GDPR Article 15 doesn't care if you want to make money by selling users' data back to them

A LinkedIn feature the average non-paying user likely only glances past could end up setting a legal precedent in the EU regarding how companies treat customer data that they've processed. …

Astera Labs unveiled an alternative to Nvidia's NVSwitch for building rack-scale AI systems on Tuesday, claiming it will work with nearly any accelerator. The AI fabric switch, codenamed Scorpio X, crams 320 lanes of PCIe 6.0 connectivity into a single ASIC with 5.12 TB/s of bidirectional bandwidth. Historically, PCIe switches have been used in a variety of applications including scale-out compute fabrics. CPUs alone either didn't offer enough or fast enough lanes for all the GPUs, NICs, and storage required. So, rather than hanging everything off the CPU, a PCIe switch, often built into the NIC, was used to connect everything together. Astera contends that with a big enough switch, PCIe is a viable alternative to interconnects like NVLink, in the scale-up fabrics used to make dozens or more GPUs behave more like a single large one without needing to redesign their accelerators. However, Astera hasn't just built a bigger PCIe switch. Scorpio is equipped with many of the same in-network compute capabilities as Nvidia's NVSwitch, which help to accelerate collective communications. These communications are especially important for generative AI inference. Large language models have become rather chatty from a network standpoint as mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures have caught on. MoE models are composed of multiple sub-models called experts. For each token generated, a different selection of experts, potentially running on different GPUs, may be used.  By moving collective communications to the switch, the GPUs spend less time waiting for the network to catch up and more time churning out tokens. Astera has gone so far as to develop a multicast operation optimized for MoE inference that it calls Hypercast. "One of the limitations of the standard multicast is the number of groups you can actually support, as well as the dynamic nature of needing to change those groups on the fly for mixture-of-experts models," Ahmad Danesh, AVP of product management at Astera, told El Reg. Where Scorpio fits in the scale-up ecosystem While there are clear benefits to using PCIe as a chip-to-chip interconnect, Scorpio isn't exactly a replacement for Nvidia's NVSwitch chips. NVSwitch 6, announced at CES in January, offers nearly 3x the bandwidth at 14.4 TB/s. However, Astera doesn't need to compete with NVSwitch directly. In fact, Astera announced plans to extend support for NVLink Fusion, Nvidia's attempt to open its high-speed interconnect to the broader ecosystem, last spring. Instead, Scorpio is being positioned more as a vendor agnostic alternative. Technologies like NVLink Fusion or the emerging UALink protocol are gaining traction, but chips need to be designed around them. PCIe works with just about anything because it's already used to get data in and out of the accelerators. For example, if you wanted to stitch together 32 or more Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Server cards, you'd need a PCIe switch, since those GPUs don't support NVLink at all.  PCIe also makes it easier to mix and match chips for disaggregated inference architectures, like we've seen with Nvidia and Groq, AWS and Cerebras, or Intel and SambaNova. These architectures involve using one accelerator for compute heavy prefill operations and another for bandwidth intensive decode operations. For this to work, the chips have to be connected to one another. Many AI chip builders are doing this over Ethernet, but PCIe would be more direct. Alongside its Scorpio X family of chips, Astera is also expanding its Scorpio P-series switches with models ranging from 32 to 320 lanes of PCIe connectivity. All of these switches work with its COSMOS management suite, a hardware monitoring platform designed to help track down and resolve issues across the network fabric.  Astera's refreshed Scorpio switches are currently sampling with production expected to ramp in the second half of 2026. ®

High-speed connectivity without NVLink baggage

Astera Labs unveiled an alternative to Nvidia's NVSwitch for building rack-scale AI systems on Tuesday, claiming it will work with nearly any accelerator.…

Editorial illustrations commisionned by various French magazines

NEW YORK (ANP) - De aandelenbeurzen in New York zijn dinsdag hoger gesloten. Beleggers waren opgelucht dat het fragiele staakt-het-vuren tussen de Verenigde Staten en Iran blijft gelden, ondanks dat deze week meerdere aanvallen plaatsvonden in het Midden-Oosten.

De Amerikaanse minister van Defensie Pete Hegseth zei dat de wapenstilstand tussen de twee landen nog steeds van kracht is. Zijn verklaring volgt een dag op Iraanse aanvallen in de Straat van Hormuz. De Amerikaanse president Donald Trump stelde dat Iran daarmee reageerde op zijn Project Freedom om gestrande schepen daar weg te krijgen.

De Dow-Jonesindex eindigde 0,7 procent hoger op 49.298,25 punten. De brede S&P 500-index steeg 0,8 procent tot 7259,22 punten. Techbeurs Nasdaq klom 1 procent naar 25.326,13 punten. Daarmee sloten de laatste twee graadmeters op nieuwe recordstanden. Maandag waren nog minnen tot 1,1 procent te zien door oplaaiend geweld in het Midden-Oosten.

OSLO (ANP/AFP/RTR) - Noorwegen heeft dinsdag ingestemd met de heropening van drie oude gasvelden in de Noordzee. Die moeten in 2028 weer in productie gaan om de gasvoorziening van Europa te versterken, meldde het Noorse ministerie van Energie.

De drie velden Albuskjell, Vest Ekofisk en Tommeliten Gamma werden in 1998 gesloten. De reserves van de velden worden geschat op tussen de 90 en 120 miljoen vaten olie-equivalent. De exploratie staat onder leiding van het Amerikaanse olieconcern ConocoPhillips en moet tot 2048 duren. Het gas wordt geëxporteerd naar het Duitse Emden.

Noorwegen maakte dinsdag ook bekend zeventig nieuwe blokken aan te bieden in de Noordzee, de Noorse Zee en de Barentszzee aan energiebedrijven voor de exploratie van olie en gas. Het land is sinds de oorlog in Oekraïne de belangrijkste gasleverancier van Europa. Sinds de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten en de blokkade van de Straat van Hormuz komt ook veel minder vloeibaar gemaakt aardgas (lng) uit die regio naar Europa.

Het SS Rotterdam is dinsdagavond ontruimd nadat het brandalarm afging. Tientallen mensen moesten het schip in Rotterdam-Katendrecht verlaten. Uiteindelijk bleek er geen sprake van brand.

Some nice work here from Swedish designer Eric Rohman, who designed thousands of movie posters in the early-to-mid 20th century. (via meanwhile)

Tags: design · Eric Rohman · movie posters · movies

New immigration enforcement package could fund security of $400m ‘East Wing modernization project’

Senate Republicans have released a new immigration enforcement funding package that includes a proposed $1bn that could go to security measures related to the $400m ballroom that is part of Donald Trump’s “East Wing modernization project”.

Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican who chairs the Senate judiciary committee, released the funding plan on Monday, as part of a wider bill the Republican party plans to pass along party lines to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies involved in the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts.

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