Holographic Storage on the Horizon

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team takes a look at pending holographic storage technology.

Henry Newman's head is still spinning from the technology previews he saw at the recent IEEE Mass Data Storage Conference. Could this be a game-changer for the tape industry and archiving data? What are the specs, limitations, and most importantly, are these the droids we've been looking for?



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Fireside Chat - HPC Embraces Big Data

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team interview Fritz Ferstl, CTO of Univa. Topics include Big Data, HPC, and the continuing convergence of both.

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Radio Free HPC Looks at Lustre with Brent Gorda

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discusses Lustre and LUG 2013 with Brent Gorda. Now part of Intel in their High Performance Data Division, Gorda was CEO of Whamcloud when the company was acquired last summer.

Gorda recently wrote a post about the rapid growth of the Lustre community, so we started our discussion there and learned a good deal more about the popular file system.

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The Joy of RDMA?

In this follow-up podcast to the GPU Technology Conference, the Radio Free HPC team mulls over a talk by GE’s Dustin Franklin, GPU app specialist. Dustin’s topic was GPU-direct RDMA; was this a first look at real-world RDMA with GPU-to-GPU communications?

Follow along as the guys describe flow charts on technical slides that are not yet approved by viewing for the “great unwashed masses” – but make no mistake, they’re impressed by what they saw. Dan “knows a guy” who can divulge more, and offers to arrange an inquisition with Henry. Henry promised to “be nice,” whatever he means by that. Rich missed this GTC session and several others while “conducting interviews,” whatever he means by that. Dan offers another characterization.

And this just in: there’s a great deal of information available on the Internet.

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FPGA’s and Stuff

In this episode of Radio Free HPC, Rich, Dan, and Henry discuss the recent buzz surrounding FGPAs. After being sidelined by accelerators, they’re increasingly being used in appliances.

Big vendors are talking about FPGAs not only for appliances but for general-purpose systems as performance assists. Are we headed back to the future?

The guys discuss the ins and outs of FPGAs and why, in some cases, they could be a huge win for the organizations that implement them. But is the architecture flexible enough? For enterprise and Big Data, perhaps it is. If you need to perform the same algorithms over and over again, FPGAs could be a perfect fit.

As with all things tech, there are a few cautionary notes to be sounded. Amassing more and more appliances can lead down a tricky road. Will their use in workload-optimized systems lead to vendor lock-in? Can you really teach an old FPGA new tricks? And can they be weaponized?

Most importantly: how are servers like cattle? Tune in to find out…

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Do Not Talk About Exascale

In this episode of Radio Free HPC, the topic of Exascale is under the hosts' scrutiny once again as they discuss some interesting stories released by The Exascale Report featuring opinion by Bill Gropp of NCSA and Bill Harrod of DOE.

Rule #1: You do not talk about Exascale. (Kind of like rule #1 of Fight Club, except the guys keep breaking it.) Why not? Because too many of the people talking about Exascale are having the wrong conversation about it.

What should the conversation be? Should it be about the systems themselves, or about the work that can be done only with those systems -- the science that we can't yet do? Spoiler alert: Dan and Henry disagree on this. But a peaceful vibe reigns once again as they discuss what The Exascale Report calls "The Three Noble Truths" of Exascale, which sounds kind of Zen and cool -- as if it was coined by Exascale Samurai.

And finally... is it time to talk about Zetta-scale?

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Human Face of Big Data

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at at a new book called The Human Face of Big Data by Rick Smolan.

The book details the ways in which Big Data affects our daily lives and predicts the ways it will transform our future. The big-picture overview the author presents is that of our planet becoming a giant nervous system in which we, its inhabitants, are the nerve endings. Or as his ten-year-old son put it, "Isn't this like growing another eye?" Indeed it is: with all of this sensory input, we are beginning to see a third dimension. It's also one of those we-don't-know-what-we-don't-know propositions. Just as we could never have imagined how transformative the Internet would be, we can't predict where Big Data will take us. We don't even know, really, how to maximize the data we're collecting right now.

The Human Face of Big Data is available -- well, probably lots of places -- but here's the Amazon link, because they have so much data on us already.

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