We Review 2014 - The Year in HPC

In this episode, Rich, Dan, and Henry review the year in HPC.
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The SC14 Wrapup Show

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team wraps up the SC14 conference.

A Hard Look at the Two 2017 Coral Supercomputers

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team meets at SC14 in New Orleans to discuss the recent news that Nvidia & IBM will build two Coral 150+ Petaflop Supercomputers in 2017 for Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories. The two machines will feature IBM POWER9 processors coupled with Nvidia’s future Volta GPU technology. NVLink will be a critical piece of the architecture as well, along with a system interconnect powered by Mellanox.

Henry thinks that IBM will have trouble delivering, and he reminds us what happened when they stumbled and pulled out of the Blue Waters deal at NCSA. Will this be the same story? Rich thinks they will come through, though probably 18 months late. Dan is being the pragmatic one this week. Go figure.

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A Look at the Print 'n Fly Gude to SC14 New Orleans

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC reviews the new Print 'n Fly Guide to SC14 New Orleans. Designed to be an in-flight magazine, the Guide is custom tailored for your journey to the Big Easy at SC14.

Download the Print 'n Fly Guide to SC14 New Orleans

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Previewing the SC14 Student Cluster Competition

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team previews the SC14 Student Cluster Competition. This year a record 12 teams will face off to build the fastest HPC clusters under a carefully monitored power envelope.

Learn more at the Student Cluster Competition Blog.

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IBM Gets out the Chip Fab Business

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team looks at IBM's plans to hand off its microelectronics unit to Global Foundries.

Is Big Blue on the right track? While Dan believes they're doing what they need to do, Henry thinks they need to completely retool the company like they did back in 1993.

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Looking Forward to the StartupHPC Meetup at SC14

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team previews the StartupHPC Meetup at SC14.

Does your Startup have ties to High Performance Computing? SC14 will be in New Orleans this year, and we are holding our first meetup on Nov 17th in New Orleans. Please come, meet like minded people, listen to industry notables, and kick off StartupHPC as a support community.

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AWS Profitability - Ready for the Cloud Apocalypse?

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team discuss the possibility of a future where the Big 3 (Amazon, Google, and Microsoft) figure out that Cloud is not profitable and pull the plug. If that Cloud Apocalypse sounds far fetched, check out these recent news nuggets:

• An article in The Register that describes how Amazon lost money despite $20 Billion in revenue.
• Business Week says that Amazon’s cloud unit, AWS, is one of the fastest-growing software businesses of all time, as Bloomberg Businessweek‘s Ashlee Vance recently wrote. It’s also in a hotly contested market. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft (MSFT) have been slashing prices to lure customers from one another.
• The Wall Street Journal says that "The developments point to the possibility that profit margins in Amazon's cloud unit—believed to be much higher than its online retailing business—face a long-term squeeze that add to investor concerns about the company's profitability."

If you're more into numbers, the team has put together a spreadsheet of AWS revenue that does not paint a rosy picture.

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DSPs for Systems Intelligence at Paypal

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team discusses a new Paypal project that is leveraging TI Keystone DSP processors for systems intelligence.

Paypal has developed a novel approach to systems intelligence. By analyzing their chaotic real-time server data, they can produce organized, intelligent results using HP’s Moonshot server powered by TI DSP processors.

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Celebrity Photo Hack Shows Need for End-to-End Data Security

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discusses the recent iCloud theft of celebrity photos. Are passwords dead? Henry thinks this is simply the data breach of the week and that the real issue is the need for two-factor authentication and end-to-end security.

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A Look at the Xennet Free-Market Cloud

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the Xennet initiative, a “public, distributed, and decentralized Supercomputer.”

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The New TPCx-HS Benchmark for Big Data

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discusses the new TPCx-HS benchmark for Big Data. Designed to asses a broad range of system topologies and implementation methodologies, TPCx-HS is the industry’s first objective specification enabling measurement of both hardware and software including Hadoop Runtime, Hadoop Filesystem API compatible systems and MapReduce layers.

The TPCx-HS benchmark specification is now available online. You can also check out a slidecast on the new benchmark presented by Raghunath Nambiar, chairman of the TPCx-HS committee.

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Moving Processing out to the Network

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discusses the concept of offloading computation to networked devices such a storage controllers. During a recent Analyst Call with Dan Olds, Mellanox described this technology as potential growth area. Henry wants to more about the interface to such and environment before he renders an opinion, while Rich notes that the companies like Solarflare have been doing this at the NIC level for level for several years now.

A Straw Proposal for Better Resource Management in Linux

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC teams looks at Henry Newman's recent straw proposal for better resource management for Linux in HPC.

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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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Radio Free HPC Looks at GPU Technology Conference 2014

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at HPC announcements from the GPU Technology Conference 2014.

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Radio Free HPC Looks at Spring 2014 Conferences

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the wave of HPC conferences coming up this Spring.

Henry is headed to a speaking gig at the HPC User Forum and then on to GEOINT. Dan is off to China for the ASC Student Competition. Meanwhile, Rich will be on the road for a month straight at GTC, the Swiss HPC Conference, LUG 2014, and then off to moderate a Big Data Panel at the Red Hat Summit.

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The Coming Wave of Declustered RAID

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the coming wave of declustered RAID solutions designed to address the problem of ever-increasing RAID rebuild times. With 5 Terabyte drives in the wings, RAID cluster rebuild times are becoming impractical.

Dan is impressed with what IBM is doing in this area with GPFS.
Henry thinks these larger drives harken the death of RAID-5 and RAID-6.
Rich has been keeping a close watch on Xyratex and their ClusterStor GridRaid implementation.
Read the original paper on Declustered RAID by Garth Gibson and Mark Holland.

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The RONNIEE Network Architecture

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the newly announced RONNIEE Network Architecture from A3 Cube. Rich did a slidecast with their CTO this week, but Dan and Henry need to know more and see this thing for themselves.

Following that, the conversation veers off into a grab bag of tech news for the week:

• Dan's is still recovering from a rootkit that infected his business computer. We seem to recall that he was always backlogged before this happened, but we'll let it slide.
• Henry is lamenting the lack of Google Fiber coming to Minnesota. Since Google tends to piggyback on the fastest Internet pipes, it looks like the state will forever be a third-world country in terms of bandwidth.
• Rich is excited about the Outernet project, which hopes to launch a series of satellites that will provide free Internet connectivity worldwide to anyone who wants it.

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insideHPC Acquires the Exascale Report

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discusses the recent acquisition of The Exascale Report by insideHPC. Exascale-level computing remains a daunting challenge that is still years away, and Rich is excited to take it on as an editorial focus. The good news is that he'll be moving the publication away from its subscription model to make it free for all to read.

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Cray 2013 Earnings Bellwether the HPC Market

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team takes a look at Cray’s 2013 earnings report. By all accounts, the company had a banner year with a total revenue of $525.7 million. What does this mean for the overall HPC Market? Who will be the winners and losers as the Tier 1 vendors shift around? Tune in to find out.

Henry Newman Rants About Flawed Hard Drive Study

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at a recent study of hard drive reliability by Backblaze. Henry had a cow, writing in Enterprise Storage Forum that the study lacked technical rigor and drew dubious conclusions. Then Slashdot picked it up and all Hell broke loose.

Of course, Rich and Dan can't help but fan the fire.

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Lenovo Acquires IBM's x86 Server Business

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team gives their take on the recent news that IBM will soon be exiting the x86 server business. Lenovo looks to have gotten a great price, but will this mean to the Cloud and HPC market?

HPC Data Center Evolution

In this podcast, Fritz Ferstl from Univa leads a fireside chat on the continuing HPC Datacenter Evolution.