RadioFreeHPC

Our conversation begins with Dan berating Henry for cheaping out on a new headset for our Radio Free HPC recordings. (Henry has since relented and pried open his wallet to purchase a truly fine headset.) Finally, we get on to the show proper. After years of futility, Intel has finally put a stake in the heart of their Itanium processor. The final shipment will take place in 2021. The boys discuss some Itanium history and reasons behind the end of the processor. Shahin gives us a tutorial on the history of 64 bit computing and we discuss the chip wars in general. Following a respectful farewell to Itanium and all that it offered, we moved on to discuss how the European exascale effort is shaping up. Recent news articles are discussing how countries in the European Union are ganging up in an effort to win the honor of hosting the fastest supercomputer in Europe. The first consortium consists of Nordic countries Finland, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, plus the Czech Republic, Belgium, and The Netherlands. Two of the advantages these countries have are power costs that are half of the European average, along with temperatures to match (which will help with cooling). The guys talk about what the term ‘pre-exascale’ really means. Is it a 100 PB system? 200 PB? 300 PB? Tune into the broadcast to hear the thrilling answer. We also discuss the composition of the machine in terms of processors and accelerators. Catch of the Week Henry’s Catch of the Week confirms his distain for all things crypto currency related. A Canadian bitcoin exchange president dies suddenly and takes his password to his grave, taking with him the coins of more than 100,000 users said to total more than $130 million US. Henry is vindicated and Dan heartily agrees with him and piles on with “I hope Bitcoin goes below zero.” Shahin defends Bitcoin and Blockchain in general. Shahin shares a game called The Last Man, where people compete to become the last person to learn about an event, such as who won the Superbowl. Dan’s Catch of the Week is led by the admission that his comprehension of quantum computing is fleeting at best. Sometimes he gets it, and other times he doesn’t. Something that might help him get over the quantum hump is a series of comic books published by the NSF’s EPiQC that cover quantum computing history and how it works. Be sure to download this episode of Radio Free HPC, you could be our 16th listener! Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

Our conversation begins with Dan berating Henry for cheaping out on a new headset for our Radio Free HPC recordings. (Henry has since relented and pried open his wallet to purchase a truly fine headset.) Finally, we get on to the show proper. After years of futility, Intel has finally put a stake in the… Read More »The sinking of the Itanic, a respectful farewell

We open the show by talking some weather. It’s so cold at Henry’s house (in Minnesota) that he’s becoming a human superconductor and quantum computing experimenters are showing up at his house to test their systems under uber cold conditions. Shahin adds an inane joke about cold and levitation that Dan threatens to cut out… Read More »Supercomputing to Modernize the Electric Grid

We open the show by talking some weather. It’s so cold at Henry’s house (in Minnesota) that he’s becoming a human superconductor and quantum computing experimenters are showing up at his house to test their systems under uber cold conditions. Shahin adds an inane joke about cold and levitation that Dan threatens to cut out of the final edit of the show. Our first topic is how Lawrence Livermore National Lab is working to simulate and then help modernize the electric grid. We talk about how the ‘new grid’ will need to be two-way, both delivering and accepting electricity. The new grid will also have to communicate with smart homes and other buildings in order to predict demand and adjust real time pricing. When the discussion turned to solar power, Henry related the problems of low payouts from utilities to consumers who have installed solar panels. Dan pointed out the current shortfalls in solar power, bringing up an example of the world’s largest solar plants still not generating enough juice to power the NYC subway system. Henry called Dan a dirty liar and an embarrassment to his family. Dan provided the following links to justify his take: On an annual basis, the NYC subway system uses 1.8 billion kilowatt hour of electricity. This is according to NYCsubway.org. This is 1,800 megawatts of electricityAccording to an article published by Origin Energy on 10/24/18, the largest single location solar field is located in India and generates 648 MW of electricity. This is obviously less than the 1,800 megawatts necessary to power the NYC subway. Dan is vindicated.Next up, we discuss some of the applications that are being run on the Summit supercomputer, the world’s largest system. Some of the applications include exploring the origin of the universe and whole-cell simulation, along with a host of other stuff. Our discussion strays into the recent announcement that scientists in Israel have supposedly cured cancer. This claim has since been debunked, or at least partially debunked…leaving it barely bunked at all.  As the conversation strays even further, Shahin suggests putting a giant mirror behind the sun in order to give us more solar energy. One hell of a good idea. Catch of the WeekShahin’s Catch of the Week starts as a mix of buzzwords combined together but clarifies itself (a bit) through explanation. What he’s talking about is a paper titled “Semi-device-independent quantum money with coherent states” that discusses using quantum computing to create unforgeable quantum banknotes and credit cards – definitely a good thing. Dan’s Catch of the Week is the dust up between Apple and Facebook and how the two goliaths have become embroiled in a slap fight. In the ensuing discussion, Dan coins the phrase “if you’re not paying for an app, it’s a virus.” The gang also points out Facebook’s naiveté (whether it’s real or put on) when it comes to user privacy issues. Dan, warming to the topic of tech giants controlling our lives, brings up the example of Microsoft’s new “Newsguard” browser feature that passes judgement on whether news sites are credible or nor credible. Newsguard is a browser extension that users can activate on new versions of Microsoft’s Edge browser. Here are a few representative discussions about Newsguard and possible implications:  Gizmodo, Publishing Insider, and Breitbart. Shahin believes that Newsguard is an AI fueled tool, which, upon further research, turns out to be incorrect. Newsguard uses ‘trained journalists’ to review and rate thousands of news and information websites. After a little more desultory conversation, the podcast ends on this disquieting note. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

We start our discussion by contemplating the fact that Shahin doesn’t have a middle name (he says he never needed one) and touching on why Henry has picked up the nick name ‘Gator’ Newman. What's an AI supercomputer?Our first topic is whether a supercomputer can or cannot be a “AI Supercomputer.” This is based on France (along with HPE) unveiling a new AI system which will double the capacity of French supercomputing. So what are the differences between a traditional super and a AI super. According to Dan, it mostly comes down to how many GPUs the system is configured with, while Shahin and Henry think it has something to do with the datasets. Send us a note or a tweet if you have an opinion on this. Software SMP hits 10kThe guys also discuss ScaleMP and how their announcement of record results, with close to 10,000 customers as of the close of 2018. This led to talk about SMP vs. MPP from a performance standpoint. Henry asserted that a clustered approach will always be superior to a big SMP approach, all things being equal. Dan doesn’t agree and Shahin confesses his love of ‘fat node’ clustering. Dan agrees with Shahin, but wonders why no one is doing it. We also note that Mellanox got a nice design win with the Finns, as they’ll be installing 200 Gb/s HDR InfiniBand interconnect in a new Finnish supercomputer to be deployed in 2019 and 2020. The interconnect will be used in a Dragonfly topology. Catch of the WeekShahin’s catch of the week is a mathematical puzzle titled “The most unexpected answer to a counting puzzle.” Here’s a link to the video.Dan likes a good comeback story and in light of that, his catch of the week is AMD nabbing a design win at Nikhef.Henry HAS NO CATCH OF THE WEEK. This makes him the “RF-HPC Villain of the Week” :)Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

We start our discussion by contemplating the fact that Shahin doesn’t have a middle name (he says he never needed one) and touching on why Henry has picked up the nick name ‘Gator’ Newman. What’s an AI supercomputer? Our first topic is whether a supercomputer can or cannot be a “AI Supercomputer.” This is based… Read More »What's an AI Supercomputer? What's up with software SMP?

After a short talk about the weather in Henry’s basement (it had just reached 60 F by the time we recorded the show), we got right down to business with an important announcement:  our pal Rich Brueckner is leaving the show. He just has too much on his plate and something had to give. While we’re worried about the impact Rich’s departure might have on our listenership, we did take note of and welcome listeners 13, 14, and 15, who made themselves known to Henry on one of his recent business trips. Yay us. Our first topic is China rolling out a successor to Tianhe-1, dubbed Tianhe-3. According to news articles, Tianhe-3 will be 200 times faster than Tianhe-1, with 100x more storage. What we don’t know is if these comparisons are relative to Tianhe-1 or Tianhe 1A. The later machine weighs in at 2.256 PFlop/s which means that Tianhe-3 might be as fast as 450 PFlop/s when complete. We also made a reference to a past episode, which we know you remember vividly, where we discussed China's three-pronged strategy for exascale. As we’re moving into our popular “Catch of the Week” segment, Shahin hijacks the conversation by questioning if anyone knows the real-world utilization rates of non-commodity configurations in public clouds. This leads to this bold estimate from Dan “I’ll bet that there isn’t a public cloud out there that has a higher than 60-65% utilization rate.” We have a spirited discussion about this pseudo-metric and how infrastructures are sized to handle peaks. We also brought up a story that malware can bring down public clouds, although someone would have to own your system before doing it. Catch of the Week: Henry hipped us to a website that shows whether your email address or password have been powned: https://haveibeenpwned.com/Shahin brought up Google’s recent 50 million euro fine for GDPR violations:Dan discussed the case of a Dutch surgeon who won a landmark case to get her medical disciplinary records removed from Google searches. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

After a short talk about the weather in Henry’s basement (it had just reached 60 F by the time we recorded the show), we got right down to business with an important announcement:  our pal Rich Brueckner is leaving the show. He just has too much on his plate and something had to give. While… Read More »China Exascale Again (Tianhe-3 is coming), GDPR shows its teeth

In this episode of Radio Free HPC, Dan, Henry, and Shahin start with a spirited discussion of IBM’s recent announcement regarding their crowd sourced weather prediction application. Henry was dubious as to whether Big Blue could get access to the data they need in order to truly put out a valuable product. Dan had questions about the value of the crowd sourced data and how it could be scrubbed in order to be useful. Shahin was pretty favorable towards IBM’s plans and believes that they will solve the problems that Henry and Dan raised. IBM came up again in the show as the boys kick around IBM’s quantum computing commercial system. Shahin brought out the point that for a market that has few applications and success stories, it attracted nearly every big vendor in the business.  Catch of the Week: Henry told the guys about a new security flaw as pointed out by Krebs, this one concerning an exploit of credit cards. Shahin talked about the newly proposed Deep500 benchmark, designed to compare deep learning and inference performance. Dan discussed a recent interview with a VC who believed that by 2035, more than 40% of jobs world wide would be taken over by AI. This prompted a discussion of how technology has impacted employment and the economy in the past and how the accelerating pace of economic displacement in the era of AI is much quicker than in any other time.   We end the episode by denouncing attorneys. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

In this episode of Radio Free HPC, Dan, Henry, and Shahin start with a spirited discussion of IBM’s recent announcement regarding their crowd sourced weather prediction application. Henry was dubious as to whether Big Blue could get access to the data they need in order to truly put out a valuable product. Dan had questions… Read More »Weather Forecasting Goes Crowdsourcing, Q means Quantum

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks back at the highlights of the 2018 CHPC Conference in South Africa. With over 500 attendees, the event featured a set of keynotes on high performance computing as well as a Student Cluster Challenge and a Cyber Security Competition. The comprehensive program included national and international contributions as well as contributions from cyberinfrastructure system partners: the South African National Research Network and the Data Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa. Captains of the HPC Industry across the globe provided key talks and workshops during the conference week and they included: Patricia Damkrogel, Vice President and General Manager of Intel, Thomas Sterling from Indiana University, USA; Michael Foley who has recently retired from the World Bank, Bhekisipho Twala from the University of South Africa, Khutso  Ngoasheng from the South African  Radio Astronomy Observatory, Elmarie Biermann from the Cyber Security Institute and many others. This year, following the theme of the conference on how HPC Transforms for the Future, increasing the participation of women in HPC was prominent. This was supported by the introduction of a sponsorship for an outstanding female in the Student Cluster Challenge. The award in this newly introduced category, sponsored by Intel, was taken by Ms. Mapule Madzena, a student from the University of the Free State. She was hailed as the best female student and walked away with R64 500.Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks back at the highlights of the 2018 CHPC Conference in South Africa. With over 500 attendees, the event featured a set of keynotes on high performance computing as well as a Student Cluster Challenge and a Cyber Security Competition. The comprehensive program included national and international… Read More »A Look Back at the 2018 CHPC Conference in South Africa

[caption id="attachment_67821" align="alignright" width="300"] From left, Henry Newman, Dan Olds, Shahin Khan, and Rich Brueckner are the Radio Free HPC team[/caption] In this podcast video, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the monumental IT challenges that Santa faces each Holiday Season. With nearly 2 billion children to serve, Santa’s operations are an IT challenge on the grandest scale. If the world’s population keeps growing by 83 million people per year, Santa may need to build a hybrid cloud just to keep up. With billions of simultaneous queries, the Big Data analytics required will certainly require an 8-socket numa machines with 4 terabytes of central memory.Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast video, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the monumental IT challenges that Santa faces each Holiday Season. With nearly 2 billion children to serve, Santa’s operations are an IT challenge on the grandest scale. If the world’s population keeps growing by 83 million people per year, Santa may need to build a hybrid… Read More »RFHPC215: A Hard Look at Santa's Big Data Challenges

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the semi-annual TOP500 BoF presentation by Jack Dongarra. The TOP500 list of supercomputers serves as a “Who’s Who” in the field of High Performance Computing (HPC). It started as a list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world and has evolved to a major source of information about trends in HPC. The 52nd TOP500 list will be published in November 2018 just in time for SC18. This BoF will present detailed analyses of the TOP500 and discuss the changes in the HPC marketplace during the past years. The BoF is meant as an open forum for discussion and feedback between the TOP500 authors and the user community.After that, we do our Catch of the Week. See our complete coverage of SC18 Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed