ACI vision, what it will mean for customers, and set the context for those announcements.

[Join our ACI Announcement Webcast on November 6, 7:30 AM PT/10:30 ET/15:30 GMT. Register here.]

ACI is designed around an application policy model, allowing the entire data center infrastructure to better align itself with application delivery requirements and the business policies of the organization. The entire objective of ACI is to allow the data center to respond dynamically to the changing needs of applications, rather than having applications conform to constraints imposed by the infrastructure. These policies automatically adapt the infrastructure (network, security, application, compute, and storage) to the needs of the business to drive shorter application deployment cycles.

ACI Diagram
ACI offers a highly optimized, application-aware fabric ideal for both physical and virtual workloads. Innovation in ASIC, hardware, software and orchestration results in greater scale, agility, visibility, optimization and flexibility.

Continue reading “The Promise of an Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI)”



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Gary Kinghorn

Sr Solution Marketing Manager

Network Virtualization and SDN

October 18, 2013 Leave a Comment
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Hardware and software queuing

I’ve talked before about how getting high performance in MPI is all about offloading to dedicated hardware.  You want to get software out of the way as soon as possible and let the underlying hardware progress the message passing at max speed.

But the funny thing about networking hardware: it tends to have limited resources.  You might have incredibly awesome NICs in your HPC cluster, but they only have a finite (small) amount of resources such as RAM, queues, queue depth, descriptors (for queue entries), etc.

Continue reading “Hardware and software queuing”



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Jeff Squyres

The MPI Guy

UCS Platform Software