Market Trends Toward Chipmaker Consolidation

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team looks at some interesting industry developments from the past week.

• Diablo Technologies resumes shipping Memory Channel Storage after a court ruling in their patent dispute with Netlist. Did the patent dispute kill their chances for success int he market? With continuing appeals in progress, Diablo is not out of the woods yet.
• Lenovo opens an HPC Center in Stuttgart. The company is investing in HPC and Dan thinks they could be the market leader in short order. They also have plans for SuperMUC Phase 2, a water-cooled system that was once the fastest supercomputer in Europe.
• Intel's potential acquisition of FPGA maker Altera. With companies like Microsoft making noise about FPGA power efficiency in their Azure cloud, this deal could give Intel an edge in hybrid datacenter technology. In related news, Samsung is reportedly looking at buying AMD and Micron has gobbled up Convey Computer.

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GTC 2105 Wrapup Show

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team wraps up the GPU Technology Conference. The theme of the show this year was Deep Learning, a topic that is heating up the market for GPUs with challenges like image recognition and self-driving cars.

As a sister conference, the OpenPOWER Summit this week in San Jose showcased the first OpenPower hardware, including a prototype HPC server from IBM that will pave the way to the two IBM/Nvidia/Mellanox Coral supercomputers expected in 2017.

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Big Data Analytics go Major League

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team takes a look at Big Data Analytics in sports. According to recent reports, at least one team in Major League Baseball is using a Cray Urika system in a bid to gain competitive advantage.

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Polarizing Net Neutrality

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team splits on the topic of Net Neutrality. The FCC will soon publish its new rules for ensuring an even playing field for Internet Bandwidth.

Dan doesn't like the idea one bit. Henry disagrees and thinks we need Net Neutrality to keep the Comcasts of the world from running amok. As for Rich, he just finds the whole argument rather amusing since it's pretty much a done deal.

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Lenovo Superfish Scandal

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the recent Lenovo laptop scandal involving Superfish malware. The company intentionally installed the program, which replaces security certificates so that the company could serve up ads on encrypted web pages.

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Archive Debacle at WGBH in Boston

In this episode, Radio Free HPC looks an archival horror story from WGBH in Boston. As the PBS affiliate attempted to move its archived video footage to the American Project, the organization was horrified to discover that many of their files on LTO4 tapes were unreadable.

Does your archive strategy match up with today's storage economics? Henry contends that this is really worth a look as the notion that "write once to tape and forget" is a recipe for disaster. In an era where this WGBH archive could easily fit on 38 hard drives, does migration to tape still make sense?

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Sorting through the HPC News Grab Bag

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team digs into the Grab Bag for Topics of the Week"

• Dan attended the Lenovo Analyst Conference, and they have him convinced that the company is Going Big on HPC.
• Rich notes that D-Wave Systems has just landed an additional $29 Million in financing. Is Quantum Computing ready for Prime Time?
• Henry is looking forward to seeing what the President's science priorities are going to be when his budget comes out this week. 

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