Computers are connected to other computers

[00:00:00] Mark Tomlinson: The second thing you need to think about is not just that everything's a computer. Is that computers are connected to other computers. Right. So the fact that you're watching this online means your computer is connected to the Internet and somewhere Joe is hosted the video and that computers connected to the Internet, we all understand the idea that the computer is connected to another computer. So computers are connected to other computers, but there's even more than meets the eye on this. [00:00:30][29.1]

[00:00:33] So a computer is connected to another computer. And if we break that down, not just to the computer, we think about CPU, disk, memory and network. Those components are connected to each other, and you might think, well, a network is just between this computer, a router. And another computer, big wires, right, Ethernet cables, Wi-Fi, but actually, if you think about a motherboard, there's a computer inside the computer because here's the CPU and it's a processor and there's a GPU. [00:01:06][32.6]

[00:01:06] This thing right here is another graphical processor. So I have two processors, but they have to work together. And the architecture of this board, there's a bunch of little lines. If you look really, really closely in the you see there's a bunch of little lines inside the circuit board. It might be easier to see on the back with all the little veins and all the different pieces connecting all of this. Those are actually like little networks. Right. [00:01:27][20.5]

[00:01:27] So the GPU can talk to the CPU while the CPU can talk to the memory. And so there's four different things of memory. So you have probably dual channel, two different channels, two different busses of memory to be able to communicate with the CPU. And so there's not just a network between this computer and your computer, there's a network inside the computer that is your computer. [00:01:52][25.2]

[00:01:53] So the idea of networking, plumbing, going back and forth, the bus speeds in there, there's a computer inside the computer connected to the computer. I hope that makes sense. So here's a few more shots of the inside of a even bigger motherboard than our little one that I showed you, this one has four processors, and in this picture, it's much easier to see the little lines in between each of the processors. And then you can see the different plumbing lines that go all the way to the memory. [00:02:24][31.0]

[00:02:25] In fact, there's there's a bunch of memory DIMMs, look at that, you got four processors. It looks like each of them. You see two DIMMs and two, let's see, maybe I can do a little bit of a pointer here. So you can see this processor probably has two dual channel DIMMs. So I can put two of the white DIMMs and two of the black DIMMS and they're connected to this processor. And maybe maybe potentially this one talks to those two banks of DIMMs. [00:02:53][28.2]

[00:02:54] This processor talks to those two. And you can see what's actually connecting that processor to those DIMMs are little lines, little network pipelines. Those are like little wires, little pipelines. Right. There's two more processors over here. So we've got like dual GPU or dual accessory processors. Maybe there's a couple another processor here, a couple more over here, maybe four network or system management are here's the PCI-E, PCI-X slots, maybe so for actually putting the peripherals in and out, input output and a bunch of network to this, again, is the inside of a computer. Here's another computer, you can see the similar kinds of things here with the pointer, here's obviously the processor. [00:03:36][42.2]

[00:03:36] You can see it's got the most big fan attached right to it. And here's our dual channel memory connector right there. Looks like a coprocessor of some kind, maybe another mathematics coprocessor there. Here, of course, the power supply. That's all the power comes from. There's a bunch of fans, etc.. But wherever you see a heat sink here, here, here, those are probably processors, so another processor there may be right here, there's a processor. And this is a different kind of device. And actually, if you look really closely, this is an F5 network's big IP load balancer. [00:04:09][32.2]

[00:04:09] Now, how many of you would think, oh, big IP, I know that that's a network device. So I only think network. Well, inside your network routing load balancer is another computer and inside that computer, because this would be the frontend computer with its processors, guess what? There's a back plain motherboard, the back part, another motherboard. [00:04:30][20.8]

[00:04:31] There's like a computer behind the computer. So there's a front part computer that does networking stuff and a back part computer that actually maybe does the hard core work. So even what you think is a router is a network, is a computer. Here's a map of a Catalyst 3850, this is a network switch and similarly, again, when they say, ASIC, that's going to be a processing chip, right. So you've got two processors, coprocessors. You got a bunch of other CPUs. So you've got a Cavium CPU, a bunch of Downlinks and PoE plus controllers. [00:05:05][33.9]

[00:05:06] See, all these heatsinks those are all going to be CPUs of some kind. You've got the obviously the power controller in here. So you might think, OK, this is really great. I've got input output. Where's the disk? There's probably some onboard memory disk. Some of these DIMMs in here might be holding disks. There's some storage of some kind. But here's the idea. It's not just a network device. It's a computer inside a computer inside a network device, which is very cool. Here is actually a storage device called a very large one called a SAN, a storage array network. I believe this is a Hitachi USB PV. And you can see what looks to be wow, wow. There's a bunch of fans. If you open it up and there's a bunch of different drawers here, you've got some of them are going to be drawers of just memory. [00:05:55][49.5]

[00:05:56] Some of them are going to be drawers of power and processing. You've got a bunch of IO modules over here. You can see where all the fiber channel or maybe even the fiber channel over Ethernet wires come in over here. You've got some of the interconnects. These are probably connecting out these black wires, probably on either side, left and right, go out to all of the individual little disks that make things make things go. But if you think of each of these little modules, we've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. There could be maybe as many as 20 different computers inside the computer. [00:06:31][34.6]

[00:06:32] But the way you and I talk about it, we just talk about it. Oh, that's just disk. But really, it's a computer inside a computer. And that's what I'm trying to tell you, is that there's different layers to the architecture. There's not just one CPU, one disk, one memory, one network device. Every device is made up of little devices and more and more devices make up the entire system for the computer. So just to display this a little bit, one of my good friends works for Soasta now Akamai. And this is their Impulse product. And the idea at a global scale that computers are connected to other computers, you want to think about something as huge as the globe and all of the hits that are happening on the globe. So if I actually go back over to bring up a demo of this right now, if I go to work, I think I have it here under demos. [00:07:28][56.1]

[00:07:29] There's the Impulse Globe. Right. So this is going to bring up kind of a dashboard of information that's showing page views and measurements. And of course, if I go back to the central repository and I bring up the showcase and you can do this as well, impulse.soasta.com. There's a full demo that's running. Here's The Globe. And of course, it's it's really sexy because it renders as an actual globe. But the most important thing I want to show you guys is that these are interconnected systems around the world and how and as they're actually running. Right. [00:08:04][35.4]

[00:08:05] So as that as the information from one computer gets sent to another computer, these are the different hits or the different outages and the different, you know, hundreds of thousands of page page views and a lot of bounce rate bounce rates really high generally all over the world. But these are these are incidents that are happening. And you can see all over the world that there's a bunch of things happening. It's nighttime when I'm recording over here. So there's not much activity happening in Europe at this point. [00:08:32][27.1]

[00:08:33] But you can see some of that information coming in. And in fact, you can see some galaxies. I don't know why I don't see any computers out in the other planets out there to be very interesting. Another view of how this stuff can work is if I actually bring up my other tool, Dynatrace that I like to use. And so another tool I like to use is Dynatrace, and that helps us view this topology of interconnected systems. Right. And here on any system, this is just a demo system. I'm looking at the transaction flow or a topology of all of the systems. Maybe one of the components is the desktop browser. [00:09:10][37.6]

[00:09:12] The next component, there's my end user sending traffic in at a certain rate. So here we have a passing transaction at two twenty eight per minute about, you know, two times a minute they're putting things in a desktop browser. We have another bot that's coming in on a portal. And as I zoom out, you can see there's much more to this system then than you might think. Right. So here's all the different entry points. There's a travel portal, the desktop browser, bots, maybe a mobile application. These are all on the front end of the system. We've got sort of a process of transactions on, another host in the middle. Fact there's three different hosts, looks like they're some some more plus one dotcom. [00:09:52][40.4]

[00:09:53] So that's a assets. We've got different pieces that are happening within that piece. And then it looks like there's some other activity happening locally that don another node. But as we move towards the back, you can see, wow, OK, now we've got a frontend, easy travel demo app. We've got some errors happening. And then we start doing the pipeline for getting to the database. Way back here on the backend, we can see that we've got the database calls, the peer paths. Here's a credit transaction based, probably credit card lookup. And of course, this one in the middle is the business process itself. And if we look way on the back end, there's a database called the Easy Travel Business. [00:10:30][37.5]

[00:10:31] So just give you an idea that computers are connected to other computers. All of these components from the back end, a database all the way up to the front end where we have multiple hosts. In fact, in the middle we have many, three hosts here. You can think of a system sort of horizontally from front to back. And then if we go back to think about the systems that are computers inside a computer, inside a computer, then you can think of that as horizontal. Right at the top. It looks like a network router, but you go down from the top digging down in. You've got, oh, there's a processor in that talks to another processor and there's another computer on the backend. That's a computer inside a computer, inside a computer. And so that's where you get the idea that there is a topology. And that's the important thing to put together. One, everything is made of computers. Number two, those computers talk to other computers. [00:10:31][0.0]

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