cpu – T.I.L

BGP, Nuclear, XGS, Global-Scale, Cloudflare, Happiness, Nokia Telemetry, Great Firewall, Dojo, Buffet, DOAC videos, Hard Knocks

BGP ORR: Things I am forgetting. At least people is asking about it.

Hyperscaler + Nuclear Energy: It is coming.

Summary 2025 OCP by Sharada: Power moving from AC to DC, liquid cooling is a must, NVIDIA netwoking in DCI with Spectrum-XGS (although I dont really see the details)

Global Scale-Computing: This is a new paradigm from current Hyperscalers design, they have the global scale but at the end of the day the compute is not just a global unit.

Cloudflare CPU perfomance benchmarks

Two kind of happiness:

1. Hedonic happiness
(Pleasure, comfort, distraction.)

2. Eudaimonic happiness
(Fulfillment. Purpose. Knowing your time here actually mattered.)

Hedonic happiness is cheap. It fades the second the buzz wears off.

But eudaimonic happiness endures. Yeah, it’s harder. It demands sacrifice. But it’s the only kind of happiness that leaves you whole.

Nokia Telemetry: I wish I could do that, so easily

Great Firewall of China Leak: info – I guess I will banned from China now. Honestly I would like to see more technical details.

Dojo shutdown: Sad

NVIDIA co-packaged optics: The video clip is so clean and silence

Videos:

DOAC McConaughey: It was like when I read his book. It is so appealing, raw, real: Resistance + Innate ability + Endurance

Almeyda: Confundes disfruta con ganar dinero / Dejar el dinero e ir a trabajar al campo con vacas y caballos.

DOAC + 1st Dr K: Very interesting anecdote, I remember that video and it was actually great. And I read DOAC book, and I was surprised that he actually uses the guidelines of the book: sweat the small stuff (long-term game), the last impression matters (peak-end rule), CO2 levels

I think these are the 3 interviews so far from Dr K in DOAC: 1st, 2nd, 3rd

DOAC + Vinh Giang: FORD: Family, Occupation, Recreation, Dreams — I think I can remember this word for the day I have a conversation….

Buffet and 300M in cash:

School of Hard Knocks: 15 pieces of advice

15: Dont listen to people who haven’t done the thing

14: If you dont know anybody, you need to become the person they want to know. You get a network, when you provide value. Build your own brand

13: Wealthy people get their money to work

12: stay small enough, long enough, you will be big enough, soon enough: keep the expenses low

11: Play 10y game – compound is a edge.

10: Master sales and marketing. Be everywhere, everytime.

9: Happy but not content: If you become comfortable in the top, the underdog will eat you.

8: Hire smart people and know your are not that smart.

7: Find a way to make money while you are sleep, if not your work until you die (close to 13) Money made with your brain, will outlast the money made with your back.

6: CEO = Change equals Opportunity

5: Marketing: everybody needs you, but they dont know who you are

4: Procrastination is the assesination of all destinations. What you can do today, dont do it tomorrow. Action takers.

3: Think bigger, same stress about 1000$ problem as the 100m$ problem, but at 100m$ bar, you have less competition.

2: Believe on your self: Does the bird on a branch, trust the branch or its wings?

1: Thanks God, I’ve got today. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. Live like you are dreaming

Netdev 0x19, RouteViews, Unexpected in Quantum Computing, BGP Bug, Scale-up fabrics, Network Engineer at Hyperscalers, CUDA in RISC-V, Tomahawk6, videos

NetDev 0x19: I would like to attend this one day, although is quite beyond my knowledge.

RouteViews Looking glass: link

Unexpected in Quantum Computing: A bit of a summary of the current state of quantum computing. In short, still quite to go (it seems you need 20 million qubits to break RSA-2048)

BGP Bug: link

Scale-up fabrics:

Network Engineer at Hyperscalers: Agree, but it shouldn’t just be for hyperscalers.

CUDA in RISC-V: good news, I hope it is developed, and RISC-V grows

Tomahawk6: A bit more visual

Videos:

Dr K: Masturbation – I really like this guy.

Janja Garnbret: just insane.

Jordan B Peterson + Michael Saylor: It is not about crypto, more about the life and path of Michael.

Veritasium: Quantum Mechanics – All paths possible: Very interesting video, ant the experiment is really nice

Veritasium: Electricity doesnt flow via the wires: I watched some time ago, and I wanted to recorded it here and try to watch again.

Hardware Lottery, Tomahawk, FAANG, FlightAwre, Cloudflare Radar, GPU facts, Peter Shor, IBM, Seth Notes

Hardware Lottery: There is Cerebras, attempts of optical networking and interconnects. So I guess there is a bit of variety out there.

Tomahawk Ultra:

With the Tomahawk Ultra, Broadcom has a switch ASIC with 51.2 Tb/sec of aggregate bandwidth that runs the Ethernet protocol and delivers 250 nanosecond port-to-port hop latency and can push through 77 billion PPS. That is twice the PPS at the same small packet sizes common in HPC as the 102.4 Tb/sec Tomahawk 6 switch ASICs from Broadcom, which have a latency of somewhere between 600 nanoseconds and 700 nanoseconds for these packet sizes.

Network Engineer at FAANG: Need to read all posts

Arista UltraEthernet: Intro

FlightAware: Interesting for tracking Ryanair flights…

Cloudflare Radar: Need to test it

GPU facts: It goes beyond me very quickly but still interesting

Peter Shor Quantum Notes: For when I retired

IBM Quantum: In the last months, there have been many breakthroughs but I still dont see any real application. This is also quite beyond me so maybe I am missing the plot.

Seth Notes: Amen

1MW Rack, Google Global Network, BGP PIC, Cisco Quantum, Deep Wiki, Gemini Languages, Vielleicht

1MW rack: I had to ask ChatGPT regarding the relationship Power and voltage. Shame on me as a son of a electrician.

Power = Voltage × Current (P = V × I)

So +/-400 VDC is 800V and 1MW power -> we need 1250 A. That is provided by the rectifiers?

Voltage (volts) = water pressure

Current (amps) = flow rate (liters per second)

Power (watts) = total water delivered (pressure × flow)

You can have high water pressure (voltage), but if your pipes are too small (not enough amps), you can’t fill a swimming pool (power).

You don’t “send” amps to the rack — you make amps available, and the rack draws what it needs.

Google global network 2025: (video)

BGP PIC: Prefix Independent Convergence (PIC). In summary, it is calculating a backup path and having installed so when having a fault, the convergence is minimize. I think it is like a MPLS FRR LSPs but for BGP. Cisco and Juniper

Cisco Quantum: Everybody to the wagon. D-Wave was the first company that offered quantum systems several years ago

DeepWiki: free explanation of GitHub repositories

Gemini Little Language Lessons: Usefull, I wish I could connect it to netflix so I can have german/english subtitles at the same time 🙂

Music:

Vielleicht: yeah, vielleicht

Hi Ren: so raw, brutal, respect.

Other:

reMarkable Paper Pro: Jealous my kindle paperwhite is so behind.

Huawei AI Cloud, Ironwood TPUv7, do the thing, TV garden Worldwide, Hacker Laws, Daylight, NVIDIA Photonics, Xsight, Finger Strength

Huawei AI Cloud: Power hungry, all optics, etc. Interesting take from China to NVIDIA. And even more interesting, how to fence off all the tariffs and restrictions…

Google Ironwood TPUv7: “It scales up to 9,216 liquid cooled chips linked with breakthrough Inter-Chip Interconnect (ICI) networking spanning nearly 10 MW” I wonder how is the network… but doesnt give low level details, just marketing.

Do the thing.

TV garden: TVs from around the world…. just in case you want to learn a language?

Hacker Laws: So many I dont know

Daylight: Looks so nice!!! And it seems it can read kindle books. Tempting

NVIDIA Photonics: I read about co-packaged from some Sherada post’s… but I didn’t see it coming so fast in production. With my network operations hat on…. how is the troubleshooting done? It the part where the fiber breaks, you replace the whole device? I guess this has been thought very deeply.

The power consumed by optics in the network is enormous and so is the capital expense. Anecdotally, we have heard it said many times that the majority of the cost in a datacenter-scale cluster is in the optical transceivers at both ends of a link and the fiber optic cable between them. Some the pieces that link switches to network interface cards is 75 percent to 80 percent of the cost of a network, with the switches and the NICs making up the other 20 percent to 25 percent.

Xsight: Another network silicon vendor. The article mentions Tofino P4.. I hope doesn’t end that way. I didn’t know anything about Avigdor Willenz

In part, that expectation for big change comes from the fact that Avigdor Willenz is the company’s founding investor. Willenz founded Galileo Technology, a maker of Ethernet switch ASICs that sold to Marvell in 2001 for $2.7 billion, and that wealth has been spread around. Willenz invested in Annapurna Labs, which sold to Amazon Web Services in 2015 for $350 million and which has created its Nitro DPUs, Graviton CPUs, and Trainium and Inferentia AI engines. He was president (now chairman) and first investor in distributed flash block storage maker Lightbits Labs. Willenz was a co-founder of AI chip maker Habana Labs, which sold to Intel in 2019 for $2 billion and is the foundation of its Gaudi compute engine line.

Finger Strength: “I’ve never seen strength like this before” true story

TFCC wrist injury: part of life…

Shelljack, Europe RISC-V, Quantum China, 100G optics teardown, Curiosity (Going long!), SS7 hacking, Juniper Hacking

Shelljack: It is old but still interesting. At least it seems easy to implement

Europe RISC-V: Interesting report about what EU is doing about the CHIP wars and RISC-V. I guess as EU is not pouring billions like USA/China is not making to the news. It was interesting to read about the participation of Spain with UCM and the people behind openchip.

Quantum China: Another quantum chip in the mix. So far everything came from USA.

100G SR4 QSFP28: An optic teardown. There are links to other teardown like 100G QSFP28 DAC and this is more hardcore: 800G ZR+ optic.

Curiosity: This is the best definition of what curios means (and I light years from it…) Ben Jojo is a star: “Trust, but verify”

SS7 hacking: More real than I thought.

Juniper Hacking: Juniper answer. In one sense doesnt surprise me, Mikrotik is famous to feed several bootnets, so why not EOL devices from other vendors?

MCP, Manus, Brain Computer, Spectrum-X, Quantum, DC, Hung Task, Do The Work

MCP: It is “old” news news from Dec 2024 but looks like a big thing now.

Manus: new hype, but looks cool. Need to try.

Brain Computer: You have to replace the neurons….

Spectrum-X with Cisco Silicon: I dont understand this move much. You are selling your Ethernet solution is the best for AI and then you bring a different one?

Quantum Computing: Several news lately from MS Majorana (official)and AWS Ocelot. Still, is being used in real problems? Just PR?

Build your own DC: good intro, I dont think you can find many books about this in amazon?

Hung tasks in linux: nice articule for troubleshooting hung tasks in linux.

Do the work

Photonics in Computing, Usb cable hack, Stutz, Building AI Networks Arista

Lightmatter: Based on this video, they are using photonics to connect chips, looks interesting, I remember Google has something with optical but for networking. But It is pretty clear this is not photonics computing.

Hacking USB cable: impressive, and expensive 🙂

Phil Stutz: Interesting conversation. But somehow, I am still looking for that thing that unlocks me…. can’t find it for the life of me….

Building AI Networks Arista:

- allreduce: collect elements from all nodes, apply a reduction operator(eg sum) then distribute reduction to all nodes
-allgather: collect elements from all nodes, and distribute the to all other nodes
- gpu: cpu for parallelization
- RDMA: RoCE2 GPU memory to GPU memory - origin in IB
- issues: flow collision, trafic polarization. low entropy!!! > dificult to ecmp => Dynamic LB
incast: many2one -> ECN + buffering (in spine!)
- use chassis!

With an operations hat on, dealing with chassis is expensive and no efficient. It kind of a vendor lock-in. AWS is all in pizza boxes and I remember one presentation in Cisco Live where the Cisco EVPN authority recommended pizza boxes.

Potato Pizza, TCP Conversation Completeness, IBM power10, AI developer kit, 2 not 3

This is a pizza that I tried several years ago, and it seems the restaurant is out of business. I have done some pizzas trying to emulate it but never matching that memory. So this is a placeholder to try:

Original Ingredients: Bechamel, Smoked Mozzarella, red onions, pancetta, sliced potatoes, and Buffalo Mozzarella.

Some example1, example2

This a old for today’s news. IBM Power10 Memory network but looks interesting:

...thanks to the coherence IBM already has across NVLink (which is really BlueLink running a slightly different protocol that makes the GPUs think DRAM is really slow but really fat HBM2, in effect, and also makes the CPUs think the HBM2 on the GPUs is really skinny but really fast DRAM).

Checking some wireshark traces last week, I cam across the concept of TCP Conversation Completeness. This was totally new for me. This video gave some idea too. This was useful for me for finding TCP conversation that showed retransmissions when trying to stablish the TCP handshake, and not just showing the retransmission, so I used “tcp.completeness<33” so I should see TCP flows with a sync + RST.

AI developer Kit by NVIDIA: This card looks nice, I would mind to buy it and give a chance to learn, but it is sold out everywhere…. This is a video about it.

2 not 3 (make a choice!):

Quantum AI Chip, InfraHub, python UV, SR controller, Kobe Bryant, Hell

Google Quantum AI: This looks remarkable.

python vu: replacement for pip, pyenv, etc. Need to try

InfraHub: As a network engineer interested in Automation. This looks interesting and I would like to go deeper to fully understand as it is the merge of the typical source of truth (DB) that you can’t get in git.

Segment Routing Controller: This is another thing I played with some years ago, but never found a controller to make TE. I dont see clearly this software is OSS but at least doesnt look like is a vendor-lock…

Kobe Bryant: venting, and it is ok.

Jordan B Peterson: Hell