NSF, QIS Funding, But First...

18th Listener Awards!

Run-of-the-mill start as we introduce the team. Henry has quite a bit of echo since he’s now firmly ensconced in his rammed earth survival compound.

Big news this week! We finally received our 18^th email in our first ever RadioFreeHPC email-to-win contest. First, let’s see what they win…

The first item in our Grand Prize bundle is a circa 1999 suede leather IBM S/390 laptop bag. It’s roomy at a generous 16”x14”, large enough to house the biggest 17” laptop or maybe 15 or 20 tablets. If that’s not enough room, it also expands an additional 4-5” on the bottom. There are compartments galore under the flaps and you’d better fill them up with soft foam since there’s really no padding around the laptop compartment.

The suede leather is a nice touch that adds weight to the bag, it’s not a lightweight in any sense of the word. We’d advise covering the bag if you’re going to be out in the weather, because the suede is sure to stain if it is exposed to water.

This bag is in brand new condition and has never been used. Ever.

The second piece of this cornucopia of delight is a IBM Mainframe 50^th anniversary medallion. It’s a very light weight metal medallion housed in a stunningly clear plastic frame. Put it on your mantle at home and impress your friends and family with how important you must be to have such a keepsake.

The final gift is a cassette tape of an IBM Talk S/390 episode covering S/390 integrated solutions. If you still have a cassette player, this will provide minutes of mainframe tech talk, marketing tips and keys to closing that big deal.

So you want to know who won this amazing collection of swag? Listen to the show and find out, or follow us on Twitter and look a couple of weeks back!

Government Bills Aim to Up the Ante for Science

In the rest of the show we discuss some recent government news. First is that the US House is looking to devote an additional $1.25 billion over the next five years. But even bigger is the proposal to expand the US National Science Foundation by $100 beeelion – which is more than 4x the size of the existing organization. We discuss the implications of this and how this might change the game in terms of base research. There is also a bill to significantly dial up funding for Quantum Information Science. All good and the team s excited to see these moves and hopes they'll proceed swimmingly!

Reasons Why No One Should Ever be Online. Ever.

Brace yourselves, GitHub has been attacked! Developers and users alike unaware that they’re downloading malware when they’re getting their open source on. Ouch.

Catch of the Week

Jessie:  Campaign Zero and Police Scorecard aim at reducing police violence.

Henry:  UK broadband performance is holding up in these virus-rampant times. Yay for the UK, great job.

Dan:  Skinny gene discovered! Eat all you want and never gain weight. Is it true?

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ColdQuanta Serves Up Some Bose-Einstein Condensate

The show starts with Dan, Jessi and Shahin in attendance. Henry is traveling from his old home base in Minnesota to his new command bunker in lovely Las Cruces, NM. Last we heard he was in Kansas City and making good time. We’re not sure how long we’re going to have to do without him as Comcast seems to be slow playing him on his internet installation timeline.

Why Freeze the Whole Room If you Just want a Frozen Atom?

Our big topic today is the quantum computing company ColdQuanta. It’s headed by an old pal of ours Bo Ewald and has just come out of stealth mode into the glaring spotlight of RadioFreeHPC. They have a unique approach to quantum computing, trapping atoms themselves to create Bose-Einstein Condensate. This is a fifth state of matter, which matters quite a bit. When you freeze a gas of Bosons at low density to near zero, you start to get macroscopic access to microscopic quantum mechanical effects, which is a pretty big deal. With the quantum mechanics start, you can control it, change it, and get computations out of it. The secret sauce for ColdQuanta is served cold, all the way down into the micro-kelvins and kept very locally, which makes it easier to get your condensate.

The company is focused on measurement and sensing but also mention straight computation, the latter like most of the other quantum competitors. They were the first company to put their quantum computer in space and the first to create Bose-Einstein Condensate while in orbit at the International Space Station.

Catch of the Week

Jessi:  Want to chill out and help NASA at the same time? Jessi has found a way with NeMO-Net, a game where users cruise through an animated ocean floor and classify coral structures. Your answers are then fed into NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer, which uses the data as fodder to improve it’s own identification prowess. It’s a great way to while away the hours during these Covid19 shut downs, right?

Shahin:  has two catches, the first is a celebration of IBM’s quant-iversary, marking the fourth anniversary of them having a quantum computer on the web – many happy returns to Big Blue. They’re also sponsoring a contest, see the web link for details.

In his second catch, Shahin shamelessly promotes his recent talk at the HPC AI Advisory Council virtual Stanford conference. He did a great job on covering just about every buzzword topic in the industry in only 30 minutes, well done.

Dan:  Dano likes fast things and seeing fast things get even faster. This is what attracted him to the story about ISV Risk Fuel and Microsoft’s Azure posting an article boasting a 20 million x speedup of derivative processing.  A 20 million times speedup of anything is pretty significant and they achieve this with a combination of 8 NVIDIA V100 GPUs (w/32GB memory each), InfiniBand and Risk Fuel’s amazing software. What’s great about this is that with this speed the model has complete fidelity with traditional calculations. In other words, you can speed all you like without any downside when it comes to accuracy – amazing stuff.

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Honeywell Traps, Zaps Ions for Science

Dan starts this episode with, as usual, an introduction of the cast. Henry reports that he’s only three weeks away from his epic move from Minnesota to Los Cruces, New Mexico.

Trapping Those Unruly Ions

We quickly move to our main topic:  Honeywell’s Trapped Ion Quantum computing initiative.  Shahin gives us a good overview of digital vs. analog and classical vs. quantum science (I recommend listeners white board out the quadrants he’s describing and their contents). The Honeywell system is in the ‘quantum-gate’ quadrant of Shahin’s model, suspending ions in space through magnetics and then hitting them with lasers to produce entanglement.

The Honeywell system is interesting because it is scoring well on the emerging Quantum Volume metric – showing very high fidelity for its qubit count. This system is the culmination of over 10 years of R&D and should be on the market later on this year.

Studying from Home

How does studying from home compare to working from home? Our second topic today is a dive into how universities are operating during the virus-related physical campus closings. Our own Jessi explains how her Purdue classes are now being conducted online with professors either video recording lectures or narrating slide decks. Some of her classes are truncated due to platform limits and tech problems. This is probably to be expected given the sudden move to online. There are practical considerations as well. Many students were on spring break when the lock downs went into place, so they don’t have their books or clothes with them. Jessi definitely does not think that online universities are the wave of the future. She strongly prefers the physical model where she can interact with students and professors. According to Jessi, nothing beats the physical model when it comes to higher ed.

Reasons Why No One Should Ever Be Online. Ever.

This week, Henry hips us to the fact that Chinese hackers may have been living in the guts of Linux since 2012. This is truly a chilling thought, as Linux runs a good portion of mission critical systems and almost all the cloud systems in the world. How big a threat is this? Listen to the pod to find out.

Catch of the Week

Jessi:  COBOL LIVES! The state of New Jersey is desperately looking for COBOL programmers to keep their creaky unemployment insurance system cranking along.

Henry:  hooked a big fish, but passed it over to Shahin who thinks it's pretty sublime.

Shahin:  landed Henry’s catch, which is a very rare film of the WW2 British code breakers hard at work at the legendary Bletchley Park site. Amazing stuff.

Dan:  a rare empty net week for Dano, sad, very sad.

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2020 Predictions, Get it?!

Shiny Crystal Ball

It’s our first episode of 2020, yay! The first that was recorded in 2020 anyway.  It's a predictable 20/20 joke (more of a meh comment really) but the topic today is... PREDICTIONS. More specifically, it's our predictions of what’s going to happen in the next year. We may not always be correct, but we think maybe we’re always certain. We look at compute, interconnects, security, and general innovations:

Compute

Dan says that we’re going to have more of it. Henry predicts that we’ll see a RISC-V based supercomputer on the TOP500 list by the end of 2020 – gutsy call on that.  This is a double down on a bet that Dan and Henry have, so he’s reinforcing his position. Dan also sees 2020 as the “Year of the FPGA” when we start to see more and more HPC boxes fueled by FPGA, which is something Shahin mostly agrees with while Henry disputes it. We also touch on liquid cooling and process size as part of this topic.

Interconnects

Dan thinks that InfiniBand will announce 400 GBs interconnect by the end of this year – a bold prediction. On a communications note, Henry says that 20% of the US user base will have access to 5G phone coverage by the end of the year. Shahin asserts that only 3% of the market will actually buy it, but Dan and Henry say not so fast – it’ll be closer to 10%. Shahin is looking for a 5G connection for servers. Not as an interconnect, but more as a WAN or a cluster that spans an entire county. On another note, Shahin believes that HPE will formally get into the interconnect business, selling the Slingshot interconnect.

Security Trends

Dan says we need more of it but doesn’t see anything that’s going to move the needle back towards the users. Jessi thinks that security education has improved things security-wise and that will continue in 2020. Henry and Dan disagree. Jessi is adamant.

Innovation/Trends

Dan pegs in-memory computing as a field that will blossom over the coming year(s). Shahin agrees that in-memory is very interesting and ripe for innovation as well. But he also sees a lot of developments in the AI processor space. Henry talks about a new application workflow that will go something like this:  Object > MemMap > Compute on the MemMap file/data > back to Object, with no POSIX in the way. Shahin also sees more quantum supremacy in the news in the coming year.

Letter(s) to the Editor!

We discuss our first letter to the editor, from a listener who wasn’t a fan of the episode where we answered Jessi’s question about why tape is still used. His term for that feature? “Poor.” This prompted Shahin to quip, “I’m surprised we don’t get more of these…..”  Please keep those comments (good, indifferent, or critical) coming, our email is podcast@radiofreehpc.com.

Why Nobody Should Ever be Online. Ever.

This week, Henry doesn’t have a “Reason Why No One Should Ever Be Online. Ever.” He was offline all week, so thus doesn’t have anything to scare us with.

Catch of the Week

Henry:  has no catch, his net came up empty.

Shahin:  was practicing Catch & Release this week, so his creel is fishless.

Jessi:  discusses her new phone. She lost her old one in a Czech toilet (nasty, yikes). This is her first phone upgrade since junior high school – probably 6-7 years – and she’s agog at how the phones have advanced. She can now take pictures and use apps. Yay Jessi!

Dan:   Encourages listeners to have a good year and to let us know what you think via email (podcast@radiofreehpc.com) and twitter (@radiofreehpc). He also highlights the new RadioFreeHPC logo along the way.

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Quantum, Quantum, Quantum

 This episode was recorded back in 2019 but then the holiday episode had to go out during holidays and cut in line, messing up the cogs of the well-oiled machine that is the RFHPC production process. Regardless, the episode starts out with Henry being cranky. It also ends with Henry being cranky. But between those two events, we discuss quantum computing and Shahin’s trip to the Q2B quantum computing conference in San Jose. His walkaway, as someone else put it, and he quotes: “Quantum computing is overhyped and underestimated.”

Not surprisingly, there is a lot of activity in quantum, with nearly every country pushing the envelop outward. One of the big concerns is that existing cryptography is now vulnerable to quantum cracking. Shahin assures us that this isn’t the case today and is probably a decade away, which is another way of saying nobody knows, so it could be next week, but probably not.

We also learn the term “NISQ” which is a descriptive acronym for the current state of quantum systems. NISQ stands for “Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum” computing. The conversation touches on various ways quantum computing is used now and where it’s heading, plus the main reason why everyone seems to be kicking the tires on quantum:  the fear of missing out.

It’s a very exciting area, but to Shahin, it seems like how AI was maybe 8-10 years ago, so still early days.

Why Nobody Should Ever be Online. Ever.

Henry lays out a dizzying scenario where hackers contact a person, telling them that their credit card is about to be used by an unauthorized party and advising them to call the police. When the person calls the police, the hackers intercept the call and, while pretending to be the authorities, extract personal details, credit card numbers, etc. This is possible because the hackers have taken over the telephone switch. Ouch, scary stuff.

But to finish out the year on a high note, Henry touches on reasons why people should be online, which was, well, nice.

Things You Think You Know, But Maybe Don’t.

In keeping with the theme of the show, Jessi asks for a quickie intro into quantum computing, why it’s such a big deal, and how it will really be used. Shahin obliges with a discussion of a vast array of quantum stuff, even including a reference to Schrodinger’s half-dead cat. He also discusses how quantum can provide exponential speed ups over traditional computing and the promise of quantum in the future.

Catch of the Week

Dan has managed to catch the team catching their catch:




Henry’s net was empty this time.

Jessi:  Brings up how Emotet malware hackers are using high-school environmental activist Greta Thunberg as a lure to infect users with Emotet and other malicious software. The hook is in the form of an attachment, “Support Greta Thunberg.doc”, which, when opened, will launch a malicious macro that downloads the Emotet Trojan and executes it. Nasty stuff. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/emotet-malware-uses-greta-thunberg-demonstration-invites-as-lure/

Shahin:  Never one to leave well enough alone, Shahin brings up quantum computing yet again by discussing a quantum comic strip (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) that does a great job of explaining quantum concepts in cartoon form. What’s next? Using sock puppets to explain HPC? http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3

Dan:  In the interests of time, Dan skips over his lame Catch of the Week.

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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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Truth, Trust, and Deepfakes

You never write, you never call, you never send flowers “just because.” But that’s ok, we welcome you back to another scintillating episode of Radio Free HPC anyway. Henry is traveling on yet another business trip, lodged in the Washington, DC area, and not even in his favorite hotel chain. But his reputation as a team player goes back to his days in the bayou, Dan says. And he performs another skillful yet awkward segue from Henry’s swamp origins to the swamp-like nature of the internet, which brings us to our special guest.

What’s true? What’s real? And how can we KNOW it?

We welcome Dave Maher, CTO of internet security company Intertrust, to share with us his deep knowledge of digital communication, identity management, data rights management, cryptography and digital certificates, blockchain, and much else. This whole subject is very much in his wheelhouse.

Dave gave us the run down on Intertrust and his other roles in the cybersecurity arena. Dan opens up the questioning with “Dave, do we really need security on the internet?” Dave, quick on the draw, responded “Well, we really haven’t had it for the last 20 years, so why start now?” which got the conversation off and running. Dave talked about the evolution of the internet and the rising need for security given that the internet has vastly changed since it began so long ago.

The main topic of the conversation is authenticity and truth. With the rise of deepfakes (images or videos that are convincingly falsified), how do we know that what we’re seeing and hearing is created by who we think and is what we think?

This leads to a deep conversation on ways we can verify content so that we know that it’s authentic. There are many ways of approaching it, but some implementation of blockchain seems to be a promising route.

Listen to the pod and get hipped to this very important topic. Shahin keeps saying it's the grand challenge of our time. He might be right.

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Preview of Supercomputing '19 - Denver

What's All Happening at SC19 in Denver?

Supercomputing '19 is coming to Denver this year and who better than Rich Brueckner to give us a sneak peak. Super excited to have Rich and his signature laugh on this show again.


In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews the full list of ancillary events at SC19, and Henry gives us one more reason to stay offline. Oh, and a few predictions.

There's a lot that happens before the exhibit floor on Monday night. Our old pal Rich Brueckner from insideHPC joins us to give us the full rundown.

SC19 Ancillary Events:

HP-CAST. HPE's user group meeting starts things off on Friday, Nov. 14 - Saturday, Nov. 15. This two-day event will be the first HP-CAST meeting with Cray in the fold, so we're looking to some great insight as to how the two companies will merge their product line, partner network, and HPC ecosystems.

Intel HPC Developer Conference. In this two-day event on Sunday, Nov. 15 - Monday, Nov. 16, Intel offers a robust program to connect the HPC community with Intel developers, Intel engineers, and industry experts. "We’ll help you tackle your HPC challenges by offering a wide range of learning opportunities at SC19.

HPC Day with The Next Platform. Making its debut at SC19, HPC Day on Sunday, Nov. 17 is an in-depth day with thought leaders at the front of high performance innovation. In a series of on-stage interviews (no slides) with industry thought leaders, the Next Platform what’s relevant to the future of supercomputing.

Arm HPC User Group. Now in its fifth year, the all-day event takes place on Monday, Nov. 18 at the Curtis Hotel in Denver. "This is not a Marketing event -- we have a full day agenda of strategic partners and end-users from all regions of the world sharing their experiences, best practices, plans, ecosystem advances, and results on Arm-based platforms for HPC applications."

Dell EMC HPC Community. Kicking off at 8:00am on Monday, Nov. 18, the Dell HPC Community meeting will feature keynote presentations by HPC experts and a networking event to discuss best practices in the use of Dell EMC HPC Systems. Attendees will have the unique opportunity to receive updates on HPC strategy, product and solution plans from Dell executives and technical staff and technology partners.

DDN User Group. Starting at 1:00pm on Monday, Nov. 18, the DDN User Group brings together the best and brightest scientists, researchers and technologists to share and learn how leading global HPC organizations are executing cutting-edge initiatives that are transforming the world. The goal of the event is to gather the community during SC to discover how HPC organizations are assessing and leveraging technology to raise the bar on HPC innovations and best practices.

NVIDIA 2019 Special Address. You’re invited to attend the NVIDIA 2019 Special Address from founder and CEO, Jensen Huang. The event takes place 3:00pm - 5:00pm on Monday, November 18. Last year's address featured spectacular cosmology visualizations computed on NVIDIA GPUs. What will be revealed about accelerated computing on stage this year? Don't miss it. You must RSVP to attend.

Beowulf Bash at SC19. After the SC19 show floor closes on Monday night, the Beowulf Bash is the party not to miss. "This year, we thought it would be great to do Stranger Things theme party. There will be 80s-style entertainment, games, the best 80s tribute band. Food, beverages, entertainment, and Eggo Waffles provided.

Hyperion Research HPC Market Briefing Breakfast. Starting at 7:00am on Tuesday, Nov. 19, this informative briefing from Hyperion Research is always standing-room only. Get there early!

Nimbix Lounge Party. On Tuesday night, Nimbix will host its 7th Annual Lounge Party in Denver. "We invite you along with our co-host Intel to enjoy an evening of entertainment, cocktails and delicious food at White Pie."

Lunch and Learn - Getting a Handle on HPC Cloud Costs. Starting at noon on Wednesday, Nov. 20, this lunch event will share the many advantages of using a cloud spend management platform and how to avoid expensive mistakes when migrating HPC workloads to the cloud. This event is recommended for anyone considering the use of cloud for HPC workloads and will be particularly useful for attendees running Slurm, Univa Grid Engine, or open-source Grid Engine. The session will focus on real-world deployment examples and provide technical demonstrations that show how hybrid clouds can be deployed efficiently and cost-effectively across multiple cloud providers.

Check out the insideHPC Events Calendar and send an email to news@insideHPC.com if your organization sponsoring a function at SC19 and you'd like it listed.

Why No One Should Ever Be Online.  Ever.

Henry’s tells us even internet "domain name registrars" are not immune, describing breaches at  NetworkSolutions.com, Register.com and Web.com which eventually led them to ask customers to reset their passwords. They apparently discovered the hack in August 2019 in which customer account information was accessed. [Yes, we're still massaging the title of this segment but looks like the above is gelling, albeit w/o a shorter tweet-friendly version.]

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Turing Machine is Sequential, How About a Parallel Machine?

Solving Exponential Problems in Polynomial Time

Pretty much all of computing rests on the strong foundation of the Turing Machine, a general purpose formulation of computing which happens to be very sequential. It transfers that attribute to the Von Neumann architecture that manifests it and leads to the famous Von Neumann bottleneck.

It would be good if an inherently parallel foundation existed. That requires a blending of computing and memory and has led to approaches to build processor-in-memory or computational memory systems. If successful, it could help reach the nirvana of solving (some?) exponential problems in polynomial time by exposing the intrinsic parallelism of large scale problems.

The @RadioFreeHPC team delves into this topic with the folks at MemComputing, a San Diego startup that's built a new parallel foundation for computing. It calls it the universal memcomputing machine, and a "realization of self-organizing circuits".

It's a lively discussion with co-founders John Beane, CEO, and Fabio Traversa, CTO of the company. Just in emulation mode on existing hardware, and on the right (exponentially growing) applications, the technology has performed so well as to lead the company to offer it as a service now instead of waiting to build custom hardware, and to make them think of Quantum Computing kinds of performance.

Here are a few slides followed by the relevant academic paper. Click on the images to expand them, and click on the paper's title to see the PDF on Arxiv.org.

Universal Memcomputing

We introduce the notion of universal memcomputing machines (UMMs): a class of brain-inspired general-purpose computing machines based on systems with memory, whereby processing and storing of information occur on the same physical location. We analytically prove that the memory properties of UMMs endow them with universal computing power—they are Turing-complete—, intrinsic parallelism, functional polymorphism, and information overhead, namely their collective states can support exponential data compression directly in memory.

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

Election security is going to be a big issue in the coming months and years. Elections have been classified as “Critical Infrastructure”, which has serious implications for Federal and state officials. Henry reports that the US Attorney for West Virginia has issued a statement about election security and concerns about the vulnerability of the state's election system.

United States Attorney Mike Stuart Issues Statement on Election Security

CHARLESTON, W.VA. – United States Attorney Mike Stuart issued the following statement about the important issues of elections, election security and voter legitimacy: “During the 2018 election cycle, Secretary of State Warner referred to my office what he perceived to be an attempted intrusion by an outside party into the West Virginia military mobile voting system. I note that there was no intrusion and the integrity of votes and the election system was not compromised.  My office instituted an investigation to determine the facts and whether any federal laws were violated. The FBI has led that investigation.  That investigation is currently ongoing and no legal conclusions whatsoever have been made regarding the conduct of the activity or whether any federal laws were violated.

Catch of the Week

Shahin talks about the work that DOE labs are doing to better understand the impact of AI on science.

DOE Sets Sights on Accelerating AI (and other) Technology Transfer

For the past two days DOE leaders along with ~350 members from academia and industry gathered in Chicago to discuss AI development and the ways in which industry and DOE could collaborate to foster AI commercialization. The occasion was DOE’s fourth InnovationXLab Summit – the earlier three summits were on advanced manufacturing; grid modernization; and energy storage. Two more are planned: bio-manufacturing in January and quantum science in the late spring.

Henry points out eight new storage-related patents granted to Intel, 2 of which look quite important for emerging storage systems. Here are the two patents here and here, and a link to the article:

Intel Assigned Eight Patents

Erase block granularity eviction in host based caching, persistently caching storage data in page cache, drive-based storage scrubbing, processors, methods, systems, and instructions to load multiple data elements to destination storage locations other than packed data registers, secure memory, techniques for command validation for access to storage device, authenticating system to enable access to diagnostic interface in storage device, techniques for moving data between network i/ot device and storage device

Dan is concerned that bots are overstepping their boundaries and talks about research at Microsoft that can generate fake comments for online articles.

This won't end well. Microsoft's AI boffins unleash a bot that can generate fake comments for news articles

Please no, we don't need a machine-learning troll farm As if the internet isn’t already a complicated cesspool full of trolls, AI engineers have gone one step further to build a machine learning model that can generate fake comments for news articles.

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Quantum Supremacy? Yes and No!

Quantum Supremacy Is and Is Not

How quantum is that?! The RadioFreeHPC team discusses the Google/NASA paper, titled "Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor", that was published and then unpublished. But it's the internet and everything is a "digital tattoo", so there are copies out there (see below).

The paper, right in its title, and at least in that draft form, claimed Quantum supremacy. "Doing what?" we hope you ask. Well, nothing particularly significant, and decidedly quantum-friendly. You might even call it "embarrassingly quantum" since quantum is all about probability functions and this experiment samples the probability distribution of a repeated experiment. But it's not nothing. 

One scary consequence of quantum supremacy is its ability to readily factorize large numbers which could be used to unscramble encrypted data. But A) this is not what happened, B) it's not expected to happen any time soon (think years), and C) it will depend on the specific encryption algorithm. We must say, however, that the paper looks pretty good. Here's the abstract. Click on the title to read it all:

Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor

Google AI Quantum and collaborators The tantalizing promise of quantum computers is that certain computational tasks might be executed exponentially faster on a quantum processor than on a classical processor. A fundamental challenge is to build a high-fidelity processor capable of running quantum algorithms in an exponentially large computational space. Here, we report using a processor with programmable superconducting qubits to create quantum states on 53 qubits, occupying a state space 2⁵³∼10¹⁶. Measurements from repeated experiments sample the corresponding probability distribution, which we verify using classical simulations. While our processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of the quantum circuit 1 million times, a state-of-the-art supercomputer would require approximately 10,000 years to perform the equivalent task. This dramatic speedup relative to all known classical algorithms provides an experimental realization of quantum supremacy on a computational task and heralds the advent of a much-anticipated computing paradigm.

LANL gets the First 5,000 Qubit D-Wave

Meanwhile, D-Wave announced that its new 5,000 qubit quantum computer has found its first home at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Qubits are different from vendor to vendor in terms of the underlying technology and implementation. Shahin lists several.

@RadioFreeHPC Update

So proud of you all! At the time of this writing, @RadioFreeHPC has soared to about 16 followers. We're pretty much there. Thank you!

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

Henry tells the fascinating story of Krebs thwarting the nefarious schemes of a professional hacker who aimed to frame him and actually mailed him narcotics. The mastermind behind it was was arrested and imprisoned for unrelated charges. Henry is really turning this into a good news segment. Dan isn't encouraged, however.

Catch of the Week

Shahin talks about using consumer electronics to build supercomputers, mentioning the recent 1,060 node Raspberry Pi cluster built by Oracle, reminiscent of the one LANL did in 2017. AFRL build a 1,760 node cluster of PlayStations, based on the IBM/Sony/Toshiba Cell processor, in 2010 following similar efforts starting in the mid 2000s. He also recalls similar projects he may have had something to do with: SGI's Project Molecule and Project Kelvin (for cooling) in 2008 (also here), and also a cluster of JavaStations at Sun in the late 90s.

Dan discusses a UCLA project to use the thermoelectric effect and build "a device that makes electricity at night using heat radiating from the ground". Intriguing, but looks a tad too pricey for what it can deliver right now.

Speaking of Intriguing, Henry talks about DNA storage. Incredible data density, but don't ask what file system it uses or whether you can have it on a USB stick any time soon. Dan and Shahin seem to have more fun with this topic than Henry!

Listen in to hear the full conversation.

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Quantum Apps Are Hybrid

"Quantum applications are always and only hybrid" is the quote that Shahin wants you to remember as he gives an update on recent news in Quantum Computing, and especially how to program them. If you're always going to have to mix classical code with quantum code then you need an environment that is built for that workflow, and thus we see a lot of attention given to that in the QIS (Quantum Information Science) area. This is reminiscent of OpenGL for graphics accelerators and OpenCL/CUDA for compute accelerators.

Henry talks about 5G and how people are starting to get serious bandwidth: 1.8 gbps has been seen on existing smart phones. Henry's super fast cable modem set-up is delivering 220 gbps and 16ms latency. And 5G is only going to get better with advertised peaks of 20 gbps and 4ms latency depending on frequency and handset and power, etc. Everyone then picks on an easy target: DSL.

Dan gives a heartfelt farewell to the retiring Titan supercomputer, complete with the matching sombre music in the background, which, discerning listeners will note, plays only when he's talking. Affection for Titan continues in its memory, and we imagine possibly also its DRAM.

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Another week another cyber-security breach! Henry has a few of them but it's all too depressing, so he decides to pass this week.

Shahin:

Shahin is looking forward to attending the Hot Chips conference to be held at Stanford August . Henry is envious, given the technology candy store that the conference represents. Shahin promises to take good notes and report back in a future episode. Let him know if you'll be there.

Dan:

Dan talks about cyber-attacks and ransomeware targeting small and mid-sized cities, the impact on insurance rates, and what a hard problem that is to solve.

Listen in to hear the full conversation.

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Quantum Computing and HPC

Quantum Computing and HPC

Another scintillating and insightful episode of RFHPC is about Quantum Computing and HPC and how the two spaces are evolving and cooperating.

We welcome a a distinguished guest with a most suitable background to talk to us about HPC and Quantum Computing. Mike Booth,  who’s been in supercomputing since 1979 including stints at Cray through 2000 where he ran the Software and Applications division and was later a GM at StorageTek heading the network storage division. He got into Quantum Computing when he joined D-Wave. He had just accepted to be the CTO of Quantum Computing, Inc. when we recorded this show.

We discuss and touch on how Quantum Computing and HPC interface, analog vs digital, qubits, magnets, resistors, connectors, cryogenics, algorithms, languages, the huge search spaces, NP-complete problems, quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (Qubo), Tabu search, etc. and how they are two different games right now but touching two sides of the big problems that represent grand challenges. Because QC is an accelerator, it fits nicely with how a lot of HPC is being done today.

We’re going to have to bring Mike back and we look forward to that.

ExaScale at Oakridge

Mike happens to be in Tennessee, and the episode was recorded when the new ExaScale system at Oakridge was announced so the team. That was quite a significant day for US science, and a second big win for Cray, this time with AMD. It's one of the few large systems that is not based on Intel or Nvidia technologies, and was described as:

• 100 Cray Shasta cabinets
• 40 MW power
• More than 1 million lbs weight
• 7,300 square feet
• 90 miles of cabling
• 5,900 gallons of water per minute for cooling

We don't remember who exactly had a hard stop, but no time for Catch of the Week this week, which some of you would be pleased to hear!

Give it a listen (and take good notes!)

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