Computers & Hardware on Rietta Cybersecurity

Meet Titan, the Rietta AI Research Lab Server

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 10:45:00 -0400

Every research lab needs a workhorse, and ours just got one in May. I’d like to introduce Titan, the newest machine in the Rietta AI Research Lab and the compute backbone behind our AI research, including Metadata Minder. The Spec Sheet Titan is built around an AMD Ryzen 9 9900X (12 cores, 24 threads), 64GB of DDR5, and dual NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti GPUs for 32GB of combined GDDR7 VRAM. Storage is a fast NVMe system disk plus a pair of 16TB drives for the bulk data side, running Ubuntu Server 26.

Financial Plan for a New Computer Under Warranty

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 11:30:00 -0500

In my recent article on why software defined RAID 1 on a PC workstation that I built myself, I explained why recovery time is so critical when the computer that you program on for a living goes down. Let’s take this a step further and talk about how I have financially planned to always have a working computer on hand. I will not only show you how to calculate how much it costs each month to constantly have a high performance computer at the ready, but also when things go well how you can have a fund for guilt free technology purchases.

Development time is money, therefore I RAID

Thu, 24 Dec 2020 11:00:00 -0500

In the line of work I am in, development time is money! This week marks the third year after I retired my Apple MacBook Pro as my primary system for a workstation that I built from parts from MicroCenter, a retailer that focuses on serving the gaming community. I also use a RAID 1 mirrored disk as well as backups for my data. You may ask how it is that in 2020 I am doing my work on a PC tower when those went out of style for all but supercomputing and gaming around 1999?

CPU Benchmark - Raspberry Pi vs AMD Athlon vs Mac Mini

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 11:09:28 -0500

As a fun little experiment, I ran the same CPU benchmark on a few processors that I have around my home office that come from various generations. The Raspberry Pi was predictably beaten by even the nine year old AMD Athlon processor, but considering its from factor and power usage it is a remarkably versatile little system on a chip.

Setting up Ubuntu for Rails Development - part 2

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

And here is the second video in the series on setting up Ubuntu Linux for Ruby on Rails development: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_0dTp0Fzoo&feature=plcp

Setting up Ubuntu for Rails Development

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Ruby on Rails is a really great platform for developing and releasing web applications. At my company, our developers are pretty evenly split between using Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux desktops as their primary development systems. Setting up Ubuntu to develop in Ruby on Rails is pretty simple, but there are a few gotchas. To help you learn how to set this up, I have recorded a couple of real-time videos of me configuring from scratch Ubuntu Linux in a virtual machine.

Improving my personal efficiency with KDE.

Sat, 07 May 2005 00:00:00 +0000

I have recently been struck with the “how can a good graphical environment help me be more efficient” bug. Many of the people I work with have migrated to Apple laptops for various reasons. It seams like the majority opinion is that Mac OS combines the best of the UNIX world with a very productive, HCI-friendly user interface and more applications. However, I do not own an Apple laptop so I figured this was a good opportunity to play around with the new KDE 3.4 on my FreeBSD 5.3-powered Toshiba Satellite. To sum it up, I like it and here is a screen shot of my current configuration with some random KDE-centric applications opened: