Sean's IT Blog

     This week we learned from Mike about building a computer and when he got to the portion about building a gaming PC he talked about the graphics cards he wanted to put into the computer. I was interested in this topic because I've always heard friends talk about the latest GPUs, especially recently with Intel announcing their new Arc A770 and Nvidia with their 4000 series coming out. I've always been interested in just what the GPU really does for the computer -  I even bought a higher-end laptop with an Nvidia RTX 2070 Super - but never took the time to really research it (the book covers it in Chapter 17).     A Graphics Processing Unit is a specialized processor that was originally designed to accelerate graphics rendering. It processes many pieces of data simultaneously, making them useful for machine learning, video editing, and gaming applications. It can also be either integrated into the computer's CPU or offered as a discrete hardware unit on a...

     The Network Interface Card, or NIC for short, has been brought up a few times in the readings already so I felt that I needed to do some more research to get a better grasp on what they are and what they do. That's when I came across the SmartNIC. SmartNIC is a newer networking technology that is used to accelerate networking, storage, and security functions. They perform virtualization, load balancing, and data path optimization. SmartNICs come with enough computing power to offload all networking, security, and storage functions from the host server to the SmartNIC which helps to free up processing power to allow the server to focus on running applications and the Operating System more efficiently.      Compared to the SmartNIC, the regular NIC is not capable of packet processing functions that include packet filtering, timestamping, deduplication, flow shunting, and flow classification. They only act as a middleman to help computers on the network c...

This technology came up in the book and I had seen it before when doing readings online, but the book didn't do much in the way of explaining a lot about it. So, I decided I would research it and write a little about it to help myself and anyone reading understand it a little better. The background behind non-volatile memory express (NVMe) is that serial ATA (SATA) is the most typical way to connect a solid state drive (SSD) to a personal computer, but SATA was designed primarily for interfacing with mechanical hard disk drives (HDD). It hasn't been able to keep up with the improvements to SSDs and the SSDs were limited by the maximum throughput of SATA. So a new technology was needed to help deliver higher throughput and faster response times with the SSDs. That's where NVMe comes in, it is a logical-device interface and driver that is designed to utilize the low latency and internal parallelism of SSDs. It is used via a PCI Express bus (PCIe) and supports many parallel c...

 While doing research for this week's paper on the evolution of Ethernet technology. I came across a few articles talking about the future of Ethernet and that was the Terabit Ethernet. TbE is Ethernet with speeds above 100 Gigabit Ethernet. In 2016 after the standards for IEEE P802.3bs were set, which was 400 Gigabit Ethernet, many suppliers began working towards faster Ethernet. According to the Wikipedia page, the Ethernet Alliance's 2022 technology roadmap expects speeds of 800 Gbps and even 1.6 Tbps to become an IEEE standard between 2023 and 2025. Companies are having to prepare for this upcoming technology by upgrading their CPUs and Motherboards to be compatible with PCI express 4.0 and 5.0. Intel has recently implemented PCIe 5.0 on their newest 12th Generation platforms. The more capable PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 will help enable these higher speeds with TbE and lower the times for data transfers. I don't fully understand everything I read in the article when it began talk...

This week we learned about RAM, how works, and the different kinds of it. I decided I wanted to look into recent developments and stumbled upon something called UltraRAM and in-memory processing. The Physics and Engineering Department of Lancaster University in the United Kingdom published a paper about the UltraRAM, saying that it "combines the non-volatility of a data storage memory, like flash, with the speed, energy-efficiency, and endurance of a working memory, like DRAM." UltraRAM is said to be able to be the universal memory type and will make Hard Drives and Solid State Drives unnecessary. Your storage and memory would be together on the same piece of silicon. They said that it would be a huge step forward for something called In-Memory Processing. This is a method for getting rid of the bottlenecking that is caused by the movement of data between the processor and the main memory. Since the stored data would be accessed much faster when placed on the RAM, it allows f...

 I wanted to use this week’s blogpost to do research on fiber optics since I think the whole idea of using light and lasers to transfer information is fascinating. The world of IT is rapidly advancing and the need for the capability to transfer data in large amounts at great speeds is necessary to sustain it. It’s not a new technology by any means, going all the way back to Alexander Graham Bell, then first being demonstrated in 1965 by German physicist Manfred Borner, and then in 1975 when the computers in NORAD headquarters were linked together with fiber optic cable. But the need and want for faster transmissions in the modern world has made the demand for fiber optic cabling greatly increase in the commercial sector. The city of San Francisco has a project to connect the entire city’s network together using fiber optics, which would enable the city to achieve high-speed data transfer and communications on a large scale. There’s also a project to run 8,000 miles of underwater ...

 This week we did a little deeper of a dive into Operating Systems and User Interfaces. In that same respect I had been reading about a new Operating System called Deltaflow.OS (Deltaflow-on-ARTIQ) which was designed by a Cambridge University startup called Riverlane. “Quantum computers store information in the form of qubits, which can exist in two different information states at the same time.” Quantum Computers are getting their very own Operating System, but it won’t be like the OSes that we use currently. This OS will help to maximize low-latency performance which will in turn help to run quantum algorithms much more efficiently. Every time I read about Quantum Computing I feel like I learn everything and nothing at the same time. The Operating System apparently will not be used in private computing, at least not for a long time. It seems as if there is a lot of room for improvement since apparently super positioning can lead to many different outcomes, but that this OS is...