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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Supercomputers Battle Corona

The conversation today begins with discussing how long it will take until Henry moves into his rammed earth Los Cruces bunker. For those of you keeping track at home, the correct answer was 41 days at the time of taping, which, by the time the podcast is out will probably be "a couple of weeks ago".

We quickly move on to discussing the Corona Virus, which started sharing the headlines with its handiwork COVID-19. What else is anyone talking about these days, right? We discuss how the supercomputing community has joined the fight and the impact on the battle against the virus.
We do our best to keep the conversation light, knowing that everyone out there is suffering from the virus – it’s the one thing we all have in common these days. We hope you enjoy the episode.

Catch of the Week:

Henry:  Hackers target medical field during Covid19 crisis, one of the crappiest things we’ve heard in a long time.
Shahin:  Tells us about a great paper title, “Software Defined Microarchitecture An Arguably Terrible Idea, but Certainly not the Worst Idea” as found on InsideHPC.
Jessie:  Discusses how Globus is offering free access for anyone working on the Covid19 Virus. Great job, Globus, way to pitch in.
Dan:  Shares his latest addiction, the ancient Asian game of Go. Here is an intro to the game and some puzzles to work on, get crackin’.

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Climbing El Capitan? Details Detailed!

 Supercomputer Leaps to New Peaks

At the top of the show we discuss whether Indiana (where Jessi is located at Purdue) is in the heartland or not. We all agree that it is and, yes, Jessi sees Larry Bird all the time.

Getting into the heart of the episode, Dan talks about the briefing he received on the new Lawrence Livermore El Capitan system to be built by HPE/Cray. This new $600 million system will be fueled by the AMD Genoa processor coupled with AMD’s Instinct GPUs. Performance should come in at TWO 64-bit exaflops peak, which is very, very sporty. The new box (more like a room) will be 10x faster than today’s fastest supercomputer and faster than the top 200 supercomputers in the world – combined.

As the show continues, we talk about the specifics of the system and components. Henry make the unfortunate mistake of bringing up IEEE floating point and sending Dan into a mini-rant. Back to the show, the system should require somewhere close to 30MW worth of electricity, which is much lower than the nearly 60MW predicted just a year or so ago. Not surprisingly, the system will be liquid cooled, but not, as we speculate, cooled by Slushy machines. We have a tremendous tech talk around the varying aspects of the machine and AMD’s great progress in clawing their way back into the market. Well worth a listen.

Why No One Should Ever Be Online. Ever.

In this edition, Henry talks about how an ultrasonic hack can make your phone vulnerable to pownership. Just sending the exact right frequency of sound to a phone sitting on a solid object might be enough to unlock it and let a miscreant get at all of your goodies. Yikes!

Catch of the Week

Jessi:  Astronaut applications have opened up again! If you ever wanted to go to space, this might be your chance. You’ll want to have a strong science and computing background – plus hero or heroine good looks wouldn’t hurt either.

Shahin:  Discusses AMD vs. NVIDIA GPU comparative shipment figures from 4Q2019.

Henry:  Net is empty, ouch.

Dan:  Bees can count to six, which is hugely disquieting. If bees can do math, we might be doomed. Maybe this is why beehives are hexagonal?

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Coronavirus

The show starts with our traditional lull, which always follows our initial introductions – when no one knows who should speak first, or prefer not to. However, we quickly regain our footing and get to the major topic of the day:  the coronavirus or COVID-19 as the doctors have dubbed it.

Shahin started out the conversation with a quick point about how supercomputing can help predict and track the progress of the disease. He also wonders about the economic effect on the tech business as inventories dry up while producers are sidelined by the virus. Dan puts out a sunny prediction that the entire medical infrastructure of the world is now focused on this virus and that we’ll surely see a cessation of the virus, aided by spring weather. Henry talks about how everything is interconnected todays global economy and how an incident in one geography can have ripple effects everywhere else. Jessi brings up the point that even if there was a vaccine, it would be difficult to get everyone vaccinated in a timely manner.

The team discusses how this might be a very good argument for diversification of supply chains in order to ensure supply of critical good. Jessi and Dan counter that having many smaller suppliers is less efficient than having few large-scale suppliers, thus, even if more suppliers were spread out geographically, competitive pressure would soon force them to consolidate in order to be competitive.

Why Nobody Should Ever be Online. Ever.

Henry brings up an article that discusses how only THREE of every 100,000 cyber-crimes are ever prosecuted, a shocking stat no matter how you look at it.

Catch of the Week

Jessi:  The Pentagon is requiring defense contractors to be cyber-security certified before they can take on new contracts. Definitely a step in the right direction.

Henry:  Comes up short this week due to spectacular snowfall at, and possibly in, his current home.

Shahin:  A book, The History of Fortran, has captured Shahin’s interest this week. In another catch, Shahin lauds AMD’s burgeoning strength in the HPC market, which is still building and should continue for some time into the future. Henry sounds a cautionary note about how AMD has to continue to execute and can’t whiff on the next generation of chips. Dan points how out AMD was first to 64 bit and first to multiple cores, which led to their first big market success over Intel, but how the company fumbled the ball later on and faded away.

Dan:  Avast Antivirus, developer of the free Avast antivirus software, was caught selling customer browser data, reinforcing the fact that nothing is really free in the world today. If you’re not paying for a product, then you ARE the product. It also reinforces Dan’s belief that if the software is free, it’s a virus.

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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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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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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.

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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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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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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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