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Cisco’s new router unites disparate datacenters into AI training behemoths

2 months 3 weeks ago
With enough routers, Switchzilla says it can link bit barns 1,000 km apart and scale fabrics beyond 3 exabits per second

Cisco has unveiled a new routing ASIC designed to help bit barn operators overcome power and capacity constraints by stitching together their existing datacenters into a single unified compute cluster.…

Tobias Mann

National Security Threatened By Climate Crisis, UK Intelligence Chiefs Due To Warn

2 months 3 weeks ago
The UK's national security is under severe threat from the climate crisis and the looming collapse of vital natural ecosystems, with food shortages and economic disaster potentially just years away, a powerful report by the UK's intelligence chiefs is due to warn. The Guardian: However, the report, which was supposed to launch on Thursday at a landmark event in London, has been delayed, and concerns have been expressed to the Guardian that it may have been blocked by number 10. The destabilising impact of the climate and nature crises on national security is one of the biggest risks facing Britain, the joint intelligence committee report is understood to say. Already, food import supply chains are coming under pressure, with the price of some commodities increasing. This could be exacerbated in the near future, the defence experts have warned, with the UK over-dependent on imports. Other industries will also be affected by ecosystem collapse in places such as the Amazon and by the worsening impacts of extreme weather around the world. These impacts will not be encountered far off in the future as some had complacently assumed, ministers have been told, but are already being felt and will grow in significance as temperatures rise beyond 1.5C above preindustrial levels. The hard-hitting report was to be published on Thursday at a landmark event in London. But the Guardian understands that the report, prepared by experts over many months, has been halted.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded To Architects of Metal-Organic Frameworks

2 months 3 weeks ago
Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for the development of molecular building blocks with spaces large enough that gases and other chemicals can flow through them. The New York Times: The cavities on the inside are "almost like rooms in a hotel, so that guest molecules can enter and also exit again from the same material," Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said during the announcement of the award. The laureates' discoveries, he added, pave the way for the creation of materials that can separate toxic chemicals from wastewater or harvest water molecules in a desert. The laureates' work started with experiments by Dr. Robson in the 1980s and gradually developed over a period of about 15 years. "It takes time for science to be recognized, and it takes multiple workers in the field with different approaches," said Dorothy Phillips, president of the American Chemical Society. The three laureates will share a prize of 11 million Swedish kronor, or around $1.17 million.

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Cisco Takes On Broadcom, Nvidia For Fat AI Datacenter Interconnects

2 months 3 weeks ago

Wide area networks and datacenter interconnects, or DCIs, as we have known them for the past decade or so are nowhere beefy enough or fast enough to take on the job of scaling AI training workloads across multiple datacenters. …

Cisco Takes On Broadcom, Nvidia For Fat AI Datacenter Interconnects was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Timothy Prickett Morgan

Logitech Will Brick Its $100 Pop Smart Home Buttons on October 15

2 months 3 weeks ago
An anonymous reader shares a report: In another loss for early smart home adopters, Logitech has announced that it will brick all Pop switches on October 15. In August of 2016, Logitech launched Pop switches, which provide quick access to a range of smart home actions, including third-party gadgets. For example, people could set their Pop buttons to launch Philips Hue or Insteon lighting presets, play a playlist from their Sonos speaker, or control Lutron smart blinds. Each button could store three actions, worked by identifying smart home devices on a shared Wi-Fi network, and was controllable via a dedicated Android or iOS app. The Pop Home Switch Starter Pack launched at $100, and individual Pop Add-on Home Switches debuted at $40 each. A company spokesperson told Ars Technica that Logitech informed customers on September 29 that their Pop switches would soon become e-waste.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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