The introduction of communication technologies appears to bias historical records in the direction of the content best suited for each technology, according to a study published February 20, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by C. Jara-Figueroa and colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. Studying the societal impact of new communication technologies is challenging, due to limited data on historical events as well as the difficulty of parsing observed correlations. The authors of this study used a…
Open-sourcing SPARTA to make abstract interpretation easy
Abstract interpretation is a powerful static analysis framework we can use to answer questions such as: What range of values does this variable take? What are all the types of the values that can flow into this function? Is this piece of code ever executed, or is it dead? Using abstract interpretation to build a scalable tool from scratch is a daunting engineering task that generally requires a protracted development effort led by an expert. To streamline that process, we…
MiGz for Compression and Decompression
Introduction Compressing and decompressing files with GZip normally uses a single thread. For large files, this can bottleneck dependent tasks like data processing, data analysis, and machine learning. Although there are several alternatives supporting multithreaded compression, such as pigz (command-line tool) and ParallelGZip (Java library), no GZip utility or Java library (for any compression format) supports multithreaded decompression. At LinkedIn, we routinely work with data ranging in size from several gigabytes to many terabytes; compression alleviates the problem of relatively…
Extending Vector with eBPF to inspect host and container performance
by Jason Koch, with Martin Spier, Brendan Gregg, Ed Hunter Improving the tools available to our engineers to help them diagnose, triage, and work through software performance challenges in the cloud is a key goal for the cloud performance engineering team at Netflix. Today we are excited to announce latency heatmaps and improved container support for our on-host monitoring solution — Vector — to the broader community. Vector is open source and in use by multiple companies. These updates also bring other user experience…
Join us for 5 serverless events in SF Bay Area this week
Developer Week Bay Area is happening this week and Cloudflare engineers and developer relations team members are delivering several talks around the Bay. Join us in San Francisco and Oakland for the following talks. We’ll hope to see you soon. WebAssembly on the Server, npm & genomics tools @ Cloudflare We’ve partnered with the WebAssembly SF meetup group to curate three talks from Zack Bloom of Cloudflare, Laurie Voss of npm, and Robert Aboukhalil of Invitae.Event Type: MeetupLocation: Cloudflare HQ,…
Practical Lessons in Machine Learning
Bot-powered credential stuffing is a scourge on the modern Internet. These attacks attempt to log into and take over a user’s account by assaulting password forms with a barrage of dictionary words and previously stolen account credentials, with the aim of performing fraudulent transactions, stealing sensitive data, and compromising personal information. At Cloudflare we’ve built a suite of technologies to combat bots, many of them grounded in Machine Learning. ML is a hot topic these days, but the literature tends…
Fabric the reinforcer
Aircraft brake disk, breakage after machanical tests Credit: Sergey Gnuskov/NUST MISIS Scientists from the National University of Science and Technology (MISIS) have tested experimental composite materials for aircraft brakes, developed by PJSC Aviation Corporation “Rubin.” New materials, reinforced by carbon “fabric,” have turned out to be far more durable than the current analogues. As a result of testing, the scientists developed recommendations to improve the fracture toughness of both existing and developed composite materials for braking systems, which in the…
Advancing additive manufacturing by slashing support
Xiaoping Qian holding a 3-D-printed beam. The silver parts are the optimized support structure for the beam. Credit: Sarah Page 3-D printing opens up design possibilities that engineers could once only dream of. The technology allows manufacturers to create parts with unique and complex shapes—parts that conventional manufacturing methods such as die casting or injection molding can’t produce. With 3-D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, a machine creates a part by adding material in layers, building the object…
In new book, researchers address challenges of adopting additive manufacturing
Credit: CC0 Public Domain Additive manufacturing holds promise as a speedier, less costly and more effective method to fabricate parts for a wide array of industries, from aerospace and automotive to healthcare and construction. But while the technological advances of this 3-D printing technique attract attention, executives in industry remain uncertain – even skeptical – about adopting the new technology in favor of traditional, time-tested approaches. A new book written by a Missouri S&T researcher, her former doctoral student and…
Renewable energy generation with kites and drones
Airborne Wind Energy Systems (AWES). Credit: UC3M Airborne Wind Energy Systems (AWES) are a new kind of technology to harvest wind energy. The expensive and heavy tower and rotor of a conventional wind turbine are replaced by a light tether and an aircraft (flexible giant kites or large drones), respectively. In the so-called ground generation scheme, AWES use the tension force of the tether to move an electrical generator on the ground whereas, in fly generation scenarios, the electrical energy…