A Preview of the ISC'14 Student Cluster Competition

In this podcast, Rich and Dan preview the Student Cluster Competition at ISC'14 in Leipzig.

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Google Hits the History Erase Button

In this podcast the Radio Free HPC team looks at a grab bag of technical news items for the week of May 11, 2014:

• A landmark ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling that an individual could demand that "irrelevant or outdated" information be deleted from Google search results.
• A new Bull supercomputer coming to DKRZ with a 45 Petabyte filesystem based on Lustre and ClusterStor technology.
• The Call for Submissions by the Graph500 and the Green Graph500.
• Dan's visit to Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China to see Tianhe-2, the world's fastest supercomputer.

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Seven Myths of SSD vs. HDD Pricing

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the Seven Myths of SSD vs. HDD Pricing, one of Henry's recent Slashdotted features at Enterprise Storage Forum.

In a nutshell, Henry thinks that the notion of SSDs replacing spinning disks in the datacenter is built on a series of flawed assumptions regarding flash storage.

• First, some assume that the price of MLC NAND flash will continue to decrease at a rapid and predictable rate that will make it competitive with HDDs for bandwidth, and nearly for capacity, by 2014 or 2015. This downward trend, it is assumed, will make flash a viable alternative for large storage and to act as a memory or “buffer” to improve performance.
• Second, there is a general assumption that prices for bandwidth ($/GB/s) for SSDs is much lower than for HDDs, and that enterprises will measure costs in these terms instead of capacity.
• Third, there is no distinction made between flash in general, such as consumer SSDs, and enterprise storage SSDs. It is assumed that MLC NAND will not only reduce in price ($/GB) but also that it will increase in density and larger capacity drives will be developed.
• Fourth, it is assumed that the quality of MLC NAND will either remain constant or increase as prices decrease and densities increase, allowing it to improve not only performance, but also reliability and power consumption of the systems it is used in.
• Fifth, it is assumed that power consumption for SSDs is, or will shortly be, significantly lower than that of HDDs overall, on a per GB basis and on a per GB/s basis.
• Sixth, they assume disk performance will grow at a constant rate of about 20 percent per generation and not improve.
• Seventh, they assume file system data layout will not improve to allow better disk utilization.

According to Henry, most of these assumptions were made in early 2012. So far they have turned out to be partially true at best and wrong at worst. A big fan of the partially true, Dan pushes back as a matter of principle. Rich, on the other hand, has heard his share of SSD hype and thinks we need need to look at the data and see what it has to say.

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The 50th Anniversary of the Mainframe

In this podcast, Dan and Henry wax poetically on the 50th Anniversary of the Mainframe. Dan flew across the country to attend the festivities, and Henry sounds a bit jealous. Rich has no idea why anyone would even cross town for such a thing, so he gets taken to the woodshed on this one.

Play Quiz: IBM S360 Mainframe Computer History now!


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Radio Free HPC Looks at GPU Technology Conference 2014

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at HPC announcements from the GPU Technology Conference 2014.

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Radio Free HPC Looks at Spring 2014 Conferences

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the wave of HPC conferences coming up this Spring.

Henry is headed to a speaking gig at the HPC User Forum and then on to GEOINT. Dan is off to China for the ASC Student Competition. Meanwhile, Rich will be on the road for a month straight at GTC, the Swiss HPC Conference, LUG 2014, and then off to moderate a Big Data Panel at the Red Hat Summit.

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The Coming Wave of Declustered RAID

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the coming wave of declustered RAID solutions designed to address the problem of ever-increasing RAID rebuild times. With 5 Terabyte drives in the wings, RAID cluster rebuild times are becoming impractical.

Dan is impressed with what IBM is doing in this area with GPFS.
Henry thinks these larger drives harken the death of RAID-5 and RAID-6.
Rich has been keeping a close watch on Xyratex and their ClusterStor GridRaid implementation.
Read the original paper on Declustered RAID by Garth Gibson and Mark Holland.

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