2018 Technology Predictions from Radio Free HPC

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews 2017 Technology Predictions from OrionX.

While all the numbers are not in yet, here are the OrionX 2017 predictions look to be true:

• Azure will grow faster than AWS. While the big three are all growing, Azure seems to be growing at the fastest rate. Microsoft has also made progress in the HPC Cloud space with Azure, including the acquisition of Cycle Computing.
• More chips than Vegas; riskier too. There are something like 26 AI chips in development, much more than the market can sustain.
• Server revenue growth will be lower than GDP growth. Quarterly numbers suggest this trend is continuing.
• ARM server market share will stay below 3 percent. We saw a lot of ARM hardware at SC17, but it will take a while for sales to make a dent in the server market.

After that, we do our 2018 Predictions:

• Henry predicts:
  
  • Security hacks will get even worse this coming year, with at least five major breaches in 2018.
  • By the end of next year, quantum computing will be on our doorstep with a number of announcements by big vendors and people are going to jump on the bandwagon.
• Rich predicts:
  
  • We will finally see an ARM-based system on the TOP500 in 2018. Henry thinks there will be as many as 10.
  • Project Cyclops will actually have an HPCG benchmark in 2018.
  • Cray Inc will be acquired by Microsoft in late 2018. Dan thinks it could be someone else by the end of the year.
• Shahin predicts:
  
  • 5G networks will be a game-changer in a number of market segments  in 2018.
  • The future is IoT, Blockchain, AI, and quantum, where machines will do the majority of the creating, consuming, and paying. Humans will not even be in the loop.
• Dan predicts:
  
  • More diversity in systems, where the homogeneous datacenter starts to go away with FPGA-accelerated systems purpose-built for specific applications.
  • He also plugs his 12 Days of Christmas Rage video that came out on Christmas Day.

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A Closer Look at the New Power9, Titan V, and Snapdragon 845

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at all new fast devices that came to market this week for HPC.

IBM Power9 Servers are here! Launched this week, the AC922 POWER9 servers will form the basis of the world’s fastest “Coral” supercomputers coming to ORNL and LLNL. Built specifically for compute-intensive AI workloads, the new POWER9 systems are capable of improving the training times of deep learning frameworks by nearly 4x allowing enterprises to build more accurate AI applications, faster.

NVIDIA Titan V brings Volta to the Desktop. Not to be outdone, NVIDIA introduced their new high end TITAN V GPU for desktop PCs. Powered by the Volta architecture, TITAN V excels at computational processing for scientific simulation. Its 21.1 billion transistors deliver 110 teraflops of raw horsepower, 9x that of its predecessor, and extreme energy efficiency.

Snapdragon 845 chip based on the ARM architecture brings AI inference to your smartphone. With A75 CPU cores clocking as high as 2.8 GHz, the new architecture also enables it to maintain the same level of performance with a 30% power reduction.

After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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A Controversy in the Irish Supercomputing List

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at a controversy stirred up by the recent Irish Supercomputing List.

The 9th Irish Supercomputer List was released this week. For the first time, Ireland has four computers ranked on the Top500 and Ireland is now ranked number one globally in terms of number of TOP500 supercomputers per capita.

Controversy: Since the publication of the List, a third party called the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) has expressed concerns that the press release issued by the Irish Supercomputing List is misleading. You can read their opinion here.

After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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