During Women’s History Month, we like to celebrate the many achievements and milestones of women around the world, but especially those rooted in science and technology. As a technology company that is also a woman-owned small business, the hard work of women everywhere does not go unnoticed in our offices and it’s something we like to call attention to whenever possible. Here are a few of our favorite techie women and their amazing accomplishments:

Women Technology Pioneers

1. Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace, born in 1815, is widely known as the “first programmer”. Her mother had her homeschooled in science and mathematics as a young girl and her work includes her focus on the notion that a specific engine could be built with the ability to transition from a calculation to computation. The second Tuesday of October is known as Ada Lovelace Day as a nod to all of the achievements of women in STEM careers.

2. Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper was born in 1906 and attended Yale University where she received a Ph.D. in mathematics. She joined the Naval Reserve shortly after where she worked with Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. During her time with Eckert-Mauchly, she designed a compiler that translated a programmer’s instructions into computer code. A few years later, she developed the first English language data processing compiler. She received several awards over the course of her career, one of them being the Presidential Medal of Freedom that was awarded to her by Former President Barack Obama in 2016.

3. Hedy Lamarr

Hedy was a self-taught inventor, awarded for a patent for her “secret communication system” in 1942. The system was intended to be a way to set radio-guided torpedoes off course during wartimes, but eventually the idea inspired technology we use on a daily basis today, like Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth.

4. Annie Easley

When we talk about women in technology, Easley is always at the top of the list. Easley was a NASA rocket scientist and a trailblazer for women, and specifically black women, in the technology space. Her work as a computer scientist laid the foundations for space shuttle launches for years to come.

5. Reshma Saujani

Saujani is the founder of the tech organization, Girls Who Code, a nonprofit organization that was built to support and increase the number of women working in computer science. Saujani founded the organization upon noticing the lack of presence of women in technology positions and women-led organizations. Girls Who Code will help to equip young women with the technology skills necessary to pursue a career in computer programming and the technology industry, potentially increasing the amount of women working in these career fields in the future.

5. Danah Boyd

Boyd is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and the founder of Data & Society, a website focused on producing original research on various technology topics, like AI and automation, the impact of technology on labor and health, and more. Boyd received a Ph.D. at the School of Information at the University of California – Berkeley and her Master’s Degree at MIT. Her work with Data & Society calls out the rippling effects and changes of technology and her work at Microsoft Research has been applied in biomedical machine learning, economics and computation, and more.

The women listed above are just a handful of the many women that have significantly impacted the technology industry and whose achievements deserve to be celebrated. This March, we lift up the voices of women in tech around the world and celebrate their important contributions.

Early this year, President Biden signed an Executive order designed to ensure that federal government agencies buy more goods and services produced in the United States. The Executive order comes from the President’s campaign promises to resuscitate the ailing domestic manufacturing industry, one of the industries hit hardest in the storm of COVID-19.

What American Manufacturers Can Expect

According to the White House, the order allows for the creation of a website that will show the various government contracts that are being awarded to foreign vendors. An American business can then bid on the contract to notify the government that an American-made alternative is available. Calls to ramp-up the American manufacturing industry come in the aftermath of COVID-19, which in its early days, had left the U.S. with extremely limited supplies of materials needed to combat the viruses spread, including important personal protective equipment like masks and gloves as well as cleaning supplies and hand sanitizer.

Critics point out that potential issues always can arise with Executive orders of this nature, including higher costs for taxpayers, potential backlash from foreign nations, and an unlikeliness to bring home lost manufacturing jobs. But as a “Buy American” sentiment begins to make its way through the federal government, we can’t help but point out how significant it is for federal agencies to work with American-made equipment, particularly in the technology industry. The risks associated with purchasing electronics equipment from foreign vendors are potentially too high – cybersecurity and data privacy are just two of the issues that come to mind. Protecting your data can become much more difficult when you put its management into the hands of a foreign nation, something that U.S. federal agencies simply can’t afford to do.

Twenty-five years ago, we found the solution that the federal government needs – American-made, on-premise high performance computing (HPC) systems, custom-built to meet the unique enterprise computing challenges that our clients face. PSSC Labs solutions are deployed in some of the world’s most demanding organizations including NASA, NIH, the U.S Air Force, FBI, and more. For questions about our systems or American-made manufacturing process, please contact us at 4sales@site-a.com or give us a call at (949) 380-7288.

When Red Hat®, Inc. announced in late 2020 that they would soon be releasing CentOS Stream, the tech community responded with an uproar of confusion and uncertainty. With many wondering about the future of their workloads and the expiration of their current operating system, solution providers like PSSC Labs have had to adapt to our clients’ needs. (Read more about CentOS Stream here).

In response to this operating system shift, we’re making a few changes to help. First, our CBeST Cluster Management Software Stack will now be compatible with Ubuntu. This will offer our clients a path out of their current CentOS/Red Hat environments without affecting their current scientific and computing applications. PSSC Labs will continue to support a truly open source cluster management environment with all of the same key features and benefits that have been present before.

Key features:

• Operating System and BIOS performance optimizations tailored by CPU type (AMD®/Intel®)
• Support for both Intel®, AMD®, NVIDIA® GPUs
• NVIDIA® CUDA SDK software preinstalled
• Multiple MPI platforms and versions installed by default
• Environment Modules configuration. This will allow user environment customization to switch between different default MPI/application/compiler versions/environments.
• Support for Cloud Bursting to Microsoft® Azure, Amazon® AWS and Google® Compute
• Support for connecting to different parallel file systems including Gluster, Lustre, and Ceph
• Support for Mellanox^® InfiniBand up to 200 Gb/s and Intel® Omni-Path up to 100 Gb/s
• Support for high speed ethernet standards 10/25/40/100 Gb/s.
• Enhanced usability and management
• Continued improvements on the build and use of slurm batch scheduler
• Slurm customization, including support for GPUs and Quality of Service prioritizing
• Slurm will allow support for bursting cloud deployment

Additionally, we offer various AI and HPC solutions that are compatible with several other operation system options, such as Microsoft® Windows® Server, Red Hat® Enterprise Linux, SUSE® Linux®, Ubuntu Linux, VMware® Linux, and more. Our HPC servers are designed to help you achieve your business objectives and overcome any potential roadblocks. For more information on our solutions, please contact us at 4sales@site-a.com or give us a call at (949) 380-7288.

If you’ve noticed it’s been more difficult than usual to get your hands on the IT parts you need, you’re not the only one. Growing demand and manufacturing hiccups seem to be to blame for the significant and growing strain on IT supply chains and forecasts indicate these issues could increase well into 2021.

CPUs, GPUs and memory chips from tech giants like AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel have all announced recent shortages for their popular components that could challenge organizations into 2021. Add to this existing chaos the implications of COVID-19 and it’s easy to see why manufacturers are having such a difficult time getting their technology products to market. Technology leaders point to a core shortage of the chemicals needed to manufacture key technology components, including memory chips as the real issue, in addition to a growing over-ordering out of an abundance of caution in uncertain times. “A lot of companies are over-ordering because of a concern of availability of parts. Once you have the illusion of short supply, everyone orders more.” (“You’re not imagining things, there is a serious chip shortage”, NetworkWorld).

So what does the current chip shortage mean for companies looking to purchase AI and HPC solutions within the year? It means that many organizations should look at the purchase cycle realistically. It’s important for those in the market for new technology solutions to see the reality that AI and HPC component delays will likely result in pushed back delivery timeframes. This means if you have a business objective that requires an upgrade of computing power, the quicker you act, the better. Meet with vendors and discuss your computing needs so that you can get ahold of the high performance computing solutions you need with minimal wait times.

At PSSC Labs, we’re always available to discuss your unique business objectives to make sure you get the perfect, custom solution for your work. If you have questions about our solutions or how we can help you, please reach out to us anytime at 4sales@site-a.com or give us at call at 949-380-7288.

This past December, Red Hat®, Inc. announced the upcoming release of CentOS Stream scheduled to take place in late 2021. With the community around the current versions of CentOS being as vast as it is, this announcement unsurprisingly caused a lot of uproar and confusion as you can see on the CentOS blog (https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/). Many have been left to wonder about the future of their operating system. Will CentOS Stream be a replacement for CentOS 8 entirely? Or merely an evolution of it, allowing users to choose the operating system version they continue to run their workloads on? The PSSC Labs Team gathered together to study this news in detail with the hope of clearing up any confusion that might have arisen.

In September of 2019, Chris Wright, VP and CTO at Red Hat said of CentOS Stream, “CentOS Stream is an upstream development platformed designed for CentOS community members, Red Hat partners, ecosystem developers, and many other groups to more quickly and easily see what’s coming next in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) ecosystem and to help shape the product.” In essence, CentOS Stream is rolling out in something of a pilot phase. Red Hat is encouraging their partners and developers to not only begin engagement in CentOS Stream but to actually start utilizing it to test solutions to their own unique business challenges. This gives users the opportunity to interact within the operating system while its official version is still being developed. The idea is that Red Hat can identify how its users utilize and interact with the system and then use that information to further build out the official version. Red Hat’s intended goal is to ensure that CentOS Stream is designed to work the way users want it to, but practically what does this mean for you and your team?

What does this mean for CentOS 8?

For now, it seems that CentOS 8 will remain an option for users that wish to continue their workloads on this version of the operating system throughout the year. But as stated by Red Hat themselves, that time will come to an end very shortly. “Updated to the CentOS Linux 8 distribution continue until the end of 2021; users can choose to switch over directly to CentOS Stream 8” where updates distribution will continue through the full Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) support phase.

Consider Your Options

Rather than migrate to CentOS Stream, consider the possibility of migrating to other versions of Linux, such as Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a Linux distribution based on Debian and mostly composed of free and open-source software. It’s also released in three editions: Desktop, Server, and Core for Internet of Things devices and robots. Ubuntu has a long history of success when it comes to supporting computationally intensive applications, meaning our clients in the Life Science, Design and Engineering, and other spaces will still have a supported operating system with Ubuntu.

PSSC Labs Supports You

For PSSC Labs clients that choose to migrate to Ubuntu, we are releasing a new version of our CBeST Cluster Management Software Stack. CBeST is our full featured cluster management software, compromised of kernel optimizations, custom scripts and open source tools that are elegantly integrated, optimized and customized for your specific PowerWulf HPC Cluster hardware and applications. It’s offered at no additional cost to our cluster clients.

No matter the future of your current operating system, PSSC Labs is here to support our clients however they need. Please feel free to contact us with any questions.