RadioFreeHPC

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team previews the ancillary events leading up to SC17, which takes place Nov. 12-17 in Denver. After that, we do our Catch of the Week. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team asks the question: Is the Cloud Killing the Tape Market? The issue came up this week that Spectra Logic is laying off 9 percent of its workforce. "There may be a silver lining for Spectra Logic, with a legacy of tape storage. The technology has had its ups and downs over the years, and things look positive for it once again as cloud providers have adopted it as a cost-effective way to handle the growing amount of data being generated, TechTarget, a marketing firm, reported." After that, we do our Catch of the Week. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, Dan Olds from OrionX describes Project Cyclops - a benchmarking quest to build the world's fastest single node. Codenamed “Cyclops”, the single-node supercomputer demonstrates the computational power that individual scientists, engineers, artificial intelligence practitioners, and data scientists can deploy in their offices. Cyclops has achieved results of (score) for the HPCC benchmark, a mark of (score) for the HPCG benchmark, and a score of (score) for the Graph500 benchmark. These results set new single node high water marks for the (list benchmark we achieved records on). We’ve done more than 150 podcasts talking about topics in high performance computing,” said Dan Olds, partner at OrionX.net Research. “It was time we actually put something together and take a run at some of these benchmarks.” Rich Brueckner commented, “We couldn’t have done this without our sponsors, who include Intel, Kingston, Seagate, and Ebullient Cooling Solutions. They’ve been incredibly helpful.”Project Cyclops is building a system based on a chassis provided by Supermicro and is fueled by a pair of Intel Xeon E5 v4 processors, 128 GB of Kingston DDR4 memory, and M2 SSD drives from Seagate. An innovative liquid cooling system from CoolIT Systems will chill the processors and GPU accelerators. RedLine Performance Solutions will provide system testing and will help optimize the system for benchmarking and workload runs. After that, we do our Catch of the Week. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at Henry Newman's recent proposal to use Blockchain as a way to combat Fake News. Henry shares that this rant result from what he saw as an egregious story that was going around that could have been easily quashed. "What if every audio or video app on your phone, TV news camera or your video camera automatically came set up to create blockchains that included information such as geolocation, date and time? Editing programs would also be required to use blockchain. And what if every frame that was edited had a blockchain describing what changes were made?" After that, we do our Catch of the Week. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at Smart Cities. As the featured topic this year at the SC17 Plenary, the Smart Cities initiative looks to improve the quality of life for residents using urban informatics and other technologies to improve the efficiency of services. With the accelerating volume of data about cities, HPC is helping cities to optimize their services, from making food safety inspections more effective to identifying children most at risk for lead poisoning. HPC is supporting the creation of computational models of urban sectors such as transportation, energy demand, or economics. And increasingly there is opportunity—and need—to develop multi-scale, coupled modeling systems that harness new data sources and measurement techniques and that capture the interdependencies between these sectors to provide a more holistic modeling capability for urban designers, planners, and developers. This plenary panel will discuss emerging needs and opportunities suggesting an increasing role for HPC in cities, with perspectives from city government, planning and design, and embedded urban HPC systems.The SC17 Plenary on Smart Cities takes place 5:30pm - 6:30pm on Nov. 13 at the Denver convention center. After that, we do our Catch of the Week Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at China's massive upgrade of the Tianhe-2A supercomputer to 95 Petaflops peak performance. As detailed in a new 21-page report by Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, the upgrade should nearly double the performance of the system, which is currently ranked at #2 on TOP500 with 33.86 Petaflops on the Linpack benchmark. The upgraded system, dubbed Tianhe -2A, should be completed in the coming months. Details about the system upgrade were presented at the conference opening session. While the current system derives much of its performance from Intel Knights Corner co-processors, the new system swaps these PCI devices out for custom-made 4-way MATRIX-2000 boards, with each chip providing 2.46 Teraflops of peak performance. After that, we do our Catch of the Week: Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this Radio Free HPC podcast, Dan Olds and Shahin Khan from OrionX describe their new AI Survey. "OrionX Research has completed one the most comprehensive surveys to date of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning. With over 300 respondents in North America, representing 13 industries, our model indicates a confidence level of 95% and a margin of error of 6%. Covering 144 questions/data points, it provides a comprehensive view of what customers are doing and planning to do with AI/ML/DL." Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at Dan's recent talk on High Performance Interconnects. When it comes to choosing an interconnect for your HPC cluster, what is the best way to go? Is offloading better than onloading? You can find out more by watching Dan's talk from the HPC Advisory Council Australia conference. The good folks at OrionX.net have posted a number of free papers on this subject as well. After that, we do our Catch of the Week. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at some new developments in the Quantum Computing ecosystem: Rigetti Computing helps Foster Quantum Machine Learning Startup EcosystemIEEE Approves Standards Project for Quantum Computing DefinitionsAfter that, we do our Catch of the Week. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discusses the eclipse and how researchers are using supercomputers to simulate the corona of the sun at eclipse time. After that, we do our Catch of the Week. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks alarming new hacks of health care data. Henry points us to a story about a PET scanner hack that exploited Windows 7. He thinks a better design would be to have the device send data only. Shahin thinks that this kind of problem with I0T will require us to have different approaches for "Big T" things like mainframes and "Little T" things like sensors.Rich is intrigued by the recent story that biohackers were able to put malware into synthetic DNA that can infect and take over a gene sequencer device.After that, we do our Catch of the Week. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the problems with IEEE Floating Point. "As described in a recent presentation by John Gustafson, the flaws and idiosyncrasies of floating-point arithmetic "constitute a sizable portion of any curriculum on Numerical Analysis." The whole thing has Dan pretty worked up, so we hope that the news of Posit Computing coming to the new processors from Rex Computing will help. The A*STAR center at the National University of Singapore will be one of the first to test out Rex machines later this month." After that, we do our Catch of the Week. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team learns about Henry's first exploit as an Ethical Superhero. "After witnessing a hit-and-run fender bender, Henry confronted the culprit and ensured that the miscreant left a note on the victim's windshield. And while we applaud Henry for his heroism, we are also very grateful that he was not shot in the process. This tale leads us into a discussion of AI ethics and how we won't have this problem in the coming era of self-driving cars." After that, we do our Catch of the Week. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at why the Alan Turing Institute is focusing on Graph Computing with their acquisition of a Cray Urika-GX supercomputer. "Hosted at the University of Edinburgh in the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), the Cray Urika-GX system will provide researchers at the Alan Turing Institute with a dedicated analytics hardware platform, enabling the development of advanced applications across a number of scientific fields including engineering and technology, defense and security, smart cities, financial services and life sciences." After that, we do our Catch of the Week. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at why Drive Writes Per Day are such an important metric for acquiring the right kind of SSD for your particular workload. Drive writes per day (DWPD) is an endurance rating that manufacturers of NAND flash storage provide their customers. ... DWPD will vary, depending upon whether the storage is intended for consumer or enterprise use. Consumer use solid state drives (SSDs) have a fixed endurance rating and capacity.After that, we do our Catch of the Week: Shahin likes a new BBC documentary on the #1 Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer in China.Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed