Tag: server

Signal Secure and Private Contacts Matching – Using SGX

Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) is a pretty cool piece of technology that aims to make it possible for user programs to hide secrets from other user programs and the operating system itself. It establishes enclaves in the system that hides the data being processed and the code processing it from all other software. The original application for SGX was to support client-machine features like DRM, to create a safe space on a client that a server can trust. Recently, the people behind the Signal messaging system have provided a really interesting example of an application that makes use of the of SGX “in reverse”, to make it possible for a client to trust a server.

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Intel Blog: Simulating Six Terabytes of RAM

intel sw smallMy first blog post as a software evangelist at Intel was published last week. In it, I tell the story of how our development teams used Simics to test the software behavior (UEFI, in particular) when a server is configured with several terabytes of RAM. Without having said server in physical form – just as a simulation. And running that simulation on a small host with just 256 GB of RAM. I.e., the host RAM is just a small fraction of the target. That’s the kind of things that you can do with Simics – the framework has a lot of smarts in it.

It was rather interesting to realize that just the OS page tables for this kind of system occupies gigabytes of RAM… but that just underscores just how gigantic six terabytes of memory really is.

Fujitsu Server Fault Injection Robot

Fault Injection is a topic that has fascinated me for a long time. Not just the area of software-to-software fault injection, but more so how you inject faults into hardware using hardware (and how to conveniently approximate this using a simulator). I just stumbled on a short interesting note about such hardware-actuated fault injection in a Fujitsu article.

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Coding Horror on Big Iron Hardware

opinionIn a post from late June, Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror discusses the horrible cost of a large HP server (scaling up to 32 processor cores in eight AMD x86 sockets), compared to a bunch of simple single-socket basic servers. There are some interesting notes on relative costs of small-and-simple servers, including things like administration and power. There is an undercurrent to the post and the comments that the big HP machine is “overpriced”. I don’t think it is. If you have ever had Erik Hagersten as a teacher in computer architecture, you will know why.

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