A Look at the Xennet Free-Market Cloud

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the Xennet initiative, a “public, distributed, and decentralized Supercomputer.”

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The New TPCx-HS Benchmark for Big Data

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discusses the new TPCx-HS benchmark for Big Data. Designed to asses a broad range of system topologies and implementation methodologies, TPCx-HS is the industry’s first objective specification enabling measurement of both hardware and software including Hadoop Runtime, Hadoop Filesystem API compatible systems and MapReduce layers.

The TPCx-HS benchmark specification is now available online. You can also check out a slidecast on the new benchmark presented by Raghunath Nambiar, chairman of the TPCx-HS committee.

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Moving Processing out to the Network

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discusses the concept of offloading computation to networked devices such a storage controllers. During a recent Analyst Call with Dan Olds, Mellanox described this technology as potential growth area. Henry wants to more about the interface to such and environment before he renders an opinion, while Rich notes that the companies like Solarflare have been doing this at the NIC level for level for several years now.

A Straw Proposal for Better Resource Management in Linux

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC teams looks at Henry Newman's recent straw proposal for better resource management for Linux in HPC.

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Radio Free HPC ISC'14 Wrapup Show

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the highlights from the recent ISC'14 conference in Leipzig, Germany.

• Intel revealed more about their upcoming Knights Landing processor, including the new Omni Scale Fabric.
• Mellanox rolled out the World’s First 100Gb/s EDR InfiniBand Switch as well as the HPC-X Scalable Software Toolkit.
• ARM64 made its debut on the show floor, and it seems to be best suited for accelerated systems.
• Team South Africa won the Student Cluster Competition for the second year in a row, while Team EPCC set a LINPACK record of 10.14 Teraflops.

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Delays in PCIe 4.0 and New Apollo Servers from HP

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks newly announced delays for the PCIe 4.0 specification and why this is bad news for high performance computing. After that, the topic switches to the new liquid-cooled Apollo 8000 servers from HP.

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Summer 2014 Tech Reading

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at a couple of techie books for Summer reading.

• Flash Boys is about a small group of Wall Street guys who figure out that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders and that, post–financial crisis, the markets have become not more free but less, and more controlled by the big Wall Street banks. Working at different firms, they come to this realization separately; but after they discover one another, the flash boys band together and set out to reform the financial markets.

• Daemon. When a designer of computer games dies, he leaves behind a program that unravels the Internet's interconnected world. It corrupts, kills, and runs independent of human control. It's up to Detective Peter Sebeck to wrest the world from the malevolent virtual enemy before its ultimate purpose is realized: to dismantle society and bring about a new world order.

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