Monday, December 30, 2019

2019 Holiday Episode (video): Family Dinner at RFHPC

It's become a tradition at RadioFreeHPC to celebrate the holidays with a video of the holiday episode. The new logo launches the video: celebrating a truly family style dinner and dreaming big (maybe too creatively, however) as the team exchanges "if-only" gifts!

Click here to see the Director's Cut version of the video followed by the edited audio-only in the usual link below.

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Saturday, December 21, 2019

South Africa CHPC National Conference

SA Students Get Ready to take ISC by storm


Probably 15% more scintillating than usual, Dan promises as he calls this episode "fantastic"!
Now a 5-day conference with two days of workshops as book-ends, multiple tracks and many speakers, and yes, a very exciting Student Cluster Competition, the CHPC National Conference has developed into a very important event in the HPC/AI world.  Dan takes us through what he saw, who won, and what we can expect at the competition at ISC in 2020, and just how impressive the whole thing was. You've got to hear it.


Why Nobody Should Ever Be Online. Ever


The Big Easy Battles Big Bad Breach: in a segment that wants to be shortened to "Ever.Ever.", Henry focused not just on yet another cybersecurity incident (the ransomware attack on New Orleans), but on the fact that they city, to its immense credit, actually had a plan! Once the problem was detected, plan kicked into action, systems were shut done, damages narrowed if not avoided, and generally good progress on preparedness was on display. Nice job!

Things You Think You Know, But Might Not


Anyone remember tape drives? Some of you do. Some of you work with them now. Well, Jessi asks about tape storage. Is it still necessary? This is very much in Henry's wheelhouse so he covers it. Shahin seems unconvinced, really, but Henry is way closer to actual use cases, so he reluctantly waves it through!

Catch of the Week


Shahin: Covers the RISC-V Summit that was just held in San Jose. With 2,000 attendees, 435 member companies, lots of great talks, and expecting to grow by another 50% next year, and for something that started only in 2010, it's quite a flywheel that's forming. Also, remember that we had the pleasure of having the RISC-V Foundation CEO, Calista Redmond as a special guest of the podcast, so make sure you listen to that episode.

Shahin also notes that the media coverage of the chip space is starting to show that competition is brewing. Comments from vendors about other projects are sounding sharper and sharper!
He also says RISC "started" at Berkeley and Stanford. "What he meant to say" was modern RISC got its big boost there. He says he's fully aware of the history of RISC going all the way back to Turing, Cray, Flynn, IBM 801 (and we cut him off, convinced already!)

Dan: Speaking of sharper competition and what people meant to say: in an interview with CNet, Apple's top brass made a comment about Chromebook vs Apple gear that's also in the category of "what he meant to say was...". Henry skillfully segues into how more and more services are cloud based, and Jessi highlights the importance of the bring-you-own-device (BYOD) trend in schools.

Jessi: Goes over the US Government Accountability Office report on on airline IT outages. Just what you need for the holiday travel season. "One IT malfunction per month" is one stat you can remember.

Henry: The great $50m African IP address heist. IPv4 addresses are in demand and an enterprising person in Africa has parlayed that into a $50m windfall for his crafty self.  Upshot is? You should all consider gifting IPv4 addresses for the holidays!

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Friday, December 13, 2019

SC19: Our Visit to the State Fair

SC19 Postview


Our show today is all about what we saw at the “State Fair for Nerds” that is SC19. Where there weren’t any livestock shows or supercomputers carved out of butter, there was a lot to see and hear.
Shahin talks about the European Processor Initiative and conversations that he had with folks from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the quantum computing briefing by D-Wave, and a chat with Cold Quanta.

We reiterate the bet between Henry and Dan, where Henry bets Dan that there will be a RISC-V based system on the TOP500 system by SC20. The stakes? The winner gets the dinner of his choice paid for by the loser.

Jessi went to the keynote by Dr. Squires and notes that someone asked him “where did you use HPC systems in your project?” This prompts Jessi to ask us if it’s kosher to have keynotes which don’t necessarily hit directly on HPC. We discuss how there have been non-HPC centric keynote speakers at several SC events in the past….see Al Gore, Alan Alda, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, etc.

Dan brings up the news from NVIDA about how they’ve gathered a consortium of big-time industry players who will be working on adapting ARM processors for accelerated computing. We speculate on whether Fujitsu will be contributing their very sporty new ARM chip to the group, with thoughts of licensing it for use by other vendors. In other NVIDIA news, Azure now has eight GPU instances connected by InfiniBand interconnects.

Why Nobody Should Ever Be Online. Ever


This week Henry has a reason why no one should ever go to a local doctor again. Ever. He cites an article about how a small doctor and dental office service provider suffered a ransomware attack, which meant that the doctors they were managing archiving for could no longer get access to their records. If this can happen to service providers, it can run these smaller providers out of business as HIPPA regulations and fine are onerous. Dan comments that he only goes to vets for medical services (just like Kramer on Seinfeld).

Things You Think You Know, But Might Not


In this installment, Jessi asks the panel about interconnects, why we need them, what they do, and what are your choices. Dan jumps in with discussing Ethernet and InfiniBand, while Henry jokingly brings up Token Ring. More helpfully, Henry discusses proprietary interconnects and things like RDMA and ROCE. Shahin believes he has the definitive answer, which is the start of his Computing 301 Lecture Series. This leads into a slight tangent where we discuss SMP vs. MPP and how coherency at scale is incredibly expensive.

Catch of the Week


Shahin: Talks about a young man who bought his own IBM z/890 mainframe for $350 and installed it in his parent’s basement. Amazing feat. He has it running and now has the only mainframe in his neighborhood. Congrats to Connor. IBM needs to hire this young man and harness his passion.

Jessi:  Getting or giving an Alexa or Google Home device? Better think twice and then think again. Big time security flaws in both devices.

Henry: Has no catch of the week. He’s looking at -14°F and has to go out and shovel snow.

Dan: Biggest tech flops of 2019. Includes We Work, Samsung Fold, hacks of VPNs, Facebook Libre and other ignominious failures.

Did you say logo?


Most of you probably didn't know that RadioFreeHPC even has a logo, Dan thinks as he gives an update on a project to update the logo, in several colors. Getting closer to the sure-to-be-coveted RadioFreeHPC merch we all wanted!

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