Preview of SC17 Ancillary Events

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team previews the ancillary events leading up to SC17, which takes place Nov. 12-17 in Denver.

After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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Is the Cloud Killing Tape?

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team asks the question: Is the Cloud Killing the Tape Market? The issue came up this week that Spectra Logic is laying off 9 percent of its workforce.

"There may be a silver lining for Spectra Logic, with a legacy of tape storage. The technology has had its ups and downs over the years, and things look positive for it once again as cloud providers have adopted it as a cost-effective way to handle the growing amount of data being generated, TechTarget, a marketing firm, reported."

After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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Announcing Project Cyclops - One Node to Rule them All

In this podcast, Dan Olds from OrionX describes Project Cyclops - a benchmarking quest to build the world's fastest single node.

Codenamed “Cyclops”, the single-node supercomputer demonstrates the computational power that individual scientists, engineers, artificial intelligence practitioners, and data scientists can deploy in their offices. Cyclops has achieved results of (score) for the HPCC benchmark, a mark of (score) for the HPCG benchmark, and a score of (score) for the Graph500 benchmark. These results set new single node high water marks for the (list benchmark we achieved records on).

We’ve done more than 150 podcasts talking about topics in high performance computing,” said Dan Olds, partner at OrionX.net Research. “It was time we actually put something together and take a run at some of these benchmarks.” Rich Brueckner commented, “We couldn’t have done this without our sponsors, who include Intel, Kingston, Seagate, and Ebullient Cooling Solutions. They’ve been incredibly helpful.”

Project Cyclops is building a system based on a chassis provided by Supermicro and is fueled by a pair of Intel Xeon E5 v4 processors, 128 GB of Kingston DDR4 memory, and M2 SSD drives from Seagate. An innovative liquid cooling system from CoolIT Systems will chill the processors and GPU accelerators. RedLine Performance Solutions will provide system testing and will help optimize the system for benchmarking and workload runs.

After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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A proposal to use Blockchain to combat Fake News

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at Henry Newman's recent proposal to use Blockchain as a way to combat Fake News. Henry shares that this rant result from what he saw as an egregious story that was going around that could have been easily quashed.
"What if every audio or video app on your phone, TV news camera or your video camera automatically came set up to create blockchains that included information such as geolocation, date and time? Editing programs would also be required to use blockchain. And what if every frame that was edited had a blockchain describing what changes were made?"

After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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SC17 Plenary to Focus on Smart Cities

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at Smart Cities. As the featured topic this year at the SC17 Plenary, the Smart Cities initiative looks to improve the quality of life for residents using urban informatics and other technologies to improve the efficiency of services.

With the accelerating volume of data about cities, HPC is helping cities to optimize their services, from making food safety inspections more effective to identifying children most at risk for lead poisoning. HPC is supporting the creation of computational models of urban sectors such as transportation, energy demand, or economics. And increasingly there is opportunity—and need—to develop multi-scale, coupled modeling systems that harness new data sources and measurement techniques and that capture the interdependencies between these sectors to provide a more holistic modeling capability for urban designers, planners, and developers. This plenary panel will discuss emerging needs and opportunities suggesting an increasing role for HPC in cities, with perspectives from city government, planning and design, and embedded urban HPC systems.

The SC17 Plenary on Smart Cities takes place 5:30pm - 6:30pm on Nov. 13 at the Denver convention center.

After that, we do our Catch of the Week
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