Coral is Cray for All

Cray Pulls an Exascale Hat Trick

Guess who's having a great year? Think Aurora, Frontier, and El Capitan. Cray has put some nice numbers on the accounts receivable ledger, and these are not ordinary numbers. The Exascale era is being defined substantially by the DOE Coral program and the commercial markets are watching as their computing needs start looking like those of the national labs. In that context, Cray's clean sweep makes its leadership in this area very important.
All of this is happening as Cray gears up to become what we hope to be an important part of HPE. The last time Cray sold anything like this to anyone was Cray BSD going to Sun, and that ended up being a multibillion dollar juggernaut. Exascale is a bigger deal, especially as supercomputing goes mainstream because of AI and data science. Exciting times. And kudos to HPE for snapping up Cray at the right time.

The impact of AI on Science

Speaking of AI, there is a series of town halls is being held around the nation by Argonne National Labs "aimed at collecting community input on the opportunities and challenges facing the scientific community in the era of convergence of High Performance Computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and the expected integration of large-scale simulation, advanced data analysis, data driven predictive modeling, theory, and high-throughput experiments. The term we are using to represent the next generation of methods and scientific opportunity is 'AI for Science'."
Co-chairing the town halls are Rick Stevens of Argonne, Kathy Yelick from Berkeley Labs, and Oak Ridge Labs' Jeff Nichols. Dan references a very good interview with Rick Stevens.

Henry Newman's Feel-Good Security Corner

Henry delights us all once again by describing how your camera can be an "Enter Here" sign for malware:

Canon DSLR Camera Infected with Ransomware Over the Air

Vulnerabilities in the image transfer protocol used in digital cameras enabled a security researcher to infect with ransomware a Canon EOS 80D DSLR over a rogue WiFi connection.
A host of six flaws discovered in the implementation of the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) in Canon cameras, some of them offering exploit options for a variety of attacks.

Catch of the Week

It was a pretty full episode and so we skip Catch-of-the-Week segment this week.

Listen in to hear the full conversation.

Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

AMD Victory Lap

AMD Victory Lap

AMD mojo continues as it pushes Moore's law one more time. RadioFree looks into the AMD Rome CPU, a beast that brings back the glory days of Opteron and establishes itself as the chip to have, and establishes AMD as the company to beat.

New Segment: Henry Newman's Feel-Good Security Corner

Henry typically looks out for you by tracking the week's most interesting cybersecurity stories. This calls for a new segment on the show. Shahin thinks Henry has deftly branded his "Catch of the Week" and getting himself off that segment. Certainly looks like it this time.

AT&T workers took $1 million in bribes to unlock 2 million phones, DOJ says

An indictment alleges that "Fahd recruited and paid AT&T insiders to use their computer credentials and access to disable AT&T's proprietary locking software that prevented ineligible phones from being removed from AT&T's network," a DOJ announcement yesterday said.

Catch of the Week

Shahin:

Shahin wants you to check out a cool event and the excellent talks that are posted. This is the meeting on the future of computing held by the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program: "among the oldest and largest of formal Federal programs that coordinate the activities of multiple agencies to tackle multidisciplinary, multitechnology, and multisector R&D needs. The 24 NITRD member agencies now invest approximately $5 billion annually in R&D programs that identify, develop, and transition to practical use the advanced networking and IT capabilities needed by the Federal Government and the Nation."

Future Computing Community of Interest Meeting, August 5-6, 2019, NITRD NCO

Goal: The Future Computing (FC) Community of Interest Meeting will explore the computing landscape for the coming decade and beyond, along with emerging and future application drivers, to inform agencies and to identify potential opportunities as well as gaps. It will also examine new software concepts needed for the effective use of advances that come with the future computing systems to ensure that the federal government is poised to respond to unanticipated challenges and opportunities.

Dan:

Dan's Catch of the Week is Rant of the Week as he complains about the complexity of creating a professional web site. Shahin agrees. Henry is not so sure but then he hasn't tried it himself yet. 30 years after the web was created, the complexity of using it for anything with reasonable complexity is still so cumbersome. What's up with that?

Listen in to hear the full conversation.

Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

Who will benefit from Intel dropping Omni-Path?

Spoofing the Spoofers

Henry has a brilliant idea to weaponize his password generator against phishing attacks.

Intel Drops Omni-Path

Henry and Shahin take a close look at the history of High Performance Interconnects, recent news, and how the market is changing profoundly. The departure of Intel from this segment is good news for some, and it remains to be seen what strategy Intel will adopt for the HPC market.

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Henry brings up one his favorite topics (going all the way back to our very first episode): the dreaded Silent Data Corruption, this time as part of the testing that the 737 MAX is undergoing. As he's wont to do, Shahin puts this in the context of our collective transition from the Industrial Age to Information Age. He thinks the series of issues with the plane prove just how difficult it is for manufacturers to go more and more digital.

Another rewrite for 737 Max software as cosmic bit-flipping tests glitch out systems – report

Testing focused on flipping five bits, said to control some of the most crucial parameters: positioning of flight controls and activation state of flight control systems, such as the infamous MCAS anti-stall system.

Shahin:

Shahin thinks the mention of building an AI supercomputer by Microsoft is intriguing. They already offer Cray capability in Azure and inquiring minds want to know more.

Microsoft to invest $1 billion in OpenAI, will jointly develop new supercomputer technologies

Microsoft and OpenAI also plan to work together on new AI supercomputing technologies to solve the world’s hardest problems. “The companies will focus on building a computational platform in Azure of unprecedented scale, which will train and run increasingly advanced AI models, include hardware technologies that build on Microsoft’s supercomputing technology, and adhere to the two companies’ shared principles on ethics and trust..."

Listen in to hear the full conversation.

Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

Is Our Future Liquid Cooled? Also: Provenance of Surveillance Data!

The Veracity and Provenance of Surveillance Data

Controversy strikes when news breaks that "Amazon's home security company Ring has enlisted local police departments around the country to advertise its surveillance cameras in exchange for free Ring products and a "portal" that allows police to request footage from these cameras, a secret agreement obtained by Motherboard shows."
The nature of such agreements can, well, garner national attention, as we see here (and do our part). That kind of attention led to the PD cited in the news in Lakeland, FL, to clarify its relationship with Ring, saying "their agreement isn't about fostering a particular brand of doorbell, but rather any tool that helps crime-fighting." Several important topics come up which can easily kindle, if not ignite, passions, and they do here also.
All of this is because the evidentiary benefits of actual images is not in doubt. Or is it?! An important issue in this day and age is the veracity and provenance of video feeds, which are liable to be complete fabrications. Welcome to the digital age!

New Supercomputer in Austria

A new system built by Lenovo checks in at #82 on the TOP500 list and is liquid cooled, leading to a debate on the future of cooling and various forms of liquid-cooling: direct contact, immersion, phase chance. Dan puts Henry and Shahin on the spot to look in the crystal ball and see if they can see it as clearly as he does. He thinks they failed.

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Apple looks ahead to 5G with purchase of Intel’s smartphone-modem unit

Apple is paying Intel $1 billion for the chip maker’s smartphone-modem division in a deal driven by the upcoming transition to the next generation of wireless technology.
The agreement announced Thursday comes three months after Apple AAPL, -2.12%   ended a long-running dispute with one of Intel’s rivals, Qualcomm QCOM, -0.07%  . That ensured Apple would have a pipeline of chips it needs for future iPhones to work on ultrafast wireless networks known as 5G.
The Apple-Qualcomm truce prompted Intel INTC, -1.91%   to abandon its attempts to make chips for 5G modems, effectively putting that part of its business up for grabs.

 

Shahin:

Shahin talks about Stephen Wolfram's blog describing his appearance before a US Senate committee.

Testifying at the Senate about A.I.-Selected Content on the Internet

Three and a half weeks ago I got an email asking me if I’d testify at a hearing of the US Senate Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation and the Internet. Given that the title of the hearing was “Optimizing for Engagement: Understanding the Use of Persuasive Technology on Internet Platforms” I wasn’t sure why I’d be relevant.
But then the email went on: “The hearing is intended to examine, among other things, whether...

Dan:

An entire nation just got hacked

(CNN) - Asen Genov is pretty furious. His personal data was made public this week after records of more than 5 million Bulgarians got stolen by hackers from the country's tax revenue office.
In a country of just 7 million people, the scale of the hack means that just about every working adult has been affected.  

Listen in to hear the full conversation

Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed
Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

Is cloud too expensive for HPC?

Is cloud too expensive for HPC?

Enquiring minds want to know, as does the HPC community whose single-minded obsession with maximum price-performance is notorious and legendary. The Radio Free team looks at actual cloud pricing based on available data and Dan's research which fuel a hearty discussion.

They look at configurations, compare prices, talk about the costs that are not included, segment the market, and then segment the applications.

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Henry highlights of the importance of having external 3rd party teams and defined processes (FIPS, Common Criteria, GDPR, etc.) test your equipment. This follows the detection of vulnerabilities in a data center class SSD. Nobody can disagree with that, of course.

Shahin:

Reflections on Trusting Trust, Turing Award Lecture by Ken Thompson

To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software.
[...]

In college, before video games, we would amuse our- selves by posing programming exercises. One of the favorites was to write the shortest self-reproducing pro- gram. Since this is an exercise divorced from reality, the usual vehicle was FORTRAN. Actually, FORTRAN was the language of choice for the same reason that three-legged races are popular.

Listen in to hear the full conversation.

Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

Quantum Apps Are Hybrid

"Quantum applications are always and only hybrid" is the quote that Shahin wants you to remember as he gives an update on recent news in Quantum Computing, and especially how to program them. If you're always going to have to mix classical code with quantum code then you need an environment that is built for that workflow, and thus we see a lot of attention given to that in the QIS (Quantum Information Science) area. This is reminiscent of OpenGL for graphics accelerators and OpenCL/CUDA for compute accelerators.

Henry talks about 5G and how people are starting to get serious bandwidth: 1.8 gbps has been seen on existing smart phones. Henry's super fast cable modem set-up is delivering 220 gbps and 16ms latency. And 5G is only going to get better with advertised peaks of 20 gbps and 4ms latency depending on frequency and handset and power, etc. Everyone then picks on an easy target: DSL.

Dan gives a heartfelt farewell to the retiring Titan supercomputer, complete with the matching sombre music in the background, which, discerning listeners will note, plays only when he's talking. Affection for Titan continues in its memory, and we imagine possibly also its DRAM.

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Another week another cyber-security breach! Henry has a few of them but it's all too depressing, so he decides to pass this week.

Shahin:

Shahin is looking forward to attending the Hot Chips conference to be held at Stanford August . Henry is envious, given the technology candy store that the conference represents. Shahin promises to take good notes and report back in a future episode. Let him know if you'll be there.

Dan:

Dan talks about cyber-attacks and ransomeware targeting small and mid-sized cities, the impact on insurance rates, and what a hard problem that is to solve.

Listen in to hear the full conversation.

Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

HPC Market Eyes $44B in 5 Years

HPC Market Eyes $44B

New report from Hyperion Research has the HPC+AI market growing to $44B, with a B, in 5 years. The industry is hitting on all cylinders, benefiting from

• The ExaScale race,
• AI coming to the enterprise only to find that it needs, or really is, HPC, depending on your point of view, and
• it's usual, sometimes slow but always steady, growth

The big news continues to be AI fundamentally bringing HPC closer to the mainstream of enterprise computing whether it is on-prem, in a co-location facility, or in a public cloud.

All of this is starting big changes in the industry. We see this in mergers and acquisitions (basically new companies), new technologies, new architectures, and new business models. An example of the latter is the loosening of chip licensing, with open source models starting to get attention. Unlike open source software, however, silicon needs a fab, and the necessary electronic design automation software applications don't have equivalent open source alternatives.

Catch of the Week

Henry:

Following a supply chain security breach, Henry predicts that standards bodies like NIST and ISO will become even more active in this area with guidelines for hardware, software, and processes.

Shahin:

Shahin talks about Apple's design chief, Jony Ive, leaving the company and shares some jokes on social media that fall flat for Dan and Henry, who probably claim it has nothing to do with them being such PC aficionados.

Jony Ive, Designer Who Made Apple Look Like Apple, Is Leaving to Start a Firm

Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer and one of the most influential executives in the history of the Silicon Valley giant, is leaving the company. Mr. Ive will depart this year to start his own design company, Apple said on Thursday. Through his new firm, LoveFrom, Mr. Ive will continue to work on a wide range of Apple products, the company said.

Dan:

Dan concludes the show without a "catch" this week!

Listen in to hear the full conversation.

Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter