IBM and Red Hat Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 22, 2024

• The Register UK ☛ Kyndryl insiders say there's little new business

  Kyndryl, the managed infrastructure services business spun out of IBM in 2021, earlier this month repeated its somewhat glum prediction that its revenue will shrink by two to four percent for its fiscal 2025, the year ending March 31.

  That "growth" would put the IT giant's annual revenue at somewhere between $15.2 to $15.5 billion.

  That rate of decline is a bit better than what we saw in Q1 FY2025, the three months to June 30, 2024, and the following quarter, which saw constant-currency revenue slippage of eight percent and seven percent, respectively. But it's consistent with the previous four years, in which revenue fell from $18.65 billion in FY2021 to $17.20 billion in FY2022 to $17 billion in FY2023 to $16.1 billion in FY2024.

• Red Hat Official ☛ InstructLab tutorial: Installing and fine-tuning your first AI model (part 1)

  Why train my own models? Sometimes you have confidential, regulated or restricted information that can’t be uploaded to other third-party platforms (well, your data might end up training their model). Or, you might want to have tighter control over various aspects of your model.

• Red Hat ☛ Best practices for InstructLab instruction datasets

  Instruction datasets are specialized datasets designed to help a language model understand and respond to specific instructions or prompts. They provide the model with structured examples of questions, commands, or statements and the corresponding desired responses. These datasets essentially "teach" the model how to follow instructions by exposing it to various scenarios where it learns the correct patterns and formats for responses.

  When providing instruction datasets to InstructLab, you can think of the model as a "student" and yourself as the "teacher." You need to provide your student with an educational reading in the form of a Markdown file that will act as the student's source of truth when answering all questions. You also need to provide some example questions and answers in the form of a qna.qaml file to demonstrate how the student will be expected to apply the knowledge from the reading during the test. 

• Red Hat ☛ Python performance optimizations with RHEL 9.5

  As Python continues playing a central role in diverse fields, such as web development, data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), performance optimizations in the language are critical to meet the growing demand of modern applications and workloads. In order to meet the growing needs of users and customers, and address bottlenecks across the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) ecosystem, Red Bait constantly analyzes data and tests new features in order to provide an enhanced experience while maintaining the same stability guarantees that RHEL is known and trusted for. 

• Red Hat ☛ A guide to premade grafana-pcp dashboard development

  Creating Grafana dashboards from scratch can be a tedious process. To help grafana-pcp users get started visualizing Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) metrics immediately, the Performance Co-Pilot plugin for Grafana includes some premade dashboards. The grafana-pcp plug-in and the 3 included datasources each have dashboards that a user can import.

  These dashboards do a great job of getting a user started and visualizing a lot of important metrics in a useful way; however, different use cases call for different visualizations. There might be a common use case that does not yet have a premade dashboard bundled in the grafana-pcp plug-in.

  The premade dashboard files in the grafana-pcp plug-in are .jsonnet files. They can be found along with the rest of the grafana-pcp sources in the Performance Co-Pilot Grafana plug-in Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub repository. The dashboard files are located in the following directories: