SC13 Wrapup Show

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team discusses what was hot and trending at the SC13 conference in Denver. Big Data was everywhere on the exhibit floor, but the coming requirements of Exascale spurred a number of low-power supercomputing demonstrations that look to be the wave of the future.

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Big Data Powers the Sports Prediction Machine

Over at The Register, Dan Olds writes that Big Data is powering amazing fortune-telling capabilities for sports at the Prediction Machine.

My pal Rich Brueckner and I had a chance to interview PredictionMachine.com founder Paul Bessire as part of our Radio Free HPC podcast a few weeks ago. In the program, Paul discusses the genesis of the Predictalator and how he turned his master’s degree in quantitative analysis into a full-time business. Along the way, we talk about what’s involved in analysing sports and how they arrived at their winning formula. It’s interesting listening for anyone who has ever been curious about applying scientific methodology to sports.

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Interconnects, Exascale, and Latency Tolerance

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team what interconnect requirements will be needed for applications outside of the current Exascale mission profile. Henry is concerned that these hyperscale machines are getting so physically large that the latency will be a showstopper for applications that have to wait for data. The speed of light is not going to change, he says, and things like Map Reduce may be latency-tolerant on the search part of it, but it is not latency-tolerant on the ingest-shuffle portion. In all, he says the PCI is not going to get us there.

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Why the Apps Will Drive What an Exascale System Looks Like

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the mission parameters driving Exascale development. Henry is concerned that a system designed for DOE applications will be tailored to that particular mission profile and therefore not be a performing system on NSF applications. Will the TOP 10 Exascale applications all be about High Energy Physics? Will Big Data applications be able to scale on such a machine? Who's driving the bus? Most of all, will Dan ever come to understand the question?

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Wrapping up ISC'13

In this podcast, Rich, Henry, and Dan discuss the recent ISC’13 conference, the Student Cluster Challenge, and South Africa’s surprise win. And while there was a lack of news at the conference this year, the boys are definitely psyched up for SC13 in Denver and Dan's plan to move a small camping trailer into his booth space for the duration of the show.

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Radio Free Looks at the Milky Way Supercomputer

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the Milky Way (Tianhe-2) supercomputer from China that now owns the top slot on the TOP500 list. They kick around the hardware and explore the configuration, but then the conversation shifts to real science and recent news about Blue Waters cracking into the HIV virus. Finally, they discuss the impact of Tianhe-2 on the western HPC world.

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Radio Free HPC Interviews Jack Dongarra on the New TOP500

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discusses the June 2013 TOP500 list with Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee. How did the Chinese manage to trump the world once again with the #1 supercomputer on the planet? Listen in to find out.

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You Gotta Own Your Own Archive, Part 2

In Part 2 of this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the importance of owning your own archive of enterprise data.

The discussion was prompted by Henry Newman's presentation entitled: Today’s I/O Challenges for Big Data Analysis from the recent HPC User Forum in Tucson.

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You Gotta Own Your Own Archive, Part 1

In Part 1 of this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the importance of owning your own archive of enterprise data.

The discussion was prompted by Henry Newman's presentation entitled: Today’s I/O Challenges for Big Data Analysis from the recent HPC User Forum in Tucson.

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Holographic Storage on the Horizon

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team takes a look at pending holographic storage technology.

Henry Newman's head is still spinning from the technology previews he saw at the recent IEEE Mass Data Storage Conference. Could this be a game-changer for the tape industry and archiving data? What are the specs, limitations, and most importantly, are these the droids we've been looking for?



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Fireside Chat - HPC Embraces Big Data

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team interview Fritz Ferstl, CTO of Univa. Topics include Big Data, HPC, and the continuing convergence of both.

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Radio Free HPC Looks at Lustre with Brent Gorda

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discusses Lustre and LUG 2013 with Brent Gorda. Now part of Intel in their High Performance Data Division, Gorda was CEO of Whamcloud when the company was acquired last summer.

Gorda recently wrote a post about the rapid growth of the Lustre community, so we started our discussion there and learned a good deal more about the popular file system.

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The Joy of RDMA?

In this follow-up podcast to the GPU Technology Conference, the Radio Free HPC team mulls over a talk by GE’s Dustin Franklin, GPU app specialist. Dustin’s topic was GPU-direct RDMA; was this a first look at real-world RDMA with GPU-to-GPU communications?

Follow along as the guys describe flow charts on technical slides that are not yet approved by viewing for the “great unwashed masses” – but make no mistake, they’re impressed by what they saw. Dan “knows a guy” who can divulge more, and offers to arrange an inquisition with Henry. Henry promised to “be nice,” whatever he means by that. Rich missed this GTC session and several others while “conducting interviews,” whatever he means by that. Dan offers another characterization.

And this just in: there’s a great deal of information available on the Internet.

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FPGA’s and Stuff

In this episode of Radio Free HPC, Rich, Dan, and Henry discuss the recent buzz surrounding FGPAs. After being sidelined by accelerators, they’re increasingly being used in appliances.

Big vendors are talking about FPGAs not only for appliances but for general-purpose systems as performance assists. Are we headed back to the future?

The guys discuss the ins and outs of FPGAs and why, in some cases, they could be a huge win for the organizations that implement them. But is the architecture flexible enough? For enterprise and Big Data, perhaps it is. If you need to perform the same algorithms over and over again, FPGAs could be a perfect fit.

As with all things tech, there are a few cautionary notes to be sounded. Amassing more and more appliances can lead down a tricky road. Will their use in workload-optimized systems lead to vendor lock-in? Can you really teach an old FPGA new tricks? And can they be weaponized?

Most importantly: how are servers like cattle? Tune in to find out…

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Do Not Talk About Exascale

In this episode of Radio Free HPC, the topic of Exascale is under the hosts' scrutiny once again as they discuss some interesting stories released by The Exascale Report featuring opinion by Bill Gropp of NCSA and Bill Harrod of DOE.

Rule #1: You do not talk about Exascale. (Kind of like rule #1 of Fight Club, except the guys keep breaking it.) Why not? Because too many of the people talking about Exascale are having the wrong conversation about it.

What should the conversation be? Should it be about the systems themselves, or about the work that can be done only with those systems -- the science that we can't yet do? Spoiler alert: Dan and Henry disagree on this. But a peaceful vibe reigns once again as they discuss what The Exascale Report calls "The Three Noble Truths" of Exascale, which sounds kind of Zen and cool -- as if it was coined by Exascale Samurai.

And finally... is it time to talk about Zetta-scale?

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Human Face of Big Data

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at at a new book called The Human Face of Big Data by Rick Smolan.

The book details the ways in which Big Data affects our daily lives and predicts the ways it will transform our future. The big-picture overview the author presents is that of our planet becoming a giant nervous system in which we, its inhabitants, are the nerve endings. Or as his ten-year-old son put it, "Isn't this like growing another eye?" Indeed it is: with all of this sensory input, we are beginning to see a third dimension. It's also one of those we-don't-know-what-we-don't-know propositions. Just as we could never have imagined how transformative the Internet would be, we can't predict where Big Data will take us. We don't even know, really, how to maximize the data we're collecting right now.

The Human Face of Big Data is available -- well, probably lots of places -- but here's the Amazon link, because they have so much data on us already.

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RF HPC Ep22 Intel Inside Cable TV

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team discusses recent reports of Intel's plans to bust up the cable TV industry by offering a service or set-top box that would allow customers to buy channels and individual shows a la carte, and -- AND -- access a cloud-based DVR service. The stuff of dreams, right? But not so fast. Acquiring licenses for each bit of content, and dealing with Hollywood in general, is not for the faint of heart.

What's in this uphill climb for Intel? Chips in every household; entry into a massive market; and another way to offset declining PC sales. What's in it for consumers seems pretty clear, but there's at least one major caveat: What's to stop, say, Comcast from raising rates for its Internet cable in order to cover lost revenue? Then we're all paying Intel and our local cable provider. Is this just "Meet the new boss... same as the old boss?"

This episode also gives us a peek into the guys' viewing preferences and current entertainment setups. (Henry: The Food Network instead of ESPN? Really?)

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Success and Failure in Tech

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at success factors for technology Startups. Prompted by a recent interview with Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolshiem, the discussion centers around lessons learned from Sun's decline and eventual acquisition by Oracle. Download the MP3 * Download the video * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed