A Hard Look at the Two 2017 Coral Supercomputers

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team meets at SC14 in New Orleans to discuss the recent news that Nvidia & IBM will build two Coral 150+ Petaflop Supercomputers in 2017 for Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories. The two machines will feature IBM POWER9 processors coupled with Nvidia’s future Volta GPU technology. NVLink will be a critical piece of the architecture as well, along with a system interconnect powered by Mellanox.

Henry thinks that IBM will have trouble delivering, and he reminds us what happened when they stumbled and pulled out of the Blue Waters deal at NCSA. Will this be the same story? Rich thinks they will come through, though probably 18 months late. Dan is being the pragmatic one this week. Go figure.

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A Look at the Print 'n Fly Gude to SC14 New Orleans

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC reviews the new Print 'n Fly Guide to SC14 New Orleans. Designed to be an in-flight magazine, the Guide is custom tailored for your journey to the Big Easy at SC14.

Download the Print 'n Fly Guide to SC14 New Orleans

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Previewing the SC14 Student Cluster Competition

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team previews the SC14 Student Cluster Competition. This year a record 12 teams will face off to build the fastest HPC clusters under a carefully monitored power envelope.

Learn more at the Student Cluster Competition Blog.

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IBM Gets out the Chip Fab Business

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team looks at IBM's plans to hand off its microelectronics unit to Global Foundries.

Is Big Blue on the right track? While Dan believes they're doing what they need to do, Henry thinks they need to completely retool the company like they did back in 1993.

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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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