RadioFreeHPC

"Quantum applications are always and only hybrid" is the quote that Shahin wants you to remember as he gives an update on recent news in Quantum Computing, and especially how to program them. If you're always going to have to mix classical code with quantum code then you need an environment that is built for that workflow, and thus we see a lot of attention given to that in the QIS (Quantum Information Science) area. This is reminiscent of OpenGL for graphics accelerators and OpenCL/CUDA for compute accelerators. Henry talks about 5G and how people are starting to get serious bandwidth: 1.8 gbps has been seen on existing smart phones. Henry's super fast cable modem set-up is delivering 220 gbps and 16ms latency. And 5G is only going to get better with advertised peaks of 20 gbps and 4ms latency depending on frequency and handset and power, etc. Everyone then picks on an easy target: DSL. Dan gives a heartfelt farewell to the retiring Titan supercomputer, complete with the matching sombre music in the background, which, discerning listeners will note, plays only when he's talking. Affection for Titan continues in its memory, and we imagine possibly also its DRAM. Catch of the Week Henry:Another week another cyber-security breach! Henry has a few of them but it's all too depressing, so he decides to pass this week. Shahin:Shahin is looking forward to attending the Hot Chips conference to be held at Stanford August . Henry is envious, given the technology candy store that the conference represents. Shahin promises to take good notes and report back in a future episode. Let him know if you'll be there. Dan:Dan talks about cyber-attacks and ransomeware targeting small and mid-sized cities, the impact on insurance rates, and what a hard problem that is to solve. Listen in to hear the full conversation. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

“Quantum applications are always and only hybrid” is the quote that Shahin wants you to remember as he gives an update on recent news in Quantum Computing, and especially how to program them. If you’re always going to have to mix classical code with quantum code then you need an environment that is built for… Read More »Quantum Apps Are Hybrid

HPC Market Eyes $44BNew report from Hyperion Research has the HPC+AI market growing to $44B, with a B, in 5 years. The industry is hitting on all cylinders, benefiting from The ExaScale race,AI coming to the enterprise only to find that it needs, or really is, HPC, depending on your point of view, andit's usual, sometimes slow but always steady, growthThe big news continues to be AI fundamentally bringing HPC closer to the mainstream of enterprise computing whether it is on-prem, in a co-location facility, or in a public cloud. All of this is starting big changes in the industry. We see this in mergers and acquisitions (basically new companies), new technologies, new architectures, and new business models. An example of the latter is the loosening of chip licensing, with open source models starting to get attention. Unlike open source software, however, silicon needs a fab, and the necessary electronic design automation software applications don't have equivalent open source alternatives. Catch of the WeekHenry:Following a supply chain security breach, Henry predicts that standards bodies like NIST and ISO will become even more active in this area with guidelines for hardware, software, and processes. Shahin:Shahin talks about Apple's design chief, Jony Ive, leaving the company and shares some jokes on social media that fall flat for Dan and Henry, who probably claim it has nothing to do with them being such PC aficionados. Jony Ive, Designer Who Made Apple Look Like Apple, Is Leaving to Start a FirmJony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer and one of the most influential executives in the history of the Silicon Valley giant, is leaving the company. Mr. Ive will depart this year to start his own design company, Apple said on Thursday. Through his new firm, LoveFrom, Mr. Ive will continue to work on a wide range of Apple products, the company said.Dan:Dan concludes the show without a "catch" this week! Listen in to hear the full conversation. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

HPC Market Eyes $44B New report from Hyperion Research has the HPC+AI market growing to $44B, with a B, in 5 years. The industry is hitting on all cylinders, benefiting from The ExaScale race, AI coming to the enterprise only to find that it needs, or really is, HPC, depending on your point of view,… Read More »HPC Market Eyes $44B in 5 Years

In this post-ISC show, the RadioFree team discusses Magical cooling technology from Europe. Dan goes over magic beads that draw heat away and can carry-on doing it pretty much forever in a technology from the venerable Fraunhofer Institute and showcased by Lenovo.How pursuit of ExaScale computing is turning into heated competition with the US, China, Japan, and Europe. The European effort is targeting 2 pre-exa installation in the coming months, and 2 actual ExaScale installations in the 2022-2023 timeframe at least one of which will be based on European technology. This presumably refers to the European Process Initiative. The software ecosystem is an important consideration and how they all evolve and whether or not they converge will be a big issue.Another heated competition at the ISC Student Cluster Competition with the team from South Africa claiming the top spot. Dan has developed an efficiency metric that he will unveil in a future episode. This could separate the prowess of the team from that of the system!Catch of the WeekHenry:Henry point out the challenge for customers when the company that breached their data goes out of business. Collections Firm Behind LabCorp, Quest Breaches Files for BankruptcyA medical billing firm responsible for a recent eight-month data breach that exposed the personal information on nearly 20 million Americans has filed for bankruptcy, citing “enormous expenses” from notifying affected consumers and the loss of its four largest customers. Shahin:Shahin highlights a paper on the beginnings of the programming language APL. A cool historical account. The Socio-Technical Beginnings of APL, by Eugene McDonnellThis paper gives some of the history of implementations of APL, and concentrates on the system aspects of these implementations, paying special attention to the evolution of the workspace concept, the time-sharing scheduling strategy, and the handling of the terminal. It contrasts the development of APL with the development of other time-sharing systems which were being built at the same time.Dan:Dan relays the sad story of the multi-year demise of a the honor bar at the hotel near ISC. Listen in to hear the full conversation. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

ExaScale is a 4-way Competition In this post-ISC show, the RadioFree team discusses Magical cooling technology from Europe. Dan goes over magic beads that draw heat away and can carry-on doing it pretty much forever in a technology from the venerable Fraunhofer Institute and showcased by Lenovo. How pursuit of ExaScale computing is turning into… Read More »ExaScale is a 4-way Competition

Why did HPE buy Cray?The RFHPC team tackles the HPE-Cray acquisition as it reviews the companies' recent moves and strengths and market conditions in the context of: the 5-tier data center application architecture: Embedded, Mobile, Desktop, On-premises, Off-premisesthe emergence of AI as a must-do enterprise app, andincreasing commonality between supercomputers and enterprise servers.Catch of the Week Henry:Another week another breach! Massive Quest Diagnostics data breach impacts 12 million patientsA massive data breach has struck Quest Diagnostics and the information of up to 11.9 million patients has potentially been compromised. On Monday, the US clinical laboratory said that American Medical Collection Agency (AMCA), a billing collections provider that works with Quest, informed the company that an unauthorized user had managed to obtain access to AMCA systems.Dan:Dan points out that the new Apple Mac Pro can be configured to cost tens of thousands of dollars. Given that he and Dan are PC people, the nuances of the Apple value are obviously lost of them, goes the counter argument. Apple’s top spec Mac Pro will likely cost at least $35,000That’s before you count the GPUs or a Pro Display XDR screen. Apple announced today that its new Mac Pro starts at an already pricey $6,000, but the company neglected to mention how much the top-of-the-line model will cost. So we shopped around for equivalent parts to the top-end spec that Apple’s promising. As it turns out: $33,720.88 is likely the bare minimum — and that’s before factoring in the four GPUs, which could easily jack that price up to around $45,000.Listen in to hear the full conversation. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

Why did HPE buy Cray? The RFHPC team tackles the HPE-Cray acquisition as it reviews the companies’ recent moves and strengths and market conditions in the context of: the 5-tier data center application architecture: Embedded, Mobile, Desktop, On-premises, Off-premises the emergence of AI as a must-do enterprise app, and increasing commonality between supercomputers and enterprise… Read More »Why did HPE buy Cray?

Quantum Computing and HPCAnother scintillating and insightful episode of RFHPC is about Quantum Computing and HPC and how the two spaces are evolving and cooperating. We welcome a a distinguished guest with a most suitable background to talk to us about HPC and Quantum Computing. Mike Booth,  who’s been in supercomputing since 1979 including stints at Cray through 2000 where he ran the Software and Applications division and was later a GM at StorageTek heading the network storage division. He got into Quantum Computing when he joined D-Wave. He had just accepted to be the CTO of Quantum Computing, Inc. when we recorded this show. We discuss and touch on how Quantum Computing and HPC interface, analog vs digital, qubits, magnets, resistors, connectors, cryogenics, algorithms, languages, the huge search spaces, NP-complete problems, quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (Qubo), Tabu search, etc. and how they are two different games right now but touching two sides of the big problems that represent grand challenges. Because QC is an accelerator, it fits nicely with how a lot of HPC is being done today. We’re going to have to bring Mike back and we look forward to that. ExaScale at OakridgeMike happens to be in Tennessee, and the episode was recorded when the new ExaScale system at Oakridge was announced so the team. That was quite a significant day for US science, and a second big win for Cray, this time with AMD. It's one of the few large systems that is not based on Intel or Nvidia technologies, and was described as: 100 Cray Shasta cabinets40 MW powerMore than 1 million lbs weight7,300 square feet90 miles of cabling5,900 gallons of water per minute for coolingWe don't remember who exactly had a hard stop, but no time for Catch of the Week this week, which some of you would be pleased to hear! Give it a listen (and take good notes!) Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

Quantum Computing and HPC Another scintillating and insightful episode of RFHPC is about Quantum Computing and HPC and how the two spaces are evolving and cooperating. We welcome a a distinguished guest with a most suitable background to talk to us about HPC and Quantum Computing. Mike Booth,  who’s been in supercomputing since 1979 including… Read More »Quantum Computing and HPC

The new TOP500 list of most powerful supercomputers is out and we do our usual quick analysis. Not much changed in the TOP10 but a lot is changing further down the list. Here is a quick take: There are 65 new entries in 2019.US science is receiving support via DOE sites and academic sites like TACC.26 countries are represented. China continues to widen its lead, now with 219 entries, followed by the US with 116, Japan with 29, France with 19, the UK with 18, Germany with 14, Ireland and the Netherlands with 13 each, and Singapore with 10.Vendors substantially reflect the country standings. Lenovo has 175 entries, Inspur 71, and Sugon 63, all in China. Cray with 42 and HPE with 40 (which will combine when their deal closes), followed by Dell at 17 and IBM at 16.  Bull has 21 entries.There are a lot of "accidental supercomputers" on the list. These are systems that probably are not be doing much science or AI work but they could, and the vendors counted them and it seems to be within the rules to list them. It's controversial but not a new practice.There are several systems listed as "Internet" companies. Hard to tell what that means but it points to the existence of very large clusters in the cloud for whatever purpose. Last year, there was one system listed as Amazon EC2, which remains on the list. This time, there is also one at Facebook. Usually the big social/cloud players don't care to participate, though they obviously could summon the resources to run the benchmarks.Just over half of systems use Ethernet as a fabric. A quarter us InfiniBand, nearly 50 use Intel's OmniPath, and the rest, 55, use custom interconnects like the ones Cray provides. The team talks about Cray+HPE entering the interconnect business for real and if so, they will be formidable.The majority of entries, 367, do not have any accelerators. 125 use Nvidia GPUs.The overwhelming majority of the systems, 478 of them, are based on Intel CPUs. 13 are IBM, and there is 1 system based on Arm provided by Cavium, now part of Marvell.So the when it comes to chips, it's an Intel game with a respectable showing by Nvidia when GPUs are used. Alternatives are bound to appear as the tens and tens of AI chips in the works become available and Arm, AMD, and IBM build on. The recently announced system at Oakridge will be all AMD, and that will point to an alternative as well.Notably, Intel is listed as the vendor for 2 entries and Nvidia is listed for 4. While Intel has stayed largely away from looking like a system vendor, Nvidia is going for it with its usual alacrity. That, and the pending acquisition of Mellanox by Nvidia should serve as a warning to all system vendors who might feel stuck between treating Nvidia as an important supplier and an up and coming competitor.CryptoSuper500Shahin mentions the 2nd edition of the CryptoSuper500 list (really 50 for now), a list developed by his colleague Dr. Stephen Perrenod, which was launched last November, and is being released at the same time as the TOP500. The TOP500 has spawned variations that look at different workloads and attributes, for example, the Green500, Graph500, and IO500 lists. CryptoSuper500 was inspired by those lists. The material for the inaugural edition of the CryptoSuper500 list here. Cryptocurrency mining operations are often pooled and are very much supercomputing class, typically using accelerator technologies such as custom ASICs, FPGAs, or GPUs. Bitcoin is the most notable of such currencies. Scroll down for the top-10 list and see the slides for the full list and the methodology. Catch of the Week Henry:Henry talks about check-out lanes at Target all being down for unknown reasons, though he hesitates to call that a cybersecurity breach. It turned out he's right and the company blamed an "internal technology issue". Target down (then back up) as cash registers fail and leave long linesTarget's payment systems appeared to

The new TOP500 list of most powerful supercomputers is out and we do our usual quick analysis. Not much changed in the TOP10 but a lot is changing further down the list. Here is a quick take: There are 65 new entries in 2019. US science is receiving support via DOE sites and academic sites like TACC.… Read More »TOP500 Jun2019, Facebook Coin

What are we going to do with 40+ different AI chips?This week, the team looks at AI chips again, this time motivated by an article in EE Times about once such chip, Graphcore, and touts it as "the most complex processor" ever at some 20 billion transistors. The VC-backed company out of Bristol, UK is also valued on paper at $1.7b, gaining it the coveted "unicorn" status, apparently the "only western semi-conductor unicorn". This being one of 40+ such AI chips (and that may be conservative), the odds of success are tough and the task formidable. But even if only 2 or 3 of such chips become successful, that's already a significant disruption to the market. The Graphcore chip is 16nm, 1.6GHz, and comes in a PCIe card at 300W. You can stack 8 of these in a 4U chassis, so 2.4 kW just for those. After a mini-rant about respected publications succumbing to clickbaits, the team talks about how cooling will be an issue and calls again for more clarity in performance metrics since the chip is rated at 125 TFlops but we don't know at what precision. Shahin reminds the team of his suggestion to clarify things by including precision in the metric, like DFlops for double precision, and then S for single, H for half, and Q for quarter precision. Henry talks about how hard it is to build and test complex software like this despite Shahin's view that the modern software stack is too high so the chip need only be concerned with a couple of layers, codes are new and open to getting recompiled, it's increasingly open source, cloud providers and large customers have the wherewithal to do the job, and traditional HPC customers have the willingness to do the work if performance enhancements are there. No "Catch of the Week" this time since Henry had a hard stop. We're used to it! Listen in to hear the full conversation. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

What are we going to do with 40+ different AI chips? This week, the team looks at AI chips again, this time motivated by an article in EE Times about once such chip, Graphcore, and touts it as “the most complex processor” ever at some 20 billion transistors. The VC-backed company out of Bristol, UK is… Read More »Forty+ different AI chips

Results of the Asian Student Cluster CompetitionIn this episode, Dan has just come back from China and reviews the results of the Asian Student Cluster Competition and HPC workshop.For the first time, a non-mainland-Chinese team wins the top spot. Taiwan takes the gold in part by their stellar performance in HPCG benchmark where they achieved 2 TFlops, some 25% better than the 2nd best team. The system was a 5-node cluster with Infiniband FDR interconnect. Other interesting info is shared on various codes and configurations.GPUs and Amdahl's LawDan also mentions that reports from some of the TOP500 sites suggest that GPUs are doing 93-97% of the computation. This sounds very impressive but Shahin points out that since GPUs have hundreds of cores, they should be doing much better, that 93-97% is in fact not as good as it should be at that scale of system and problem size. He is still waiting for some actual utilization data on GPUs too.Catch of the Week Henry:Henry points out many security cameras, offered by several brands but are all manufactured by the same vendor back in China, have big time vulnerabilities so he's staying away from all of them until further notice. Shahin wonders why they are called "security" cameras! P2P Weakness Exposes Millions of IoT DevicesA peer-to-peer (P2P) communications technology built into millions of security cameras and other consumer electronics includes several critical security flaws that expose the devices to eavesdropping, credential theft and remote compromise, new research has found.Shahin:Shahin talks about Jaguar-Land Rover planning to offer a cryptocurrency wallet to reward drivers that participate in providing traffic and other types of data. He likes their catch phrase: zero emission, zero accident, zero congestion. ON THE MONEY: EARN AS YOU DRIVE WITH JAGUAR LAND ROVERDrivers will be able to earn cryptocurrency and make payments on the move using innovative connected car services being tested by Jaguar Land Rover.Dan:Dan laments the confiscation of his external camera battery at the airport in China because the spec label was a little worn off and the authorities could not read it to ascertain its safety despite his willingness to get a note from the airline, etc.  Nice expensive battery, but at a medium-sized paperback book, maybe following the rules strictly is not a bad idea.Listen in to hear the full conversation. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter