Radio Free HPC ISC'14 Wrapup Show

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the highlights from the recent ISC'14 conference in Leipzig, Germany.

• Intel revealed more about their upcoming Knights Landing processor, including the new Omni Scale Fabric.
• Mellanox rolled out the World’s First 100Gb/s EDR InfiniBand Switch as well as the HPC-X Scalable Software Toolkit.
• ARM64 made its debut on the show floor, and it seems to be best suited for accelerated systems.
• Team South Africa won the Student Cluster Competition for the second year in a row, while Team EPCC set a LINPACK record of 10.14 Teraflops.

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Delays in PCIe 4.0 and New Apollo Servers from HP

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks newly announced delays for the PCIe 4.0 specification and why this is bad news for high performance computing. After that, the topic switches to the new liquid-cooled Apollo 8000 servers from HP.

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Summer 2014 Tech Reading

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at a couple of techie books for Summer reading.

• Flash Boys is about a small group of Wall Street guys who figure out that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders and that, post–financial crisis, the markets have become not more free but less, and more controlled by the big Wall Street banks. Working at different firms, they come to this realization separately; but after they discover one another, the flash boys band together and set out to reform the financial markets.

• Daemon. When a designer of computer games dies, he leaves behind a program that unravels the Internet's interconnected world. It corrupts, kills, and runs independent of human control. It's up to Detective Peter Sebeck to wrest the world from the malevolent virtual enemy before its ultimate purpose is realized: to dismantle society and bring about a new world order.

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A Preview of the ISC'14 Student Cluster Competition

In this podcast, Rich and Dan preview the Student Cluster Competition at ISC'14 in Leipzig.

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Google Hits the History Erase Button

In this podcast the Radio Free HPC team looks at a grab bag of technical news items for the week of May 11, 2014:

• A landmark ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling that an individual could demand that "irrelevant or outdated" information be deleted from Google search results.
• A new Bull supercomputer coming to DKRZ with a 45 Petabyte filesystem based on Lustre and ClusterStor technology.
• The Call for Submissions by the Graph500 and the Green Graph500.
• Dan's visit to Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China to see Tianhe-2, the world's fastest supercomputer.

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Seven Myths of SSD vs. HDD Pricing

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the Seven Myths of SSD vs. HDD Pricing, one of Henry's recent Slashdotted features at Enterprise Storage Forum.

In a nutshell, Henry thinks that the notion of SSDs replacing spinning disks in the datacenter is built on a series of flawed assumptions regarding flash storage.

• First, some assume that the price of MLC NAND flash will continue to decrease at a rapid and predictable rate that will make it competitive with HDDs for bandwidth, and nearly for capacity, by 2014 or 2015. This downward trend, it is assumed, will make flash a viable alternative for large storage and to act as a memory or “buffer” to improve performance.
• Second, there is a general assumption that prices for bandwidth ($/GB/s) for SSDs is much lower than for HDDs, and that enterprises will measure costs in these terms instead of capacity.
• Third, there is no distinction made between flash in general, such as consumer SSDs, and enterprise storage SSDs. It is assumed that MLC NAND will not only reduce in price ($/GB) but also that it will increase in density and larger capacity drives will be developed.
• Fourth, it is assumed that the quality of MLC NAND will either remain constant or increase as prices decrease and densities increase, allowing it to improve not only performance, but also reliability and power consumption of the systems it is used in.
• Fifth, it is assumed that power consumption for SSDs is, or will shortly be, significantly lower than that of HDDs overall, on a per GB basis and on a per GB/s basis.
• Sixth, they assume disk performance will grow at a constant rate of about 20 percent per generation and not improve.
• Seventh, they assume file system data layout will not improve to allow better disk utilization.

According to Henry, most of these assumptions were made in early 2012. So far they have turned out to be partially true at best and wrong at worst. A big fan of the partially true, Dan pushes back as a matter of principle. Rich, on the other hand, has heard his share of SSD hype and thinks we need need to look at the data and see what it has to say.

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The 50th Anniversary of the Mainframe

In this podcast, Dan and Henry wax poetically on the 50th Anniversary of the Mainframe. Dan flew across the country to attend the festivities, and Henry sounds a bit jealous. Rich has no idea why anyone would even cross town for such a thing, so he gets taken to the woodshed on this one.

Play Quiz: IBM S360 Mainframe Computer History now!


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