Looking Forward to the StartupHPC Meetup at SC14

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team previews the StartupHPC Meetup at SC14.

Does your Startup have ties to High Performance Computing? SC14 will be in New Orleans this year, and we are holding our first meetup on Nov 17th in New Orleans. Please come, meet like minded people, listen to industry notables, and kick off StartupHPC as a support community.

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AWS Profitability - Ready for the Cloud Apocalypse?

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team discuss the possibility of a future where the Big 3 (Amazon, Google, and Microsoft) figure out that Cloud is not profitable and pull the plug. If that Cloud Apocalypse sounds far fetched, check out these recent news nuggets:

• An article in The Register that describes how Amazon lost money despite $20 Billion in revenue.
• Business Week says that Amazon’s cloud unit, AWS, is one of the fastest-growing software businesses of all time, as Bloomberg Businessweek‘s Ashlee Vance recently wrote. It’s also in a hotly contested market. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft (MSFT) have been slashing prices to lure customers from one another.
• The Wall Street Journal says that "The developments point to the possibility that profit margins in Amazon's cloud unit—believed to be much higher than its online retailing business—face a long-term squeeze that add to investor concerns about the company's profitability."

If you're more into numbers, the team has put together a spreadsheet of AWS revenue that does not paint a rosy picture.

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DSPs for Systems Intelligence at Paypal

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team discusses a new Paypal project that is leveraging TI Keystone DSP processors for systems intelligence.

Paypal has developed a novel approach to systems intelligence. By analyzing their chaotic real-time server data, they can produce organized, intelligent results using HP’s Moonshot server powered by TI DSP processors.

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Celebrity Photo Hack Shows Need for End-to-End Data Security

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discusses the recent iCloud theft of celebrity photos. Are passwords dead? Henry thinks this is simply the data breach of the week and that the real issue is the need for two-factor authentication and end-to-end security.

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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.