AfriTECH 2.0 holds today! 5G, blockchain, cybersecurity, cloud computing top agenda - ITREALMS

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The Africa Tech Alliance Forum (AfriTECH 2.0) is set to hold on November 09, 2022 on a theme that encompasses the current technology trends in our world today — ‘Sustainability and The Company of the Future’.

Some topics which would be critically analyzed by experts so as to point us in the right direction to attain a resilient future and keep thriving irrespective of hiccups are Blockchain | Cryptocurrency | CyberSecurity and The Future of Money, Cloud Computing in 5G Era: Everything-As-A-Service, Creating Sustainable Future through Connectivity and Building Sustainable Future for Startup Ecosystem: NITDA’s Perspective.

Konga Mega computing sales ends Sunday - ITREALMS

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A huge surge has been recorded among bargain-hungry shoppers as Konga, Nigeria’s leading composite e-commerce giant, prepares to draw the curtains on its widely popular Mega Computing Sales.

The promotion, a two-week-long sales fiesta offering best deals and unmatched discounts on a variety of computing products, has generated significant excitement among shoppers, including students and their parents, as well as educational institutions, especially with the commencement of a new academic session across Nigeria. 

Konga upsets Nigerian PCs, devices market with mega computing sales - ITREALMS

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The much-anticipated Konga Mega Computing Sales powered with huge discounts and incentives and same day delivery goes live from Monday, August 29, 2022 for two weeks.

According to the management of Konga, additional discounts are on offer for customers via its CSR arm, Konga Kares, thereby making it the most discounted computing sales of all seasons this year. Feelers indicate that Konga guarantees to refund customers the difference in price if they find cheaper prices for same genuine products in any channel in Africa.

Personal Computing Devices demand declines in MEA - ITREALMS

ITREALMS:

The Personal Computing Devices (PCD) market in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) has been reported as being on the drop side which is made up of desktops, notebooks, workstations, and tablets, reports ITREALMS.

According to the latest insights from International Data Corporation (IDC), PCD declined by 7.7 per cent year on year in Q2 2018.

The global technology research and consulting firm's Quarterly PCD Tracker shows that shipments fell to around 5.4 million units for the three-month period, which represents the lowest quarterly volume recorded for more than seven years.

"While this marks a considerable decline for the overall market, the PC segment actually performed well, with desktops experiencing strong growth and notebooks experiencing only a small decline," explains Fouad Charakla, IDC's senior research manager for client devices in the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa. "However, there was a much more significant decline in tablet shipments, and only the aggressive distribution push of certain Far-Eastern players prevented an even steeper decline."

The biggest decline in PCD shipments was seen in the 'Rest of Middle East' group of countries (which comprises Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Palestine). "Iran accounted for the largest chunk of this decline, with the country's worsening economic situation further weakening the local currency, which in turn caused shipments into the country to become more expensive and demand to decline," says Charakla. "The MEA region's largest single market, Turkey, experienced something similar, with the country's currency weakening to new lows against the U.S. Dollar, causing a significant increase in the cost of imported devices and a corresponding decline in demand."

In stark contrast, South Africa experienced strong year-on-year growth in PCD shipments after the rand reached one of its highest levels against the US dollar in recent times. "Market players operating in the country continued to take advantage of this opportunity throughout Q2 2018, with imported PCs costing far less than previously for both local channels and end users," says Charakla. "Other countries that saw strong year-on-year growth for the quarter were Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, and Lebanon."

IDC's research shows that the leading PC vendors remained unchanged in Q2 2018, with the top five all occupying the same positions as Q2 2017. While HP experienced a significant year-on-year jump in its share of PC shipments for the quarter, all the other major players saw their shares shrink, with the exception of Acer, which remained flat. It is also worth noting that the top three vendors accounted for more than 80% of the region's commercial PC shipments in Q2 2018.

Chuks Egbune/ED, Ops

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ETSI takes on 1st MEC Hackathon @Edge Computing Congress - ITREALMS

ITREALMS:

The first-ever Multi-Access Computing (MEC) hackathon has been slated for the Edge Computing Congress in Berlin during the last quarter of this year, reports ITRealms.

The event being organized by the European Telecommunication Standards Institute (ETSI) will hold on 18 and 19 of September 2018, in Berlin, and co-located with Knect365’s event at the annual Edge Computing Congress on 18-20 September.

The ETSI MEC (Multi-Access Computing) Hackathon, ITRealms reports, will challenge developers to create in-vehicle infotainment applications featuring Virtual or Augmented Reality and to demonstrate how they can leverage Multi-Access Edge Computing and networking to improve performance and user experience.

Hosted by KNect365, the event is supported by key players in the ISG MEC community:  the technical infrastructure is supported by Intel, Huawei, Saguna and Viavi, and prizes are courtesy of KNect365 and Vodafone. Ip3 and Ismb also form part of the organization committee.

Registration, ITRealms gathered, is open and free of charge with deadline fixed on 10 July 2018. Team size is 5 members (maximum), while registration notification to the selected teams will be done by 30 July 2018.

Chuks Egbune/GEE

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GridGain unveils in-memory computing

ITREALMS:

The GridGain Systems Incorporated has unveiled iIn-memory computing, describing it as characterized by using high-performance, integrated and distributed memory systems to compute and transact on large data sets in real-time, reports ITRealms.

According to the White Paper by GridGain and made available to ITRealms, in-memory computing is anticipated to perform orders of magnitude faster than possible with traditional disk-based or flash technologies.

“GridGain is an in-memory computing platform that delivers unprecedented speed and massive scalability to modern data processing. GridGain enables high-performance transactions, real-time streaming, and fast analytics in a single, comprehensive data access and processing layer,” official said.

In addition, GridGain said it easily powers both existing and new applications in a distributed, massively parallel architecture on affordable, industry-standard hardware.

“GridGain can run on premise, in a hybrid environment, or on a cloud platform such as AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform,” part of the white paper read.

GridGain provides a unified  Application Programming Interface (API) which supports SQL, C++, .NET, Java/Scala/Groovy, Node.js and more access for the application layer. The unified API connects cloud-scale applications with multiple data stores containing structured, semi-structured and unstructured data (SQL, NoSQL, Hadoop).

“It offers a high-performance data environment that allows companies to process ACID transactions and generate valuable insights using ANSI-99 SQL from real-time, interactive and batch queries. In-memory computing platforms offer a strategic approach to in-GRIDGAIN.COM,” the white paper further read.

Chuks Egbune/GEE

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Intel’s secret for future high-performance PCs

DigitalSENSE Business News:

Intel Corporation has revealed the anticipated secret of future high-performance computing, reports DigitalSENSE Business News.

The new and enhanced technologies, DigitalSENSE Business News reports would bolster Intel’s leadership in high performance computing (HPC), which would include the future generation Intel Xeon Phi Processor, tagged ‘Knights Hill,’ and Intel ‘Omni-Path’ architecture; a new high speed interconnect technology optimized for HPC deployments.

Also DigitalSENSE Business News gathered that the new software releases and collaborative efforts were designed to make it easier to extract the full performance potential from current and future Intel Industry- standard hardware.

Charles Wuischpard, Vice President, Data Center Group, and General Manager of Workstations and HPC at Intel affirmed this secret to DigitalSENSE Business News, stressing that this innovation will address the dual challenges of extreme scalability and mainstream use of high performance computing systems while providing the foundation for a cost-effective path to superb computing.

The new Intel Xeon Phi Product family, Knights Hill, he told DigitalSENSE Business News via a press statement, will be built using Intel’s 10mm process technology and integrate Intel Omni- Path Fabric technology. Noting that industry investment in Intel Xeon Phi processors continues to grow with more than 50 providers expected to offer systems built using the new processor version of Knights Landing with many more systems using the coprocessor PCle card version of the product.

 
Intel equally disclosed to DigitalSENSE Business News that the Intel Omni-Path Architecture is expected to offer 100 Gbps line speed and up to 56 per cent lower switch fabric latency in medium-to-large clusters than InfiniBand alternatives.  

The Intel Omni-Path Architecture will use a 48 port switch chip to deliver greater port density and system scaling compared to the current 36 port InfiniBand alternatives.  Providing up to 33 percent more nodes per switch chip is expected to reduce the number of switches required, simplifying system design and reducing infrastructure costs at every scale.  

“Intel is excited about the strong market momentum and customer investment in the development of HPC systems based on current and future Intel Xeon Phi processors and high-speed fabric technology. The integration of these fundamental HPC building blocks, combined with an open standards-based programming model, will maximize HPC system performance, broaden accessibility and use, and serve as the on-ramp to exascale,”  he said.

Charles Wuischpard pointed out that the expected benefits of the system scale include up to 1.3x greater port density than InfiniBand – enabling smaller clusters to maximize single switch investments and use up to 50 per cent fewer switches than a comparable InfiniBand-based cluster of medium- to large-size and up to 2.3x higher scaling in a two-tier fabric configuration using the same number of switches as an InfiniBand-based cluster – allowing for more cost-effective scaling for very large cluster-based systems.

           

Recent high-profile Knights Landing deals, DigitalSENSE Business News recalls  include the Trinity supercomputer, a joint effort between Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, and the Cori supercomputer, announced by The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center. Additionally, DownUnder GeoSolutions a geosciences company, recently announced the largest commercial deployment of current-generation Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, and the National Supercomputing Center IT4Innovations announced a new supercomputer that will become the largest Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor-based cluster in Europe.

Dr. Matt Lamont, managing director, DownUnder GeoSolutions “The combination of Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors with our proprietary software allows us to provide our customers with one of the most powerful geo-processing production systems to date,” said. “Our Intel Xeon Phi powered solutions enable interactive processing and imaging from each of our geophysicists’ individual computers. A testing regime that once took weeks can now be achieved in days. We’re thrilled with the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors and look forward to evaluating the next-generation product.”

            Intel-based systems account for 86 percent of all supercomputers and 97 percent of all new additions, according to the 44th edition of the TOP500 list announced today. In the two years since the introduction of the first-generation Intel Xeon Phi product family, these many-core coprocessor-based systems represent 17 percent of the aggregated performance of all TOP500 supercomputers. The complete TOP500 list is available at www.top500.org.

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Different shapes of Cloud hinges on trust by Antony Cook

ITRealms:

The Assistant General Counsel, Microsoft Middle East and Africa, Antony Cook, who dwelt on Cloud Computing: Privacy and Security, asserting that trust is the key to cloud services, at an event in Lagos, reports ITRealms.

And for Cook, the numbers matters so much, stating that mobility checks has seen 1.1 billion global smartphone subscribers, yet 5 billion non-smartphone users still exist globally.

Cook also said that on mobility, there are over a billion users, Facebook users are now in the hands of 680 million mobile, just as 175 million tweets are generated daily.

On the big data, Cook pointed out that there was 2.4 billion global internet users in 2012, whereas total amount of digital information in the world is increasing 10x every 5 years, with the Cloud being the enabling force for all these trends.

Thus, for Cook, clouds come in different shapes, namely the public, private and public cum private clouds.

For the public clouds, Cook said this manages data centers by service provides within agile, cost effective and scalable.

Private clouds, the counsel said is on-premises or hosted by a third party which could be more secured, more customizable, greater control and more overhead.

Accordingly, the AGM at Microsoft says that public and private clouds has reputed for optimal mix of cost and control, while agile, scalable, more secure and cost effectiveness could be outlined as seeming advantages.

Some key benefits of the cloud include cost savings, security and performance.

Precisely, Antony said that for the cost savings, cloud services provide cost savings without compromising on quality.

On the security benefit, Antony said experience and scale enabled cloud service providers are known to offer more robust security.

Even as the performance gains involve cloud services which enable customers to innovate and operate at a faster pace.

However, across security, privacy and compliance, he pointed out that trust is key, stressing that people would like to know how safe are their data in the cloud, where will my data be stored and who can access it for  hat purposes, whilst on compliance, customers will like to know if the cloud will increase their regulatory risk?

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CPN disowns jailed banker over N9.2 m fraud

… Omenogor not an IT professional

The Computer Professional (Registration Council) of Nigeria (CPN) has disowned Mr. Romeo Omenogor over N9.2 million fraud at the United Bank of Africa (UBA), saying he is not a registered Information Technology (IT) professional.

The Registrar cum Chief Executive Officer of CPN, Mr. Shehu Sekiru, made this clarification in a press statement made available to ITRealms Online, saying that abinitio, the 10-year fraudster, Mr. Omenogor is not a registered IT professional in the country, therefore should not be referred to as an IT specialist in the first instance. 

“Therefore, he was not supposed to be employed by the bank abinitio,” he argued.

Reacting to a publication that implicated Mr. Omenogor, he said that CPN has used different medium to enlighten employers of labour and members of the public on the risk involved in employing unregistered IT practitioners to handle IT jobs in their organizations.

This, according to him, is because their investment in Information could only be protected by employing skillful, competent and knowledgeable people who are known and certified as professionals by their professional bodies.

To this effect, he said that CPN has specifically written the management of UBA in an effort to encourage the organization to ensure appropriate registration of their IT staff.

He recalled that Computer Professionals (Registration Council) of Nigeria was established through Act No 49 of 1993, stressing that the Act was passed into law on June 10 and gazetted on August 9 of the same year.

“It is a corporate entity that is charged with the regulation, control and supervision of the computing profession and practice in Nigeria in line with Section 1 (2) of the Act,” he said, asserting that CPN is under the supervision of the Federal Ministry of Education.

Remmy Nweke

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