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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