Is Our Future Liquid Cooled? Also: Provenance of Surveillance Data!

The Veracity and Provenance of Surveillance Data

Controversy strikes when news breaks that "Amazon's home security company Ring has enlisted local police departments around the country to advertise its surveillance cameras in exchange for free Ring products and a "portal" that allows police to request footage from these cameras, a secret agreement obtained by Motherboard shows."
The nature of such agreements can, well, garner national attention, as we see here (and do our part). That kind of attention led to the PD cited in the news in Lakeland, FL, to clarify its relationship with Ring, saying "their agreement isn't about fostering a particular brand of doorbell, but rather any tool that helps crime-fighting." Several important topics come up which can easily kindle, if not ignite, passions, and they do here also.
All of this is because the evidentiary benefits of actual images is not in doubt. Or is it?! An important issue in this day and age is the veracity and provenance of video feeds, which are liable to be complete fabrications. Welcome to the digital age!

New Supercomputer in Austria

A new system built by Lenovo checks in at #82 on the TOP500 list and is liquid cooled, leading to a debate on the future of cooling and various forms of liquid-cooling: direct contact, immersion, phase chance. Dan puts Henry and Shahin on the spot to look in the crystal ball and see if they can see it as clearly as he does. He thinks they failed.

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Apple looks ahead to 5G with purchase of Intel’s smartphone-modem unit

Apple is paying Intel $1 billion for the chip maker’s smartphone-modem division in a deal driven by the upcoming transition to the next generation of wireless technology.
The agreement announced Thursday comes three months after Apple AAPL, -2.12%   ended a long-running dispute with one of Intel’s rivals, Qualcomm QCOM, -0.07%  . That ensured Apple would have a pipeline of chips it needs for future iPhones to work on ultrafast wireless networks known as 5G.
The Apple-Qualcomm truce prompted Intel INTC, -1.91%   to abandon its attempts to make chips for 5G modems, effectively putting that part of its business up for grabs.

 

Shahin:

Shahin talks about Stephen Wolfram's blog describing his appearance before a US Senate committee.

Testifying at the Senate about A.I.-Selected Content on the Internet

Three and a half weeks ago I got an email asking me if I’d testify at a hearing of the US Senate Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation and the Internet. Given that the title of the hearing was “Optimizing for Engagement: Understanding the Use of Persuasive Technology on Internet Platforms” I wasn’t sure why I’d be relevant.
But then the email went on: “The hearing is intended to examine, among other things, whether...

Dan:

An entire nation just got hacked

(CNN) - Asen Genov is pretty furious. His personal data was made public this week after records of more than 5 million Bulgarians got stolen by hackers from the country's tax revenue office.
In a country of just 7 million people, the scale of the hack means that just about every working adult has been affected.  

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ExaScale is a 4-way Competition

In this post-ISC show, the RadioFree team discusses

• Magical cooling technology from Europe. Dan goes over magic beads that draw heat away and can carry-on doing it pretty much forever in a technology from the venerable Fraunhofer Institute and showcased by Lenovo.
• How pursuit of ExaScale computing is turning into heated competition with the US, China, Japan, and Europe. The European effort is targeting 2 pre-exa installation in the coming months, and 2 actual ExaScale installations in the 2022-2023 timeframe at least one of which will be based on European technology. This presumably refers to the European Process Initiative.
  The software ecosystem is an important consideration and how they all evolve and whether or not they converge will be a big issue.
• Another heated competition at the ISC Student Cluster Competition with the team from South Africa claiming the top spot. Dan has developed an efficiency metric that he will unveil in a future episode. This could separate the prowess of the team from that of the system!

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Henry point out the challenge for customers when the company that breached their data goes out of business.

Collections Firm Behind LabCorp, Quest Breaches Files for Bankruptcy

A medical billing firm responsible for a recent eight-month data breach that exposed the personal information on nearly 20 million Americans has filed for bankruptcy, citing “enormous expenses” from notifying affected consumers and the loss of its four largest customers.

Shahin:

Shahin highlights a paper on the beginnings of the programming language APL. A cool historical account.

The Socio-Technical Beginnings of APL, by Eugene McDonnell

This paper gives some of the history of implementations of APL, and concentrates on the system aspects of these implementations, paying special attention to the evolution of the workspace concept, the time-sharing scheduling strategy, and the handling of the terminal. It contrasts the development of APL with the development of other time-sharing systems which were being built at the same time.

Dan:

Dan relays the sad story of the multi-year demise of a the honor bar at the hotel near ISC.
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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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