New Top on the TOP500 – 415 PF!

Breaking News Edition

We have a new #1 on the TOP500 list of most powerful supercomputers! Big gets bigger by a factor of 2.8x as Fujitsu’s “Supercomputer Fugaku” tops the list at 415 PFlops.  There are also an additional three new entries in the top ten. We break down the top of the list in this fascinating episode of RadioFreeHPC.

Listen to us now! It will help you to amaze your friends and dismay your enemies with your newfound knowledge of the list. We have it here and first! Or at least not much later than others!

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@HPC_Guru Speaketh! Kind of.

Our Guest Today is...

In this extraordinary episode of Radio Free HPC, the crew interviews the industry icon that is @HPC_Guru. This is the first time that anyone has been granted an interview with him and we’re proud to have been chosen for this honor.

We posed an even dozen questions and received very thoughtful responses, which we rendered out in a machine voice in order to fit our podcast format. In the interview, HPC_Guru tells us his top five cool things in HPC today, why he remains anonymous, where he thinks HPC hardware will be in 10 years and who he thinks will be the first to reach exascale. And that’s just four of our 12 questions!

We don’t have to tell you that @HPC_Guru is a legend in the industry, as is his Twitter account. He has more than 15,000 followers and has tweeted over 38,000 times. Just to put that in context, if his average tweet is 150 characters, then he’s tweeted 5.7 million characters. Or if you look at it as words, HPC Guru has beaten the hell out of Leon Tolstoy’s War & Peace. Tolstoy came up with a piddling 587,287 words in his novel while HPC Guru has written roughly 712,500 words – and HPC Guru has written about more difficult content. Supercomputing is much more complex than Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. While this is impressive, it’s not quite as many words/characters as Timothy Prickett Morgan writes in a typical year.

If you printed up HPC Guru’s tweets, the tome would come in at more than four pounds, and that’s single spaced. That’s as much as a high-end laptop, including the storage and maybe even the power brick. Looking for another metric? If @HPC_Guru printed out each of his tweets, two per sheet of 8.5 by 11 inch paper, and laid them end to end, it would stretch a little over 3.3 MILES.

Give this groundbreaking episode a listen, in fact, listen to it twice to get the full impact.

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A is for Ampere, Nvidia A100's Public Debut

NOTE:  The publication of this episode was delayed due to the untimely passing of our partner and pal Rich Brueckner. So what we’re announcing as "breaking news" isn’t so fresh today, but our takes on what NVIDIA’s new A100 processor brings to the table are still valid. 


Breaking News! This special edition of RadioFreeHPC takes a deep dive into NVIDIA’s spanking new A100 GPU – which is an impressive achievement in processor-dom. The new chip is built with a 7nm process and weighs in at a hefty 54 billion transistors and capped at 400 Watts. It sports 6,912 FP32 CUDA cores, 3,456 FP64 CUDA cores and 422 Tensor cores.
This 8^th generation GPU, using what the company calls its Ampere technology, is a replacement for both their V100 GPU and Turing T4 processors, giving the company a single platform for both AI training and inferencing.
We talk about the specs of the A100, breaking down its game both in terms of typical HPC FP64 processing and FP32 (and lower precision) computing for AI workloads. On the HPC side, the new GPU seems to offer an across the board 25% speedup, which is substantial. But the A100 really shines when it comes to tensor core performance which the company reports at an average speed up of 10x on Tensor Core 32 bit vs. V100 FP32.
New features of the A100 include Sparsity (a mechanism that doubles sparse matrix performance), a much speedier NVLink (2x), and a hardware feature that allows the A100 to be partitioned into as many as 7 GPU instances to support individual workloads.
All in all, this is an amazing new processor, a behemoth large and hot, but so fast, chip that is heavily tilted towards new AI and Tensor workloads with a passing but welcome nod to 64-bit HPC apps.

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What Good Did It Do? Quite a Lot, and Quite the Story

A typical show opening, but we’re missing Henry – he was away packing for his big move from his long-time home base in Minnesota to his new bunker in Las Cruces. He’s packing up all of his memorabilia, like his first punch card sets, his core memory collection and his home terminal, lovingly wrapping them up for the long trip south.

News Alert

NEWS ALERT:  we interrupt this show blog for a special announcement. We’re having a contest! This is the digital version of the "18^th caller" contest. The 18th emailer to RFHPC, starting now, will receive what Dan might describe as a fantastic prize from us at Radio Free HPC. Send in your email entries now, and listen to the show for details. This might take a couple of weeks, it might take a couple of years, but we're nothing if not good with small numbers and large units. And that 18th lucky emailer deserves a prize.

A Cool New Book Project

We have a special guest today, David Barkai, a 50-year veteran of HPC. David has worked in a wide variety of positions at NASA, Intel, Cray, SGI and others. His project now is writing a book to chronicle the last 50 years in HPC told from the perspective of those who were there.
The main emphasis in the book is examining the good that HPC has done in the world, which is quite the story. He’s looking at the applications that have changed the world, from weather forecasting to safer and quieter cars and so on, and the system architectures that have made them possible in a decade-by-decade tour of HPC development.

• 1970s:  Vector Processors
• 1980s:  Multiprocessors
• 1990s:  Massive Parallelism
• 2000s:  Clusters and Accelerators
• 2010s and beyond:  HPC and AI/Cloud

As David says in our interview, the top HPC systems have advanced 10-15 times faster than Moore’s Law, which is astounding. In the book he goes into detail about how the industry drove performance at such a dizzying pace. He’s still writing away and is interested in hearing about your HPC journey to help fill out the book. You can reach him here.

Reasons Why No One Should Ever Be Online. Ever.

Henry is practicing what he preaches and is not online right now as he waits to the internet company to get him connected again.

Catch of the Week:

Jessi:  Google’s head of Quantum computing hardware resigns. John Martinis resigned after being assigned to an advisory role in the company.
Shahin:  Discusses a paper on Coarse Grain Reconfigurable Architecture (CGRA) as a way of having performance and programmability closer to the metal. Its survey of what's been going on in this area with FPGAs is great and may also point to what we can expect in future supercomputers.
Dan:  Subs for Henry with a horrible impression for a first catch. But his real catch is a plug for the Radio Free HPC Studio Products production of “Charles Babbage, his life and times.”  It’s an impressive production with chills, thrills and plenty of action. Don’t put it off, listen now. All those reviews are great for a reason!

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AI in Science. When is it real?

We fire up the show with introductions and a little snippiness on Dan’s part. Henry reports that the weather in Minnesota is nearly human.

AI in Science

Jumping into our main topic, Shahin introduces an article from HPCwire interviewing Argonne’s Associate Laboratory Director Rick Stevens about how the DOE will be using AI in science. This is one of the biggest potential changes in our industry and well worth the investigation. But figuring out where AI fits into the traditional world of research and simulation is a difficult problem. Henry points out that nearly every grant proposal needs to include “AI” in order to get serious consideration.

We discuss Dan's Great HPC Road Trip* of national labs in 2018 and how nearly every lab is looking at using AI to inform their simulations and cut down on the brute force computing they’re doing now. Dan’s national lab interviews are here: Idaho National Lab, NCAR, NREL, Los Alamos, Sandia, NERSC, Lawrence Livermore

There’s also a slight tangent where Dan talks about driving hundreds of miles out of his way to mess with Henry’s Las Cruces lot and future home. This resulted in an epic short film “The Haunting of Henry House” which is stuck in bureaucratic  approval cycles according to Henry.

RFHPC Hall of Fame?

We also discuss the possibility of founding a Radio Free HPC Hall of Fame, but discarded it when we realized that no one would want to be in it.

COVID-19

As the conversation continues, Dan brings up an article that discusses how COVID-19 might affect processor foundry revenues and demand. We are, as a group, underwhelmed by the analysis. Henry notes that he has seen a significant increase in the price of laptops when shopping for a graduation gift for his nephew. Henry has reportedly seen an increase of around 20% in prices since February.

Reasons Why No One Should Ever Be Online. Ever.

Hackers have stolen and ransomed AMD’s GPU test files, a dastardly act, but not surprising to see. They’re looking for $100 million to give the files back, while AMD has downplayed their importance and value.

Catch of the Week

Henry:  Another empty net week for our pal Henry
Shahin: How is the internet coping with all of the extra traffic caused by Covid19 isolation?
Jessi:   For the first time in recorded history, Jessi’s net is empty….sad.

SuperCatch

Dan:  has a SuperCatch! He does a promo of the inaugural episode of a new RadioFreeHPC segment. Suffice to say that RadioFreeHPC Studios has a brand new production of “Charles Babbage, His Life & Times,” a gripping radio drama that will engage your emotions from A-B.

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One Big Debate over OneAPI

For RF-HPC aficionados, it’s a typical opening for this episode. Henry is counting down the days until he moves to sunny Los Cruces and we have a lull in the conversation right after the introductions. We recover quickly and move onto the main course of today’s show:

Intel’s OneAPI project

The OneAPI project is a highly ambitious initiative; trying to design a single API to handle CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and other types of processors. In the discussion, we look under the hood and see how this might work. One thing working in Intel’s favor is that they’re using data parallel C++, which is highly compatible with CUDA – and which is probably Intel’s target with this new initiative.

Henry points out that porting codes is a pain and that no one wants to port to another API if it can possibly be avoided, so he predicts that most customers will not want to use it and if they consider it, before they move any code, they need to be sure that this new API is going to stick around for many years.

Shahin is generally positive on the project. Henry and Dan to have a rare moment of agreement in disputing Shahin’s thoughts about several things! Let's start with his view that Java has provided portability in exchange for performance – and then improved its performance. Henry and Dan take issue with this, with Henry saying that Java provides little real performance and Dan saying that programs have changed to provide Java performance rather than Java changing to provide performance. Shahin believes that OneAPI is a good thing for the industry and will be successful. Dan believes it’s a good thing for Intel, but has doubts about whether it’s good for the industry. Henry doesn’t see big adoption for the foreseeable future saying, “It has a long way to go and it’s a significant risk.” Dan and Henry end up agreeing and agreeing to disagree with Shahin. Jessi is safely on the fence on this one.

It’s a very good conversation, well worth a listen.

Why Nobody Should Ever be Online. Ever.

This week, Henry shares a personal story about key fobs and a very troubling problem he found with his latest rental car. It has everything, thrills, chills and a shocking conclusion.

Catch of the Week

Jessi:  The Department of Defense has built a supercomputer in a shipping container, for sending to wherever its computation is needed. The supercomputer itself is designed to work on AI-related problems, and falls under the classification of "AI on the edge," where data is processed in the same location it is collected. While it’s not news, it’s news to Jessi and it’s cool, so it’s her catch of the week.

Shahin:  Tells the story of a reporter renting a shared car service, which is unlocked by a cell phone. The reporter ventures out into the hinterlands a little bit and finds that she can’t get the car to work anymore. Why? Because there wasn’t enough cell phone coverage to properly start the car – meaning that the reporter had to wait (and wait) for a person to be sent out to physically interact with the car and get it going again. Yikes – think out your products, people, ok?

Henry:  Hackers made a home for themselves inside Citrix for five months, siphoning off personal and financial information. Yikes again. The company had to be alerted by the FBI to the hack and, assumedly, their internal tools didn’t pick up the penetration. That’s a long time to be exploited!

Dan:  McAfee researchers show that just a few strips of tape on a road sign can prompt a Tesla car to accelerate by an astounding 50 miles per hour over the posted speed limit on that sign. According to Dan, this is a bad thing.

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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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7 Years, 251 Episodes, 17 Listeners

RadioFreeHPC Celebrates a Number in its Prime

Welcome to a historic milestone:  Our 251^st Radio Free HPC episode! We’re celebrating 251 rather than 250 for a couple of reasons. First, everyone celebrates round numbers and that’s boring. And 251 is round enough for those who crave them. Second, 251 is a prime number and we all love us some prime numbers, right?

This is not quite a "highlights" show, but a look back at how RadioFreeHPC came about, who came up with the name RadioFreeHPC, how the show has evolved, a bit of "remember when", a few notable episodes, and the meteoric rise of its listenership!

We discuss the early days, with each of us sharing some of our favorite moments. As the episode continues, we talk about how particular features have become part of the show over time, like “Catch of the Week”, “Henry Newman’s Why No One Should Ever Be Online. Ever”, and the semi-occasional “Why AI Is Our Doom” from Dan.

Here are a couple of choice pictures both of which link to the same holiday special that includes a video where Dan and Henry discuss the ideal gift for Henry!

Did You Say Prizes?

We also discuss fantastic prizes for anyone who has listened to all 251 of our episodes. Reach out to us on Twitter (@Radiofreehpc) or via email to let us know if you qualify and what prize you’d like. Oh, and you have to listen to this episode to learn what the prizes are.

Thank you our listeners, we could do it without you – we have, we must have – but it's totally no fun if we actually know about it.

Here's to the next so many episodes. We need another number in its prime to celebrate, so feel free to propose a good one.

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RISC-V CEO Sees Bright Global Future for Open Source CPUs

RISC-V, Historic Passwords Revealed, End of the World

We’re missing Henry S. Newman this week, who is down in Los Cruces inspecting and overseeing the construction of his new crib. Dan and Shahin discuss just how little they’d want to be the general contractor working to build Henry’s house. Henry would be deploying a set of lasers to make sure that the foundation was true to the nearest 1/64^th of an inch and all the while pointing to the contract which contains his exacting requirements. Dan wants to be there in a lawn chair, live blogging the entire process.

Open Sourcing the CPU? What Does it Mean and How Does it Work?

We have a very special guest today:  Calista Redmond, CEO of upstart RISC-V, the designers of a new open source processor instruction set which is looking to disrupt the entire industry. RISC-V can be used for light weight tasks such as embedded processing but, on the other hand, is also going to be utilized as the system accelerator for the European Exascale initiative boxes. That’s some serious flexibility. In our discussion, we briefly cover the origins of RISC-V, which started at Berkeley several years ago. It’s important to keep in mind that RISC-V is an instruction set, not a processor. Anyone can use the RISC-V instruction set, modify it for their unique needs, and then fab their own chips. Today, the instruction set is being used in everything from the smallest embedded device to large scale-out systems. The business model for RISC-V is different than most any other company. They make the ISA freely available to all comers. The RISC-V Foundation drives the design and development of IP, software, and tools for the instruction set. Foundation members pay dues and in return receive access to Foundation technology and programs, plus visibility and input into the RISC-V roadmap. Our interview with Calista covers a broad range of topics including how the foundation works to alleviate the risks of ISA fragmentation, where the strongest interest in RISC-V is geographically and workload-wise, and a comparison of RISC-V’s open source nature vs. the proprietary nature of existing ISA’s. Give it a listen, it’s a great introduction to RISC-V and the paradigm of open source ISA’s. We include an excerpt of a recent article on RISC-V in The Economist:

Open-source computing: A new blueprint for microprocessors challenges the industry’s giants

RISC-V is an alternative to proprietary designs Most microprocessors —the chips that do the grunt work in computers—are built around designs, known as instruction-set architectures (ISAs), which are owned either by Intel, an American giant, or by Arm, a Japanese one.

Catch of the Week

Since we don’t have Henry, we don’t get a new episode of “Henry Newman’s Why No One Should be Online. Ever”, but we’ll somehow survive. As usual, we do have our Catch of the Week feature: Shahin:   Historic UNIX passwords cracked and recovered. Both the passwords and hashing algorithms were pretty weak back in the day and we now know just how weak. Listen to the podcast to hear some of the most important passwords of the era, including Eric Schmidt, Dennis Richie, Brian Keringhan, and Ken Thompson – who probably has the best password from a technical standpoint. We also discuss how much time and hardware it took to crack these passwords.

Computer historians crack passwords of Unix's early pioneers

... Leah Neukirchen recovered an BSD version 3 source tree and posted about it on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list, revealing that she was able to crack many of the weak passwords used by the equally weak hashing algorithm from those bygone days. Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie's was "dmac", Bourne's was "bourne", Schmidt's was "wendy!!!" (his wife's name), Feldman's was "axlotl", and Kernighan's was "/.,/.,". Four more passwords were cracked by Arthur Krewat: Özalp Babaoğlu's was "12ucdort", Howard Katseff's was "graduat;", Tom London's was "..pnn521", Bob Fabry's was "561cml.." and Ken Thompson's was "p/q2-q4!" (chess notation for a common opening move).

Dan:  Speaking of time, we might not have so much left. According to the European Space Agency, there is an asteroid approaching Earth that has a “non zero” chance of impacting our beloved planet. The asteroid, dubbed 2019 SU3, is expected to come within 73,000 miles (or maybe zero miles) from Earth, which is extremely close. Expected arrival time is September 16, 2084. Is this the time to panic? Yes, says Dan. We’ll be giving updates on this asteroid every five years or so, to keep you on top of the action.

Asteroid may collide with Earth, ESA warns: 'Non-zero... probability'

Asteroids known as near-Earth objects are among the most dangerous space items, with space agencies around the world keeping a close eye on them. The European Space Agency is paying particular attention to asteroid 2019 SU3, which may collide with Earth as soon as 70 years from now. The space rock was recently added to the ESA's Risk List due to the potential for it to collide with Earth on Sept. 16, 2084.

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FinTech and HPC-AI

@RadioFreeHPC Has Entered The Building

First things first, you can call us @RadioFreeHPC now, thanks to our new Twitter account. We decided maybe this social media thing is not a fad after all. We are also pleased to inform you that our Twitter account is almost as heavily followed as the podcast itself. Thank you! We should be up to about 6 or 7 followers by the time you read this. Good thing we allocated 64 full bits to track the number.

FinTech and HPC-AI

Shahin gives an update on the HPC-AI on Wall Street conference. We discuss the well-received Cryptocurrency panel that he moderated, the challenges of using of AI in financial services, the emerging computational storage, and advanced HPC-class modeling that helps venture capital investors decide whether to invest in a startup. Check out his blog on the panel and top-10 crypto topics of the day here:

Top-10 Crypto/Blockchain Topics

Why? What’s the big deal? Blockchain or Crypto? ICOs Political Support Libra Apps Security Other Coins Digital Assets Smart Contracts

Henry Newman's Why No One Should be Online, Ever.

Once again, Henry actually has good news, and once again, it's the kind of good news that highlights the bad news.

Man Who Hired Deadly Swatting Gets 15 Months

An Ohio teen who recruited a convicted serial “swatter” to fake a distress call that ended in the police shooting an innocent Kansas man in 2017 has been sentenced to 15 months in prison. “Swatting” is a dangerous hoax that involves making false claims to emergency responders about phony hostage situations or bomb threats, with the intention of prompting a heavily-armed police response to the location of the claimed incident.

Catch of the Week

Shahin talks about France and Germany planning to block the Libra cryptocurrency. Henry and Dan think this is a good time to say "we told you so"! Nobody's surprised, though Shahin thinks this is the beginning of this, not the end.

Germany's Scholz: We cannot accept parallel currencies such as Facebook's Libra

German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said on Tuesday policymakers could not accept the emergence of parallel currencies such as Facebook’s planned Libra, adding that Berlin would reject any such plans. Facebook’s planned Libra is the most well-known of the stablecoins, a certain form of cryptocurrency backed by assets such as traditional money deposits, short-term government securities or gold.

Henry doesnt know whether to laugh or cry as he describes some of the "ignoble" prize winners and wonders how they ever got funded.

Magnetic cockroaches, dirty money, wombat poo and posties' balls: It's the Ig Nobels 2019

This year's theme was 'habits' and they were baaaaad The Annals of Improbable Research held its annual award-giving ceremony – the Ig Nobel Prize – on Thursday night at Harvard's Sanders Theatre, and the entries were as worthy as ever.

Dan talks about the call-center scammer whose plea deal backfires:

Call-center scammer loses $9m appeal in stunning moment of poetic justice

But I only expected to pay $250,000, wails scumbag to wall of blank faces. A call-center scammer has lost his appeal to overturn a $9m fine – after a court pointed out the crook had specifically waived the right to appeal when he pleaded guilty.

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The Hottest of Hot Chips Conference

The 31st Hot Chips Conference

Shahin reports from the Hot Chips conference with Henry and new guest Glenn Heinle, a veteran of AI, HPC, and Storage worlds and currently at Keeper Tech.

The team discusses and debates the highlights of the conference and the hottest of the Hot Chips. Here are a few notes and images to prepare you for the podcast.

AMD CEO Dr. Su's talk was all about High Performance Computing, used more in its English meaning than a market segment. The evidence that HPC is going mainstream is mounting.






TSMC took a perhaps overly literal definition of Moore's law and talked about transistor density and the killer apps that have driven the fabrication industry.





The giant wafer-scale chip from Cerebras is definitely a head turner, and solving a lot of cool problems along the way, but "is it a monument or a market?" as Shahin put it.





Upmem showed what it sees as a practical approach to processor-in-memory, producing standard-interface DIMMs with embedded processors and a novel programming model.





Jintide showed a cool behavioral analytics approach to actual full CPUs, aiming to monitor its traffic in real time and flagging misbehavior.  Shahin calls this general approach "Wide Packet Inspection" as a contrast to the traditional "Deep Packet Inspection."




So, car companies and other manufacturers may just have enough volume and interest to roll their own. Tesla talked about their Full Self Driving inference chip, the what-is-the-word?, bespoke AI chip that meets only their requirements and nothing else and comes in at 40 Watts.

Henry Newman's Feel-Good Security Corner

"Turn off your Bluetooth", says Henry as he talks about the now-famous KNOB vulnerability, which is obviously serious enough to have its own web site! Shahin points out how the equivalent of VPN for Bluetooth and other protocols are out there and references the company he works with, Afero, who has developed this and is thus not affected.

KNOB Attack Weakens Bluetooth Encryption

It turns out Bluetooth might have more in common with doors than we thought. Researchers disclosed a new attack they called Key Negotiation of Bluetooth (KNOB) that affects every device released before 2018 (and potentially some released after) because of an issue with the Bluetooth protocol itself. This attack can be used to make it easier to brute-force the encryption keys used by the devices.

Catch of the Week

Glenn talks about a 1-inch (cubed) full Linux computer:

This Linux computer plus router is the size of a ring box

If there's one thing that stayed consistent through the last decade or so of tech industry turmoil, it's the love affair between techies and Linux. There's just a ton you can do with the OS, and its open-source format means you can customize your rig from the ground up.

Bluetooth is not enough! Henry asks us to cancel our credit card too if we have shopped at Hy-Vee:

Breach at Hy-Vee Supermarket Chain Tied to Sale of 5M+ Stolen Credit, Debit Cards

On Tuesday of this week, one of the more popular underground stores peddling credit and debit card data stolen from hacked merchants announced a blockbuster new sale: More than 5.3 million new accounts belonging to cardholders from 35 U.S. states. Multiple sources now tell KrebsOnSecurity that the card data came from compromised gas pumps, coffee shops and restaurants operated by Hy-Vee, an Iowa-based company that operates a chain of more than 245 supermarkets throughout the Midwestern United States.

Shahin puts in a plug for a meetup group he has formed called Enterprise IoT.

Sharing insights about the challenges and successes in Enterprise IoT

We will discuss all aspects of building and scaling commercial IoT products. Topics include building a business case, assessing end-user benefits, selecting connectivity hardware, software development for embedded-mobile-cloud including multi-product mobile apps, security, privacy, cloud back-end, analytics and AI, remote control, commerce, governance, the relevance of cryptocurrencies, etc.
Anyone with a serious interest in IoT or engaged in planning or launching IoT projects should consider attending.

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Is cloud too expensive for HPC?

Is cloud too expensive for HPC?

Enquiring minds want to know, as does the HPC community whose single-minded obsession with maximum price-performance is notorious and legendary. The Radio Free team looks at actual cloud pricing based on available data and Dan's research which fuel a hearty discussion.

They look at configurations, compare prices, talk about the costs that are not included, segment the market, and then segment the applications.

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Henry highlights of the importance of having external 3rd party teams and defined processes (FIPS, Common Criteria, GDPR, etc.) test your equipment. This follows the detection of vulnerabilities in a data center class SSD. Nobody can disagree with that, of course.

Shahin:

Reflections on Trusting Trust, Turing Award Lecture by Ken Thompson

To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software.
[...]

In college, before video games, we would amuse our- selves by posing programming exercises. One of the favorites was to write the shortest self-reproducing pro- gram. Since this is an exercise divorced from reality, the usual vehicle was FORTRAN. Actually, FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.

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HPC Market Eyes $44B in 5 Years

HPC Market Eyes $44B

New report from Hyperion Research has the HPC+AI market growing to $44B, with a B, in 5 years. The industry is hitting on all cylinders, benefiting from

• The ExaScale race,
• AI coming to the enterprise only to find that it needs, or really is, HPC, depending on your point of view, and
• it's usual, sometimes slow but always steady, growth

The big news continues to be AI fundamentally bringing HPC closer to the mainstream of enterprise computing whether it is on-prem, in a co-location facility, or in a public cloud.

All of this is starting big changes in the industry. We see this in mergers and acquisitions (basically new companies), new technologies, new architectures, and new business models. An example of the latter is the loosening of chip licensing, with open source models starting to get attention. Unlike open source software, however, silicon needs a fab, and the necessary electronic design automation software applications don't have equivalent open source alternatives.

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Following a supply chain security breach, Henry predicts that standards bodies like NIST and ISO will become even more active in this area with guidelines for hardware, software, and processes.

Shahin:

Shahin talks about Apple's design chief, Jony Ive, leaving the company and shares some jokes on social media that fall flat for Dan and Henry, who probably claim it has nothing to do with them being such PC aficionados.

Jony Ive, Designer Who Made Apple Look Like Apple, Is Leaving to Start a Firm

Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer and one of the most influential executives in the history of the Silicon Valley giant, is leaving the company. Mr. Ive will depart this year to start his own design company, Apple said on Thursday. Through his new firm, LoveFrom, Mr. Ive will continue to work on a wide range of Apple products, the company said.

Dan:

Dan concludes the show without a "catch" this week!

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Why did HPE buy Cray?

Why did HPE buy Cray?

The RFHPC team tackles the HPE-Cray acquisition as it reviews the companies' recent moves and strengths and market conditions in the context of:

• the 5-tier data center application architecture: Embedded, Mobile, Desktop, On-premises, Off-premises
• the emergence of AI as a must-do enterprise app, and
• increasing commonality between supercomputers and enterprise servers.

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Another week another breach!

Massive Quest Diagnostics data breach impacts 12 million patients

A massive data breach has struck Quest Diagnostics and the information of up to 11.9 million patients has potentially been compromised. On Monday, the US clinical laboratory said that American Medical Collection Agency (AMCA), a billing collections provider that works with Quest, informed the company that an unauthorized user had managed to obtain access to AMCA systems.

Dan:

Dan points out that the new Apple Mac Pro can be configured to cost tens of thousands of dollars. Given that he and Dan are PC people, the nuances of the Apple value are obviously lost of them, goes the counter argument.

Apple’s top spec Mac Pro will likely cost at least $35,000

That’s before you count the GPUs or a Pro Display XDR screen.
Apple announced today that its new Mac Pro starts at an already pricey $6,000, but the company neglected to mention how much the top-of-the-line model will cost. So we shopped around for equivalent parts to the top-end spec that Apple’s promising. As it turns out: $33,720.88 is likely the bare minimum — and that’s before factoring in the four GPUs, which could easily jack that price up to around $45,000.

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TOP500 Jun2019, Facebook Coin

The new TOP500 list of most powerful supercomputers is out and we do our usual quick analysis. Not much changed in the TOP10 but a lot is changing further down the list. Here is a quick take:

• There are 65 new entries in 2019.
• US science is receiving support via DOE sites and academic sites like TACC.
• 26 countries are represented. China continues to widen its lead, now with 219 entries, followed by the US with 116, Japan with 29, France with 19, the UK with 18, Germany with 14, Ireland and the Netherlands with 13 each, and Singapore with 10.
• Vendors substantially reflect the country standings. Lenovo has 175 entries, Inspur 71, and Sugon 63, all in China. Cray with 42 and HPE with 40 (which will combine when their deal closes), followed by Dell at 17 and IBM at 16.  Bull has 21 entries.
• There are a lot of "accidental supercomputers" on the list. These are systems that probably are not be doing much science or AI work but they could, and the vendors counted them and it seems to be within the rules to list them. It's controversial but not a new practice.
• There are several systems listed as "Internet" companies. Hard to tell what that means but it points to the existence of very large clusters in the cloud for whatever purpose. Last year, there was one system listed as Amazon EC2, which remains on the list. This time, there is also one at Facebook. Usually the big social/cloud players don't care to participate, though they obviously could summon the resources to run the benchmarks.
• Just over half of systems use Ethernet as a fabric. A quarter us InfiniBand, nearly 50 use Intel's OmniPath, and the rest, 55, use custom interconnects like the ones Cray provides. The team talks about Cray+HPE entering the interconnect business for real and if so, they will be formidable.
• The majority of entries, 367, do not have any accelerators. 125 use Nvidia GPUs.
• The overwhelming majority of the systems, 478 of them, are based on Intel CPUs. 13 are IBM, and there is 1 system based on Arm provided by Cavium, now part of Marvell.
• So the when it comes to chips, it's an Intel game with a respectable showing by Nvidia when GPUs are used. Alternatives are bound to appear as the tens and tens of AI chips in the works become available and Arm, AMD, and IBM build on. The recently announced system at Oakridge will be all AMD, and that will point to an alternative as well.
• Notably, Intel is listed as the vendor for 2 entries and Nvidia is listed for 4. While Intel has stayed largely away from looking like a system vendor, Nvidia is going for it with its usual alacrity. That, and the pending acquisition of Mellanox by Nvidia should serve as a warning to all system vendors who might feel stuck between treating Nvidia as an important supplier and an up and coming competitor.

CryptoSuper500

Shahin mentions the 2nd edition of the CryptoSuper500 list (really 50 for now), a list developed by his colleague Dr. Stephen Perrenod, which was launched last November, and is being released at the same time as the TOP500. The TOP500 has spawned variations that look at different workloads and attributes, for example, the Green500, Graph500, and IO500 lists. CryptoSuper500 was inspired by those lists. The material for the inaugural edition of the CryptoSuper500 list here.
Cryptocurrency mining operations are often pooled and are very much supercomputing class, typically using accelerator technologies such as custom ASICs, FPGAs, or GPUs. Bitcoin is the most notable of such currencies. Scroll down for the top-10 list and see the slides for the full list and the methodology.

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Henry talks about check-out lanes at Target all being down for unknown reasons, though he hesitates to call that a cybersecurity breach. It turned out he's right and the company blamed an "internal technology issue".

Target down (then back up) as cash registers fail and leave long lines

Target's payment systems appeared to be missing the mark the day before Father's Day, as terminals went AWOL for a couple of hours in a number of the company's US retail outlets. The outage caused long lines but prompted an encouraging show of sympathy for Target employees from people on Twitter. And there were some jokes too, of course.

Shahin:

Facebook is expected to release a new cryptocurrency that is already impacting the crypto market.

Here’s what we know so far about the secretive Facebook coin

Facebook is likely to release information about its secretive cryptocurrency project, codenamed Libra, as soon as June 18, TechCrunch reports.

As is traditional with new cryptocurrencies, the social networking giant is expected to release a so-called “white paper” outlining how the currency works and the company’s plans for it.

Dan:

Dan reminds us all of the inimitable Erich Anton Paul von Däniken and his ancient astronauts hypotheses!

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Black Hole Seen, with Data to Match

Here's this week's synopsis.

Black Holes Visualized

The news of the cool visualization of an actual black hole leads to interesting issues in HPC land. Shahin is at pains to give credit where it is due while considering it as an achievement in data visualization not unlike many others before it. Yes, it's about a fascinating topic, but that's also not unlike many others in the past.

But the team moves on to the real point: the size of the radio data that had to be collected and managed and processed to visualize it. 1.75 PB of raw data from each telescope meant a lot of physical drives that had to be flown to the data center. Henry leads a discussion about the race between bandwidth and data size, various companies’ plans to launch thousands of satellites to help get away from sneakernet, and the imminent arrival of 5G. We've discussed large scale data movement in previous episodes and think it's an important issue for HPC, AI, and Cloud.

Catch of the Week

Henry:
That sneakernet discussion above is it for Henry this week.

Shahin:

Mapping Space Debris (video)

LeoLabs is a company that maps objects in the low Earth orbit (LEO). The visdeo shows actual trajectories of 12,401 low Earth objects in space being tracked on August 24, 2017 by LeoLabs' phased array radars. Video loop shows approx 2 hours of data.

Dan:

Scientists put human gene into monkeys to make them smarter, human-like

Making monkeys more smart and human-like, scientists have used gene-editing to insert human brain gene in a monkey.
For the first time, a team of Chinese scientists made use of gene-editing techniques to make monkey brains more human-like. By the end, the monkeys, rhesus macaques, got smarter and had superior memories as compared to the unaltered monkeys.

The team doubts this is a true story and that leads Shahin to his first rant on the show when he complains about previously reputable publications succumbing to clickbait.

We're More Likely Than Not Living In A Computer Simulation, MIT Professor Suggests

An MIT professor has said he believes it's "more likely than not" that we are living in some kind of simulated universe, given that we ourselves are not far away from being capable of creating hyper-realistic simulations ourselves.

Yet another story that raises eyebrows. This one leads the RFHPC team to create a new award on the spot!

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