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!

Join us!

* Download the MP3 
* Sign up for the insideHPC Newsletter
* Follow us on Twitter
* Subscribe on Spotify 
* Subscribe on Google Play 
* Subscribe on iTunes 
* RSS Feed
* eMail us

Let's Learn Deeply about Extreme Weather

This week we have Dan, Jessi, and Shahin on the call. Henry is off in Los Cruces overseeing construction of what can only be called a bunker. Why? Its main feature is 21-inch rammed earth walls, guaranteed to withstand withering heat waves, cold snaps, and probably any high caliber round. We speculate on the exact configuration of the home, wondering if Henry is running wild with the rammed earth and concrete theme, with concrete chairs and tables, plus rammed earth interior walls.

Applying Deep Learning to Extreme Weather

Dan deftly moves us on to the main topic of this show, how researchers are using supercomputers to apply deep learning to extreme weather. A research team from Rice University utilized three supercomputers (TACC’s Stampede 2, Wrangler, and Pittsburg Supercomputing Center’s Bridges system) to see if data on heat waves and cold spells could be predicted by analysis of atmospheric circulation and prior surface temperature. The results of these tests indicated that this deep learning approach is more accurate at predicting extreme weather.

In the call, we discuss the computational difficulty of weather forecasting and the use case that the Rice researchers are testing. This promising research can pay great dividends in terms of  giving early warning to hazardous weather, saving crops and perhaps saving lives in the process.  As promised in the podcast, here’s a link to the paper. We also have a short discussion of what motivates Dan to read a particular paper and what turns him off. Jessi’s main standard in papers is that it has to be able to be printed in black and white and remain legible and understandable. So if you want to attract Jessi’s attention for your paper, make sure your charts don’t use color.

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

The question this week is why Cray computers were horseshoe shaped.  One of the reasons was wire length and this shape puts the components closely together to reduce the length of the wires needed to connect them. It also gave them enough room for a person to get their hands inside to weave the wires. So the key was minimal, uniform, and accessible wire length. There are also a couple of other explanations, one is that it gave room for the liquid cooling pipes necessary to cool the box, another is that the system forms a capital “C” shape, which stands for, of course, Cray.

Catch of the Week

Henry: is away this week. (We know some of you don't read this all and come straight here!)

Jessi:  Tells us that the US might want to take a close look at Estonia as a model to overcome cybersecurity. The country has put together a civilian cybersecurity force and instituted mandatory cyber classes in schools. This is a response to massive cyberattacks launched against Estonia in 2007 that took down much of their digital infrastructure for weeks.

Shahin:  Discusses how Justine Haupt came up with a way to keep her cell phone from distracting her – she built a rotary dial interface for it. Along with helping save her from using the most time-wasting features on her phone, it will also confound an entire generation of folks who have never seen a rotary phone dialer. Justine also is working in robotics and has a page of her inventions and thoughts.

Dan:  Brings up a story about a man convicted of murder mainly on the basis of DNA evidence, although that evidence was shaky, mainly saying that they couldn’t exclude him. His case was reopened by the Innocence Project who reached out to a company called Cybergenetics for further analysis. Cybergenetics ran samples through their 170,000 line AI algorithm and found that there was zero chance that the convicted man’s DNA was present in the sample. So the man will be released, which is great. The problem is that the Cbyergenetics code is a black box and the company, citing competitive advantage, will not release the code.  How should we deal with situations like this in the future?

Listen in to hear the full conversation

* Download the MP3 
* Sign up for the insideHPC Newsletter
* Follow us on Twitter
* Subscribe on Spotify 
* Subscribe on Google Play 
* Subscribe on iTunes 
* RSS Feed
* eMail us