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Harnessing the Advantages of Edge AI

Article taken from HPCWire “Harnessing the Advantages of Edge AI”

You can enjoy a number of advantages when you deploy edge AI applications. It’s about empowering your users in the field to convert data to value in real-time.

  • Real-Time Insights – Equip your users with real-time information, from business intelligence to military strategy to updated patient health data.
  • Faster Decision Making – Your users can react much more quickly to real-time information and make quicker, more informed decisions.
  • Increased Automation – Train your machines or devices to perform autonomous tasks and maximize efficiency.
  • Enhanced Privacy – Keeping more data closer to the edge means having to send less of it to the cloud, thereby increasing opportunities for data breaches.

Do go to the article for full read. Harnessing the Advantages of Edge AI

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Tuning Compute Performance – Nanyang Technological University Targets I/O Bottlenecks to Speed Up Research

A customer case study writeup on how the HPC Team at Nanyang Technological University used Altair Mistral to tune Compute Performance.

The High Performance Computing Centre (HPCC) at Nanyang Technological University Singapore supports the university’s large-scale and data-intensive computing needs, and resource requirements continue to grow. HPCC churned out nearly 19 million core CPU-hours and nearly 300,000 GPU-hours in 2021 to enable more than 160 NTU researchers. HPCC’s small, four-engineer team turned to Altair for cutting-edge tools to help support their growing user community and evaluate scaling up to a hybrid cloud environment. They needed job-level insights to understand runtime issues; metrics on I/O, CPU, and memory to identify bottlenecks; and the ability to detect problematic applications and rogue jobs with bad I/O patterns that could overload shared storage. The HPCC team deployed Altair Mistral™ to profile application I/O and determine the most efficient options to optimize HPC at NTU.

Tuning Compute Performance – Nanyang Technological University Targets I/O Bottlenecks to Speed Up Research
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Application I/O Profiling on HPC Clusters with Altair Mistral and Altair PBS Professional

A Paper has been published by Altair and myself on the “Application I/O Profiling on HPC Clusters with Altair Mistral and Altair PBS Professional”. For more information, do take a look at

The High Performance Computing Centre (HPCC) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore employs the latest techniques to ensure good system utilization and a high-performance user experience. The university has a large HPC cluster with the Altair® PBS Professional® workload manager, and the HPCC team installed Altair Mistral™ to monitor application I/O and storage performance. In this paper, we describe how they used Mistral to analyze an HPC application. After getting some insights into the application, they profiled it against HPCC’s three storage tiers and gained detailed insights into application I/O patterns and storage performance.

Application I/O Profiling on HPC Clusters with Altair Mistral and Altair PBS Professional
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How to disable CBC Mode Ciphers in RHEL 8 or Rocky Linux 8

This writeup is reference from The Geek Diary

Edit /etc/sysconfig/sshd and uncomment CRYPTO_POLICY line:

CRYPTO_POLICY=

Edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config file. Add Ciphers, MACs and KexAlgorithms have been added

KexAlgorithms curve25519-sha256@libssh.org,ecdh-sha2-nistp521,ecdh-sha2-nistp384,ecdh-sha2-nistp256,diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256
Ciphers chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com,aes256-gcm@openssh.com,aes128-gcm@openssh.com,aes256-ctr,aes192-ctr,aes128-ctr
MACs hmac-sha2-512-etm@openssh.com,hmac-sha2-256-etm@openssh.com,umac-128-etm@openssh.com,hmac-sha2-512,hmac-sha2-256,umac-128@openssh.com

After making changes to the configuration file, you may want to do a sanity check on the configuration file

# sshd -t

Restart sshd services

# systemctl restart sshd

To test if weak CBC Ciphers are enabled

$ ssh -vv -oCiphers=3des-cbc,aes128-cbc,aes192-cbc,aes256-cbc [youruserid@IP of your Server]

You should receive a aimilar message message 

Unable to negotiate with 172.21.33.13 port 22: no matching cipher found. Their offer: chacha20-poly1305@openssh.com,aes256-gcm@openssh.com,aes128-gcm@openssh.com,aes256-ctr,aes192-ctr,aes128-ctr

References:

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Using SSLScan to determine supported cipers

SSLScan queries SSL services to determine the ciphers that are supported. This is a very useful tool if you wish to

SSLScan is designed to be easy, lean and fast. The output includes preferred ciphers of the SSL service, and the certificate and is in text and XML formats.

The Project Site and Installation can be found at https://github.com/rbsec/sslscan

I was checking my Windows Server,

$ sslscan --rdp x.x.x.x
Version: 2.0.15-static
OpenSSL 1.1.1t-dev  xx XXX xxxx

Connected to x.x.x.x

Testing SSL server x.x.x.x on port 3389 using SNI name x.x.x.x

SSL/TLS Protocols:
SSLv2     disabled
SSLv3     disabled
TLSv1.0   disabled
TLSv1.1   disabled
TLSv1.2   enabled
TLSv1.3   disabled

  TLS Fallback SCSV:
Server supports TLS Fallback SCSV

  TLS renegotiation:
Session renegotiation not supported

  TLS Compression:
Compression disabled

  Heartbleed:
TLSv1.2 not vulnerable to heartbleed

  Supported Server Cipher(s):
Preferred TLSv1.2  256 bits  ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384   Curve 25519 DHE 253
Accepted  TLSv1.2  128 bits  ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256   Curve 25519 DHE 253
.....
.....

You may want to scan by port level

$ sslscan x.x.x.x:8444
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Understanding the Difference between QSFP, QSFP+, QSFP28

Sometimes I use these terms loosely. Here an article that explain the 3 fiber optic transceivers QSFP, QSFP+ and QSFP28

Taken from the article “Difference between QSFP, QSFP+, QSFP28“

Here are some main points

  1. The QSFP specification supports Ethernet, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand and SONET/SDH standards with different data rate options.
  2. QSFP transceivers support the network link over singlemode or multimode fiber patch cable.
  3. Common ones are 4x10G QSFP+, 4x28G QSFP28
  4. QSFP+ are designed to support 40G Ethernet, Serial Attached SCSI, QDR (40G) and FDR (56G) Infiniband, and other communication standards
  5. QSFP+ modules integrate 4 transmit and 4 receive channels plus sideband signals. Then QSFP+ modules can break out into 4x10G lanes. 
  6. QSFP28 is a hot-pluggable transceiver module designed for 100G data rate.
  7. QSFP28 integrates 4 transmit and 4 receiver channels. “28” means each lane carries up to 28G data rate.
  8. QSFP28 can do 4x25G breakout connection, 2x50G breakout, or 1x100G depending on the transceiver used.
  9. Usually QSFP28 modules can’t break out into 10G links. But it’s another case to insert a QSFP28 module into a QSFP+ port if switches support.
  10. QSFP+ and QSFP28 modules can support both short and long-haul transmission.
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Encountering SSH “Permission denied, please try again.”

If you encountered issues like “Permission denied, please try again.” during SSH, there are a few steps to consider.

One possibility is that you may want to took at /var/log/secure which might give some clues to the possible causes. One could be due to lock out rules for SSH. There is one interesting writeup which could shed light into this possibility. Configure lockout rules for SSH login

Another possibility is that you may want to check on the permission on your .ssh directory which may be incorrectly set. For example, you may want to consider

  1. .ssh directory: 700 (drwx——)
  2. public key (.pub file): 644 (-rw-r–r–)
  3. private key (id_rsa): 600 (-rw——-)
  4. authorized_keys: 600 (-rw——-)

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PackagesNotFoundError and Conda Install

If you are installing package with conda and you are encountering an issue. 

PackagesNotFoundError: The following packages are not available from current channels:

- c-compiler
- fortran-compiler
- cxx-compiler

There is a workaround below. IThis is important as it tells conda to also look on the conda-forge channel when you search for packages.

conda config --append channels conda-forge
## Package Plan ##

  environment location: /usr/local/anaconda3-2022/envs/sagemath_env

  added / updated specs:
    - c-compiler
    - cxx-compiler
    - fortran-compiler
    - pkg-config


The following packages will be downloaded:

    package                    |            build
    ---------------------------|-----------------
    _libgcc_mutex-0.1          |             main           3 KB
    _openmp_mutex-5.1          |            1_gnu          21 KB
    binutils-2.36.1            |       hdd6e379_2          27 KB  conda-forge
    binutils_impl_linux-64-2.36.1|       h193b22a_2        10.4 MB  conda-forge
    binutils_linux-64-2.36     |      hf3e587d_10          24 KB  conda-forge
    c-compiler-1.5.0           |       h166bdaf_0           5 KB  conda-forge
    cxx-compiler-1.5.0         |       h924138e_0           5 KB  conda-forge
    fortran-compiler-1.5.0     |       h2a4ca65_0           5 KB  conda-forge
    gcc-10.4.0                 |      hb92f740_10          24 KB  conda-forge
    gcc_impl_linux-64-10.4.0   |      h7ee1905_16        46.7 MB  conda-forge
    gcc_linux-64-10.4.0        |      h9215b83_10          25 KB  conda-forge
    gfortran-10.4.0            |      h0c96582_10          24 KB  conda-forge
.....
.....
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Detecting and Shutting Down VNC Server in CentOS-7

To list the ports and the Xvnc session’s associated user, as root, enter:

# lsof -i -P | grep vnc
Xvnc        2267     root    5u  IPv6    76766      0t0  TCP *:6003 (LISTEN)
Xvnc        2267     root    6u  IPv4    76767      0t0  TCP *:6003 (LISTEN)
Xvnc        2267     root    9u  IPv4    76775      0t0  TCP *:5903 (LISTEN)
Xvnc        2267     root   10u  IPv6    76776      0t0  TCP *:5903 (LISTEN)

Apparently, there is some Xvnc running. To do a quick shutdown

# systemctl |grep vnc
vncserver@:1.service                                                                             loaded active running   Remote desktop service (VNC)
  system-vncserver.slice                                                                           loaded active active    system-vncserver.slice

# systemctl stop vncserver@:1.servic
# systemctl stop system-vncserver.slice

Check that the XVNc again

# systemcl stop xvnc.socket
# systemctl status xvnc.socket
* xvnc.socket - XVNC Server
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/xvnc.socket; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: inactive (dead)
   Listen: [::]:5900 (Stream)
Accepted: 0; Connected: 0

# systemctl |grep vnc

If however, you are interested in setting up VNC, there is a good article for you to consider
Remote-desktop to a host using VNC¶

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RapidFile Toolkit v2.0 for FlashBlade

What is RapidFile Toolkit?

RapidFile Toolkit is a set of supercharged tools for efficiently managing millions of files using familiar Linux command line interfaces. RapidFile Toolkit is designed from the ground up to take advantage of Pure Storage FlashBlade’s massively parallel, scale-out architecture, while also supporting standard Linux file systems. RapidFile Toolkit can serve as a high performance, drop-in replacement for Linux commands in many common scenarios, which can increase employee efficiency, application performance, and business productivity. RapidFile Toolkit is available to all Pure Storage customers.

RapidFile

Benefits of RapidToolkit according to the Site

Increase SysAdmin Productivity

  • Up to 20X faster than Linux Core Utilities
  • Accelerates file management and analytics

Faster Data Movement & Analytics

  • Accelerates Perforce Checkout by up to 20X
  • Rapid file copy to and from scratch space

Faster & Simpler Data Pipelines

  • Indexing files systems up to 20X faster, reducing metadata caching time
  • Support EDA, Genomics, DevOps, HPC, Analytics & Apache Spark and AI/ML

Commands

Linux commandsRapidFile Toolkit v2.0Description
lsplsLists files & directories
findpfindFinds matching files
dupduSummarizes file space usage
rmprmRemoves files & directories
chownpchownChanges file ownership
chmodpchmodChanges file permissions
cppcopyCopies files & directories

To Download, you have to be Pure Storage Customers and Partners.

Download URL (login required): 

https://support.purestorage.com/FlashBlade/FlashBlade_Release/FlashBlade_Release_Information/RapidFileToolkit