RFP Pro Tips

The Dos and Donts of RFP Benchmarks

In today’s show we only have Dan and Henry on deck, Shahin is away at the “HPC and AI on Wall Street” event where he’ll be hosting various panel discussions. But Dan and Henry soldier on with a discussion based on a recent, and fascinating, presentation by Tricia Balle of Cray at the HPC-AI Advisory Council event in Perth, Australia.

The topic: Benchmarks in HPC Procurement Tenders. As Shahin said in the IO500 episode (originally about SPEC) "benchmarks specify the specious specter of our species", but in market whose middle name is "performance", they can be pretty much everything, and a real and critical part of the RFP/buying process. We discuss how benchmarks should and shouldn’t be used in RFPs, and the relevant best practices; important stuff whether you are on the customer side or the vendor side.

You can see the entire presentation with slides here:

Henry Newman's Why No One Should be Online, Ever.

Dan comes up with a new label for the ever uplifting Feel Good Security Corner.  Henry talks about the Google security exploit, discovered in 2017 and finally getting fixed, that allows miscreants to take over your system through a combination of Google email and calendar applications. However, this isn’t so bad – it only potentially impacts 1.5 million users…oh, wait, that’s not correct, it impacts as many as 1.5 BILLION users…which makes it quite bad. Here’s a link to the story:

Google To Fix Malicious Invites Issue For 1 Billion Calendar Users

Way back in 2017, two researchers at Black Hills Information Security disclosed how a vulnerability in the Google Calendar app was leaving more than a billion users open to a credential-stealing exploit. Google apparently didn't fix this at the time as it would have caused "major functionality drawbacks" for Calendar users, despite those researchers demonstrating how they had weaponized the vulnerability at the Wild West Hackin' Fest.

Catch of the Week

Henry discusses the Wired story below about how wifi almost didn’t happen. Most people probably don’t know that September 15^th will mark the 20^th anniversary of Wi-Fi. It was introduced to a room of 60 people at the Atlanta Convention Center, an understated announcement for a technology that would go on to change the world. The story is a very cool look at the history of Wi-Fi and how a little-known IEEE specification went on to become the standard vs. something called HomeRF, which was supported by IBM, HP, Intel, and Compaq.

How Wi-Fi Almost Didn’t Happen

We all love Wi-Fi, except when we can’t connect. We take for granted being able to have wireless access at home and the office, on airplanes, in cafés around the globe, and if we'd be so lucky, floating on the International Space Station. But what if Wi-Fi hadn’t happened? It almost didn’t, at least not in the way we recognize it today.

Listen in to hear the full conversation.

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IO500 Team Visit

IO500 Benchmark Gets Traction

Storage is complicated and benchmarking it has too many complexities for the traditional kernel-like or application-specific approaches. Thanks to a few experienced and tenacious researchers, and the community that supports them, the IO500 has managed to put a credible stake in the ground, and is getting traction, with 101 entries on the current list and expecting many more by SC19.

ReadioFreeHPC hosts the IO500 Steering Committee to do a deep dive. "The steering committee is the decision body ensuring the development and curation of the benchmark and its results but also responsible to resolve ethical issues." Henry and Shahin ask the hard questions, or so they think!

John Bent (Seagate), Julian Kunkel (University of Reading), and George Markomanolis (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) join RadioFreeHPC's virtual studio. We missed the fourth member of the team, Jay Lofstead (Sandia National Laboratories) due to scheduling conflicts. We also missed Dan once more as he was navigating airports and planes coming back from Australia.

"The IO-500 has been developed together with the community and its development is still ongoing. The benchmark is essentially a benchmark suite bundled with execution rules. It harnesses existing and trusted open source benchmarks. The goal for the benchmark is to capture user-experienced performance.

Henry Newman's Feel-Good Security Corner

The segment that is rapidly establishing itself as the go-to place for why being online is just too dangerous. Our spirits are lifted again as Henry describes a ransomware attack on a back-up site for dental offices in Wisconsin. There go insurance data, contact information, etc.

Ransomware Bites Dental Data Backup Firm

PerCSoft, a Wisconsin-based company that manages a remote data backup service relied upon by hundreds of dental offices across the country, is struggling to restore access to client systems after falling victim to a ransomware attack.

Catch of the Week

Mining cryptocurrencies is compute intensive. The high levels of required electricity has made the topic visible and controversial. So where would you go if you want a lot of electricity? Why, the nearest nuclear power reactor, of course. Shahin talks about crafty folks who have done just that!

Employees connect nuclear plant to the internet so they can mine cryptocurrency

Ukrainian authorities are investigating a potential security breach at a local nuclear power plant after employees connected parts of its internal network to the internet so they could mine cryptocurrency.

Henry describes a few ISPs who ended up stealing communication spectrum from, guess where, the airport, obviously. And here's the thing about at least some of these incidents: the whole thing is so complex now that it can be hard to tell incompetence from malice.

American ISPs fined $75,000 for fuzzing airport's weather radar by stealing spectrum

Three ISPs will be fined $25,000 apiece by America's broadband watchdog, the FCC, for interfering with weather signals in Puerto Rico. Boom Solutions, Integra Wireless, and WinPR were all found to be using devices for their point-to-point broadband that were “misconfigured,” according to the regulator this week. This caused interference with a doppler weather radar station at San Juan international airport.

Listen in to hear the full conversation.

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