Monday, December 31, 2018

A Look Back at the 2018 CHPC Conference in South Africa

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.
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Friday, December 28, 2018

A Hard Look at Santa's Big Data Requirements



[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.
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Monday, November 26, 2018

Looking at TOP500 Trends for Exascale at SC18

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.

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Saturday, November 17, 2018

Running Down the TOP500 at SC18

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks back on the highlights of SC18 and the newest TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers.

[caption id="attachment_71623" align="alignright" width="300"] Buddy Bland shows off Summit, the world's fastest supercomputer at ORNL.[/caption]

The latest TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers is out, a remarkable ranking that shows five Department of Energy supercomputers in the top 10, with the first two captured by Summit at Oak Ridge and Sierra at Livermore. With the number one and number two systems on the planet, the "Rebel Alliance" vendors of IBM, Mellanox, and NVIDIA stand far and tall above the others.
Summit widened its lead as the number one system, improving its High Performance Linpack (HPL) performance from 122.3 to 143.5 petaflops since its debut on the previous list in June 2018. Sierra also added to its HPL result from six months ago, going from 71.6 to 94.6 petaflops, enough to bump it from the number three position to number two. Both are IBM-built supercomputers, powered by Power9 CPUs and NVIDIA V100 GPUs.


At number five is Piz Daint, a Cray XC50 system installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano, Switzerland. At 21.2 petaflops, it maintains its standing as the most powerful system in Europe. It is powered by a combinations of Intel Xeon processors and NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs
Trinity, a Cray XC40 system operated by Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories improved its performance to 20.2 petaflops, enough to move it up one position to the number six spot. It uses Intel Xeon Phi processors, the only top ten system to do so.
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Tuesday, November 6, 2018

A Look at the Spaceborne Supercomputer One Year Later

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team sits down with Mark Fernandez from HPE to discuss the Spaceborne Supercomputer that it currently orbiting the planet in the International Space Station.

Last week, HPE announced it is opening high-performance computing capabilities to astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) as part of its continued experiments on the Spaceborne Computer project.

Spaceborne Computer is the first commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) supercomputer that HPE and NASA launched into space for a one-year experiment to test resiliency and performance, achieving one teraFLOP (a trillion floating point operations per second) and successfully operating on the International Space Station (ISS).  After completing its one-year mission proving it can withstand harsh conditions of space – such as zero gravity, unscheduled power outages, and unpredictable levels of radiation – Spaceborne Computer will now, for the first time ever, open its supercomputing capabilities for use aboard the ISS. These “above-the-cloud” services will allow space explorers and experimenters to run analyses directly in space instead of transmitting data to and from Earth for insight.

After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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Monday, October 29, 2018

A Preview of the SC18 Student Cluster Competition

In this podcast, Radio Free HPC Previews the SC18 Student Cluster Competition.
The Student Cluster Competition was developed in 2007 to provide an immersive high performance computing experience to undergraduate and high school students. With sponsorship from hardware and software vendor partners, student teams design and build small clusters, learn designated scientific applications, apply optimization techniques for their chosen architectures, and compete in a non-stop, 48-hour challenge at the SC conference to complete a real-world scientific workload, showing off their HPC knowledge for conference attendees and judges. Teams are composed of six students, at least one advisor, and vendor partners. The advisor provides guidance and recommendations, the vendor provides the resources (hardware and software) and the students provide the skill and enthusiasm. Students work with their advisors to craft a proposal that describes the team, the suggested hardware, and their approach to the competition. The SCC committee reviews each proposal and provides comments for all submissions received before the deadline."
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Monday, October 22, 2018

A Look at IDC's Growing Server Market Numbers

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the latest server market numbers from IDC. The takeaway? The Server industry up 43 percent year over year. Component prices have gone up, so there may be multiple contributing factors implying richer configurations are being deployed. Dan thinks IDC might be adjusting their model, but we can't be sure from here. He doesn't see how a company like Inspur can jack their business by 112 percent in a single year. This is simply unprecedented growth. Welcome to the Server Business in the Age of Cloud.
Rich notes that Intel's terrific earnings recently were a bellwether for this "bullish" server market. As an interesting data point, something like 50 percent of all Intel chips made worldwide today are custom chips going to the hyperscale cloud market. Apparently, the Googles of the World don't want the off-the-shelf parts. And since they buy in such high volume, Intel is reaping big rewards.
After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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Brent Gorda on his new Role as HPC Lead for ARM

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team catches up with Brent Gorda to discuss the future of ARM in HPC.
Brent Gorda leads the HPC business for Arm. Prior to this recent role, he spent a year consulting (HPC/Quantum/AI) and advising startup CEO's in Silicon Valley. Earlier in his career, he founded Whamcloud, which he sold to Intel and served as the General Manager for Intel’s High Performance Data Division. Brent has also served on many advisory boards (SCxy, Cray Research, Westera) and founded the Student Cluster Competition, a world-wide event affecting the careers of thousands of undergraduates each year.
After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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A Look at Remarkable Growth in the HPC Server Market

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at remarkable growth in the HPC Server Market reported by Hyperion Research.

Hyperion Research reports that worldwide factory revenue for the high-performance computing (HPC) technical server market jumped 27.6% to $3.7 billion in the second quarter of 2018 (2Q18), up from $2.9 billion in the same period of 2017, according to the newly released Hyperion Research Worldwide High-Performance Technical Server QView. Sequentially, second-quarter 2018 HPC server revenue grew 16.7% over the $3.2 billion figure in the first quarter of 2018.

Revenue in the first half of calendar year 2018 rose 23.8% over the 2017 first half, from $5.6 billion to $6.9 billion. Hyperion Research forecasts that revenue for HPC server systems will reach about $12.9 billion in full-year 2018 and will grow to $19.6 billion in 2022.
    According to Steve Conway, Hyperion Research senior vice president of research, “Revenue in the second quarter also benefited from HPC’s crucial role at the forefront of R&D for emerging, economically important artificial intelligence uses such as self-driving vehicles, precision medicine, smart cities and the Internet of Things.”

    After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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    SC18 Event Preview

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks ahead to preview SC18 in Dallas. The conference takes place Nov. 11 - 16.
    SC18 in Dallas is world’s largest gathering of HPC professionals, and the smart money is on the organizations that leverage the show for their own gatherings, meetups, special booth sessions, and user groups. Here is a roundup of special events not to miss.
    Ancillary Events at SC18:
    Does your company have special events planned for SC18? Let us know at news @ insidehpc.com and we will add it to this post.

    See our complete coverage of SC18

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    Wednesday, September 5, 2018

    Radio Free HPC Looks at the Frightening Notpetya Cyber Attack

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at one of the most massive hacks ever, the Notpetya cyber attack on shipping company Maersk and their partners.
    This story, featured in Wired magazine, should send chills down the spines of anyone out there who isn’t religiously updating their machines. In other news, Dan is in Australia for the week at the HPC-AI Advisory Council annual Perth meeting, in his catch of the week, he discusses how one of the companies at the conference has made extensive use of IBM’s Watson and is seeing great benefits. Shahin brings up a new camera with almost unimaginable image specs, while Henry get his two cents in on everything else.”
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    Monday, August 20, 2018

    A Look at the new Eagle Supercomputer at NREL

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the new Eagle supercomputing under construction at NREL.

    The new machine from HPE will run more detailed models that simulate complex processes, systems, and phenomena to advance early research and development on energy technologies across fields including vehicle, wind power, and data sciences.
    We are strongly committed to architecting technologies to power the next wave of supercomputing and are creating advanced HPC systems while scaling energy efficiency in data centers, to get us there,” said Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC and AI Group, HPE. “Through Eagle and our overall ongoing collaboration with the U.S. DOE and NREL, we are advancing research to bolster innovation in energy and sustainability.”
    After that, we do our Catch of the Week.
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    Monday, August 13, 2018

    A Look at China' new Exascale Prototypes

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at China's new ARM-based Exascale supercomputer prototype.

    As reported in China Daily, scientists have put an exascale computing prototype into operation that does not run the x86 instruction set. The Sunway exascale computer prototype was developed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology (NRCPC), the team that developed Sunway TaihuLight, crowned the world's fastest computer two years in a row in 2016 and 2017.
    The Sunway exascale computer prototype is very much like a concept car that can run on road,"said Yang Meihong, director of the National Supercomputing Center in Jinan. "We expect to build the exascale computer in the second half of 2020 or the first half of 2021," said Yang.
    Another prototype exascale supercomputer Tianhe-3 passed the acceptance tests on July 22. Its final version is expected to come out in 2020. The two prototypes marked a further step towards China's successful development of the next-generation supercomputer.

    After that, we do our Catch of the Week:
    • Rich points us to the story about Rigetti Computing's pending 128-qubit quantum computer. The company has already built the 128-qubit processing chip, and is working to put all the pieces together to bring more power to researchers and developers. If successful, it could be the world’s most powerful quantum computer and it could have the chance to outpace traditional supercomputers. Meanwhile, you can already access IBMQ, D-Wave, and Chinese quantum machines in the cloud today.
    • Henry notes that one of the scary things to come out of the Black Hat conference is a new kind of microwave weapon for cooking your enemy from communication satellites.
    • Dan is wardriving in North Carolina in the town the Internet forgot.
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    Monday, August 6, 2018

    A Look at the IO500 Benchmark Suite

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team talks to John Bent from the IO500 committee about why he and a team of I/O professionals created the IO500 benchmark suite. The second IO500 list was revealed at ISC 2018 in Frankfurt, Germany.
    Following the success of the Top500 in collecting and analyzing historical trends in supercomputer technology and evolution, the IO500 was created in 2017 and published its first list at SC17. The need for such an initiative has long been known within High Performance Computing; however, defining appropriate benchmarks had long been challenging. Despite this challenge, the community, after long and spirited discussion, finally reached consensus on a suite of benchmarks and a metric for resolving the scores into a single ranking.
    After that, we do our Catch of the Week.
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    Monday, July 30, 2018

    Lincoln Labs Paper on Spectre/Meltdown Performance Hits

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at a new whitepaper from Lincoln Labs focused on the performance hits Spectre/Meltdown mitigations. The news is not good for HPC workloads.

    After that, Shahin point us to the story about how DARPA just allocated $75 Million in awards for thinking-outside-the-box computing innovation. They call it the Electronics Resurgence Initiative and the list of projects funded includes something called Software Defined Hardware.

    After that, we do the Catch of the Week.

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    Monday, July 23, 2018

    A Look at China's Plan for Exascale



    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team goes through a fascinating presentation that provides details on China's Three-Pronged Plan for Exascale.
    China may not be the first to Exascale, but they are building three divergent architectural prototypes that pave the way forward. We've got the details in this not-to-miss podcast.
    We should probably note that this is our 200th Episode of Radio Free HPC. We would like to thank all 13 of our regular listeners for their continued support!



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    Tuesday, July 10, 2018

    The Radio Free Trip Report from ISC 2018

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team offers up a Trip Report from ISC 2018 in Frankfurt. It was a whirlwind week for news with a new USA machine on the TOP500, but the other big news centered around the convergence of HPC & AI. This common theme was all over the show floor, with use cases on display in dozens of exhibits.

    Topics include:
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    Monday, June 25, 2018

    For the first time in years, the USA Leads the TOP500 Supercomputers

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews the latest TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers.
    The TOP500 celebrates its 25th anniversary with a major shakeup at the top of the list. For the first time since November 2012, the US claims the most powerful supercomputer in the world, leading a significant turnover in which four of the five top systems were either new or substantially upgraded.
    Highlights:
    #1 is Summit, an IBM-built supercomputer now running at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), captured the number one spot with a performance of 122.3 petaflops on High Performance Linpack (HPL), the benchmark used to rank the TOP500 list. Summit has 4,356 nodes, each one equipped with two 22-core Power9 CPUs, and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. The nodes are linked together with a Mellanox dual-rail EDR InfiniBand network.

    #2 is Sunway TaihuLight, a system developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, drops to number two after leading the list for the past two years. Its HPL mark of 93 petaflops has remained unchanged since it came online in June 2016.

    #3 is Sierra, a new system at the DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory took the number three spot, delivering 71.6 petaflops on HPL. Built by IBM, Sierra’s architecture is quite similar to that of Summit, with each of its 4,320 nodes powered by two Power9 CPUs plus four NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and using the same Mellanox EDR InfiniBand as the system interconnect.

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    Monday, June 18, 2018

    Preview of ISC 2018 Student Cluster Competition & Ancillary Events

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team previews the ISC 2018 Student Cluster Competition.

    "Now in its seventh year, the ISC-HPCAC Student Cluster Competition enables international STEM teams to take part in a real-time contest focused on advancing STEM disciplines and HPC skills development at ISC 2018 from June 25-27. To take home top honors, twelve teams will have the opportunity to showcase systems of their own design, adhering to strict power constraints and achieve the highest performance across a series of standard HPC benchmarks and applications."



    After that, Rich describes a number of ancillary events have been scheduled in Frankfurt.

    Events in chronological order:
    • HP-CAST will take place June 22-23 at the Frankfurt Marriott. HP-CAST is an organization of HPE customers and partners who provide input to HP to increase the capabilities of HP solutions for large-scale, scientific and technical computing.
    • The Dell EMC HPC Community will get together for a half-day meeting on Sunday, June 24 at the Frankfurt Marriott.
    • DDN User Group will be held on Monday, June 25 from 9:00am - 12:30am at the Movenpick Hotel.
    • D-Wave Systems will host a seminar on Quantum Computing on Monday, June 25 starting at 2:00pm at the Frankfurt Marriott.
    • Intel Special Session: Dr. Raj Hazra, Corporate Vice President at Intel, will discuss AI & HPC emerging technologies that will accelerate discovery and innovation at 6:00 pm Monday, June 25 in the Panarama 2 room at the Frankfurt Messe.
    • The Hyperion Research  Breakfast Briefing will take place on Tuesday, June 26 at 7:45am at the Grandhotel Hessischer Hof.
    • Univa will host a Breakfast Seminar on Cloud HPC on Wednesday, June 27 at 8:00am at the Frankfurt Marriott.
    • The Women in HPC network is running a half day workshop on Thursday, June 28.
    After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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    Saturday, June 9, 2018

    A Closer Look at the new Summit Supercomputer

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the new 200 Petaflop Summit supercomputer that was unveiled this week at ORNL. Powered by IBM POWER9 processors, 27,648 NVIDIA GPUs, and Mellanox InfiniBand, the Summit supercomputer is also the first Exaop AI system on the planet.
    This massive machine, powered by 27,648 of our Volta GPUs, can perform more than three exaops, or three billion billion calculations per second,” writes Ian Buck on the NVIDIA blog. “That’s more than 100 times faster than Titan, previously the fastest U.S. supercomputer, completed just five years ago. And 95 percent of that computing power comes from GPUs. Built for the U.S. Department of Energy, this is a machine designed to tackle the grand challenges of our time. It will accelerate the work of the world’s best scientists in high-energy physics, materials discovery, healthcare, and more, with the ability to crank 200 petaflops of computing power to high precision scientific simulations.
    After that, we do our Catch of the Week.
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    Monday, June 4, 2018

    A Look at the new NVIDIA HGX-2 Reference Platform for HPC & AI

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the new NVIDIA HGX-2 Reference Platform for HPC & AI.
    "The HGX-2 cloud server platform supports multi-precision computing, supporting high-precision calculations using FP64 and FP32 for scientific computing and simulations, while also enabling FP16 and Int8 for AI training and inference. This unprecedented versatility meets the requirements of the growing number of applications that combine HPC with AI. HGX-2 is a part of the larger family of NVIDIA GPU-Accelerated Server Platforms, an ecosystem of qualified server classes addressing a broad array of AI, HPC and accelerated computing workloads with optimal performance."

    After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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    Monday, May 28, 2018

    Why the GDPR Matters to us all

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at ramifications for the European GPDR laws, which went into effect May 25, 2018.
    The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the most important change in data privacy regulation in 20 years - we're here to make sure you're prepared.
    After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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    Sunday, May 20, 2018

    Results from the ASC18 Student Cluster Competition

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews the results of the ASC 2018 Student Cluster Competition.

    "The ASC 2018 Student Supercomputer Challenge finalist were announced on March 20, 2018. Twenty of the 300+ enrolled teams around the world including: Tsinghua University-China, Friedrich-Alexander, Erlangen-Nuremberg University- Germany, Saint Petersburg State University – Russia, University of Miskolc – Hungary, Texas A&M University – USA, and Hong Kong Baptist University, will compete from May 5 to 9, 2018 in the final round at Nanchang University. The 20 finalists will design and build supercomputers up to 3,000 Watts, solve exceptionally difficult problems in AI reading comprehension, perform RELION optimization as a core application of the Nobel winning cryo-electron microscopy, and utilize CFL3D, HPL, and HPCG."

    After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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    Monday, May 7, 2018

    Coral-2 Exascale Machines will require Boatload of Accelerators

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team takes a look at daunting performance targets for the DOE's CORAL-2 RFP for Exascale Computers.

    "So, 1.5 million TeraFlops divided by 7.8 is how many individual accelerators you need, and that's 192,307, which by the way looks like a prime number. Now, multiply that by 300 watts per accelerator, and it is clear we are going to need something all-new to get where we want to go."

    The Request for Proposals is designed to get bids from vendors to build two and (potentially) three new exascale supercomputers. Each system is expected to cost between $400 – $600 million.

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    Monday, April 30, 2018

    A Closer Look at the new Interactive Supercomputing Map of the USA

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the new interactive USA Supercomputing Map from Hyperion Research.

     "The mapped sites include government, academic and industrial HPC data centers, along with HPC vendors. This powerful tool can be used to identify the economic impact of HPC in a user-defined area (state, Congressional district, et al.) or for the United States as a whole, or to understand where HPC jobs are located, as well as who the Congressional district representatives are."

    As part of the discussion, Rich recaps Hyperion's recent HPC User Forum in Tucson. The event featured an extended session on Quantum Computing with presentations by D-Wave Systems, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NIST, and Rigetti Computing. You can watch them all right here on insideHPC.

    After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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    Monday, April 23, 2018

    A Closer Look at the Coral-2 RFP for Exascale Supercomputers

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the new Department of Energy's RFP for Exascale Computers.

    Called CORAL-2, this Request for Proposal is for up to $1.8 billion and is completely separate from the $320 million allocated for the Exascale Computing Project in the FY 2018 budget. Those funds are mostly focused at application development and software technology for an exascale software stack.
    These new systems represent the next generation in supercomputing and will be critical tools both for our nation’s scientists and for U.S. industry,” Secretary Perry said.  “They will help ensure America’s continued leadership in the vital area of high performance computing, which is an essential element of our national security, prosperity, and competitiveness as a nation.”
    The RFP is issued under the CORAL umbrella (Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Livermore). CORAL1 has already procured the following systems:
    • Aurora at Argonne National Lab (target completion date in 2021)
    • Summit at ORNL (2018 to 2023 timeframe)
    • Sierra at LLNL (2018 to 2023 timeframe)
    This RFP (CORAL2) is designed to get bids from vendors to build two and (potentially) three new exascale supercomputers. Each system is expected to cost between $400 – $600 million.

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    Saturday, April 14, 2018

    How Seniors Keep Up with Technology

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discusses technology changes and how senior citizens work with social media.
    Henry's Mom Binnie Coppersmith is once again our guest on the show, which is monumental since no one has ever offered to come back before.
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    Zuckerberg Goes to Washington

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at Facebook's testimony before Congress.

    “Dan Olds and Henry Newman are the only guys on deck today, Rich and Shahin are either traveling or doing something useless. However, this episode is ground breaking. Henry and Dan agree on everything ranging from the Facebook security “scandal” to the implications of GDPR. It’s a shocking and stunning turn of events."

    We should have a full crew next week and it’s hard to believe that Dan and Henry will agree yet again, so the universe will be back in order.”

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    Henry's Mom is Back to Describe Travel Booking before Technology

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discusses technology changes in the last 50 years of the Travel Agencies.
    Henry's Mom Binnie Coppersmith is once again our guest on the show, which is monumental since no one has ever offered to come back before.
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    Monday, April 9, 2018

    HPC Highlights from the 2018 GPU Technology Conference

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews the highlights of the GPU Technology Conference.

    From Rich's perspective, the key HPC announcement centered around new NVIDIA DGX-2 supercomputer with the NVSwitch interconnect.
    The rapid growth in deep learning workloads has driven the need for a faster and more scalable interconnect, as PCIe bandwidth increasingly becomes the bottleneck at the multi-GPU system level. NVLink is a great advance to enable eight GPUs in a single server, and accelerate performance beyond PCIe. But taking deep learning performance to the next level will require a GPU fabric that enables more GPUs in a single server, and full-bandwidth connectivity between them.

    NVIDIA NVSwitch is the first on-node switch architecture to support 16 fully-connected GPUs in a single server node and drive simultaneous communication between all eight GPU pairs at an incredible 300 GB/s each. These 16 GPUs can be used as a single large-scale accelerator with 0.5 Terabytes of unified memory space and 2 petaFLOPS of deep learning compute power.”
    For more details on DGX-2, check out our insideHPC interview with NVIDIA's Marc Hamilton.


     
    Henry Newman and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

    After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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    Wednesday, March 21, 2018

    Mind Archival for Immortality

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team goes off the supercomputing rails a bit with a discussion on digital immortality.

    A new company called Nectome will reportedly archive your mind for future uploading to a machine.
    We’re building the next generation of tools to preserve the connectome. Our ultimate ambition is to keep your memories intact for the future.
    While the price of $10K seems reasonable enough, they do have to kill you to complete the process.

    After that, we do our Catch of the Week. 

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    Monday, March 12, 2018

    A Quest for Quantum Supremacy

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the big three technologies of the day on the Hype curve:
    • Machine Learning. The GTC conference is coming up, and we are seeing a continuing series of announcements like the high density deep learning server from Lamda Labs.
    • Cryptocurrency. GPUs are in short supply as crypto miners continue to buy mass quantities of consumer devices.
    • Quantum Computing. This week Google unveiled their 72-Qbit Bristlecone Quantum Chip, which they claim has them on the road to Quantum Supremacy. At the same time, quantum seems to be going mainstream, as evidenced by a panel discussion this week at SXSW. You can listen to the full recording of the session right here on insideHPC.
    [caption id="attachment_69839" align="alignright" width="300"] Quantum Computing was the focus of a panel discussion at SXSW this week. From left: Bo Ewald (D-Wave Systems) Antia Lamas-Linares (TACC) Patricia Baumhart (D-Wave Systems) Jerry Chow (IBM) and Andrew Fursman 1Qbit.[/caption]

    After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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    Monday, March 5, 2018

    A Closer Look at the European Processor Initiative

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the European Processor Initiative, an effort to design a build an exascale computer based around European technology.

    "According to an interview in Primeur Magazine with EPI project coordinator Philippe Notton from Atos, the project involves not only a processor, but an accelerator as well. Will it be based on ARM, OpenPOWER, or something else like RISC-V? We will have to wait and see."

    After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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    Monday, February 19, 2018

    Diverging Chip Architectures in the Wake of Spectre and Meltdown

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the tradeoff between chip performance and security. In the aftermath of the recently disclosed Spectre and Meltdown exploits, Cryptograpy guru Paul Kocher from Rambus is calling for a divergence in processor architectures:
    The direction that we need to go as an industry though is ...We need to stop trying to build one processor architecture that is great for playing video games and doing wire transfers. We need to build architectures where there are cores and software stacks designed for security that can be slower, that can be simpler, and we need separate ones that are optimized for performance."


    In this video, Paul Kocher presents: Spectre - Exploiting Speculative Execution. Kocher is the lead author of the paper on the Spectre processor vulnerability.

    After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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    Monday, February 5, 2018

    A New CEO at HPE

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at HPE's new CEO, Antonio Neri, a longtime HPE executive who previously served as President of the company. As the number 1 server vendor in the HPC space, this change will be one to watch as we transition to the exascale era in the next five years or so.
    This transistion comes at an interesting time for HPE, as one of their main competitors, Dell Technologies, is reportedly looking at an IPO or reverse acquisition by VMware.
    Closer to home in the HPC space:
    • HPE just landed a huge deal at DoD Modernization for four supercomputers totaling 14 Petaflops of performance
    • HP-CAST host Frank Baetke has left the company and will continue on as Chair of EOFS.
    After that, we do our Catch of the Week.
     
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    Monday, January 29, 2018

    When NVIDIA Bans Consumer GPUs in the Datacenter

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at NVIDIA's new EULA GeForce Software user license, which prohibits the use of consumer GPUs in the datacenter. We are not looking to beat up on anyone, but our focus is on what limitations this might mean for the industry:
    No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.
    When we purchase hardware, aren't we free to use it any way we please? And why do BitCoin miners get a pass during a worldwide GPU shortage?

    Plus, what do we mean by the word "datacenter?" anyway? Shahin predicts the imminent proliferation of 5G networking capabilities will move computing closer to the edge, thereby changing what we mean by the term "datacenter."

    After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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    Monday, January 22, 2018

    Looking at the Cryptocurrency Crash

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the recent cryptocurrency crash and why prices for these coins is so volatile.

    After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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    Tuesday, January 16, 2018

    Europe Invests in Exascale

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at European Commission's recent move to fund exascale development with 1 Billion Euros.
    While Europe already had a number of exascale initiatives under way, this is a major step forward in that it puts up the money. Under a new legal and funding structure, the Commission’s contribution will be $486 million, or roughly half of the projected EUR 1 Billion total. Before the new structure was put in place, the Commission was effectively limited to contributing only 20 percent of HPC initiatives undertaken with member states.
    After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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    Monday, January 8, 2018

    Spectre and Meltdown Exploits threaten HPC Performance

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the performance ramifications of the Spectre and Meltdown exploits that affect processors from Intel, AMD, and many others. While patches are on the way, the performance hit from these patches could be as high as twenty or thirty percent in some cases.

    For information and links to useful resources, visit the security research findings page on Intel.com.

    Downlaod the White Paper: How the Meltdown and Spectre bugs work and what you can do to prevent a performance plummet.

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    Friday, January 5, 2018

    A List of Things Not Invited Back in 2018

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews their list of things Not Invited Back in 2018. Along the way, they share some of their New Year Resolutions.

    Not Invited Back for 2018:
    • Henry want to see an end to Swatting.
    • Dan wants to see an end to IEEE Floating-Point Arithmetic
    • Rich is not inviting PEZY back since their CEO got arrested for padding expense reports and bilking the Japanese government.
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