Brent Gorda on his new Role as HPC Lead for ARM

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team catches up with Brent Gorda to discuss the future of ARM in HPC.

Brent Gorda leads the HPC business for Arm. Prior to this recent role, he spent a year consulting (HPC/Quantum/AI) and advising startup CEO's in Silicon Valley. Earlier in his career, he founded Whamcloud, which he sold to Intel and served as the General Manager for Intel’s High Performance Data Division. Brent has also served on many advisory boards (SCxy, Cray Research, Westera) and founded the Student Cluster Competition, a world-wide event affecting the careers of thousands of undergraduates each year.

After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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A Look at Remarkable Growth in the HPC Server Market

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at remarkable growth in the HPC Server Market reported by Hyperion Research.

Hyperion Research reports that worldwide factory revenue for the high-performance computing (HPC) technical server market jumped 27.6% to $3.7 billion in the second quarter of 2018 (2Q18), up from $2.9 billion in the same period of 2017, according to the newly released Hyperion Research Worldwide High-Performance Technical Server QView. Sequentially, second-quarter 2018 HPC server revenue grew 16.7% over the $3.2 billion figure in the first quarter of 2018.

Revenue in the first half of calendar year 2018 rose 23.8% over the 2017 first half, from $5.6 billion to $6.9 billion. Hyperion Research forecasts that revenue for HPC server systems will reach about $12.9 billion in full-year 2018 and will grow to $19.6 billion in 2022.

According to Steve Conway, Hyperion Research senior vice president of research, “Revenue in the second quarter also benefited from HPC’s crucial role at the forefront of R&D for emerging, economically important artificial intelligence uses such as self-driving vehicles, precision medicine, smart cities and the Internet of Things.”

After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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SC18 Event Preview

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks ahead to preview SC18 in Dallas. The conference takes place Nov. 11 - 16.

SC18 in Dallas is world’s largest gathering of HPC professionals, and the smart money is on the organizations that leverage the show for their own gatherings, meetups, special booth sessions, and user groups. Here is a roundup of special events not to miss.

Ancillary Events at SC18:

• HP-CAST is the HPE Enterprise user group meeting that kicks things off in Dallas on Nov. 9-10, prior to SC18.
• Intel HPC Forum at the Omni in Dallas on Nov. 11. The event is free of charge and features a keynote by Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee.
• Dell EMC HPC Community Meeting goes from 8:00 am - 2:00 pm at the Fairmont Dallas on Nov. 12.
• DDN User Group Meeting at the Old Red Museum of Dallas County History & Culture from 1:00 pm - 6:00pm on Nov. 12.
• Hyperion Research Breakfast Briefing at SC18 takes place at the Adolphus Hotel at 7:15 am - 9:00 am on Tuesday, Nov. 13. Breakfast will be served at 6:45 am.
• Univa will host a Lunch & Learn session from 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm on Nov. 14 at the Westin in Dallas.
• Mellanox SC18 Evening Event on Wednesday, Nov. 14. Entertainment will be provided SUPER mentalist in the world Lior Suchard in his amazing show followed by a gala dinner.

Does your company have special events planned for SC18? Let us know at news @ insidehpc.com and we will add it to this post.

See our complete coverage of SC18

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Radio Free HPC Looks at the Frightening Notpetya Cyber Attack

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at one of the most massive hacks ever, the Notpetya cyber attack on shipping company Maersk and their partners.

This story, featured in Wired magazine, should send chills down the spines of anyone out there who isn’t religiously updating their machines. In other news, Dan is in Australia for the week at the HPC-AI Advisory Council annual Perth meeting, in his catch of the week, he discusses how one of the companies at the conference has made extensive use of IBM’s Watson and is seeing great benefits. Shahin brings up a new camera with almost unimaginable image specs, while Henry get his two cents in on everything else.”

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A Look at the new Eagle Supercomputer at NREL

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the new Eagle supercomputing under construction at NREL.

The new machine from HPE will run more detailed models that simulate complex processes, systems, and phenomena to advance early research and development on energy technologies across fields including vehicle, wind power, and data sciences.

We are strongly committed to architecting technologies to power the next wave of supercomputing and are creating advanced HPC systems while scaling energy efficiency in data centers, to get us there,” said Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC and AI Group, HPE. “Through Eagle and our overall ongoing collaboration with the U.S. DOE and NREL, we are advancing research to bolster innovation in energy and sustainability.”

After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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A Look at China' new Exascale Prototypes

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at China's new ARM-based Exascale supercomputer prototype.

As reported in China Daily, scientists have put an exascale computing prototype into operation that does not run the x86 instruction set. The Sunway exascale computer prototype was developed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology (NRCPC), the team that developed Sunway TaihuLight, crowned the world's fastest computer two years in a row in 2016 and 2017.

The Sunway exascale computer prototype is very much like a concept car that can run on road,"said Yang Meihong, director of the National Supercomputing Center in Jinan. "We expect to build the exascale computer in the second half of 2020 or the first half of 2021," said Yang.

Another prototype exascale supercomputer Tianhe-3 passed the acceptance tests on July 22. Its final version is expected to come out in 2020. The two prototypes marked a further step towards China's successful development of the next-generation supercomputer.

After that, we do our Catch of the Week:

• Rich points us to the story about Rigetti Computing's pending 128-qubit quantum computer. The company has already built the 128-qubit processing chip, and is working to put all the pieces together to bring more power to researchers and developers. If successful, it could be the world’s most powerful quantum computer and it could have the chance to outpace traditional supercomputers. Meanwhile, you can already access IBMQ, D-Wave, and Chinese quantum machines in the cloud today.
• Henry notes that one of the scary things to come out of the Black Hat conference is a new kind of microwave weapon for cooking your enemy from communication satellites.
• Dan is wardriving in North Carolina in the town the Internet forgot.

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A Look at the IO500 Benchmark Suite

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team talks to John Bent from the IO500 committee about why he and a team of I/O professionals created the IO500 benchmark suite. The second IO500 list was revealed at ISC 2018 in Frankfurt, Germany.

Following the success of the Top500 in collecting and analyzing historical trends in supercomputer technology and evolution, the IO500 was created in 2017 and published its first list at SC17. The need for such an initiative has long been known within High Performance Computing; however, defining appropriate benchmarks had long been challenging. Despite this challenge, the community, after long and spirited discussion, finally reached consensus on a suite of benchmarks and a metric for resolving the scores into a single ranking.

After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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