Coronavirus

The show starts with our traditional lull, which always follows our initial introductions – when no one knows who should speak first, or prefer not to. However, we quickly regain our footing and get to the major topic of the day:  the coronavirus or COVID-19 as the doctors have dubbed it.

Shahin started out the conversation with a quick point about how supercomputing can help predict and track the progress of the disease. He also wonders about the economic effect on the tech business as inventories dry up while producers are sidelined by the virus. Dan puts out a sunny prediction that the entire medical infrastructure of the world is now focused on this virus and that we’ll surely see a cessation of the virus, aided by spring weather. Henry talks about how everything is interconnected todays global economy and how an incident in one geography can have ripple effects everywhere else. Jessi brings up the point that even if there was a vaccine, it would be difficult to get everyone vaccinated in a timely manner.

The team discusses how this might be a very good argument for diversification of supply chains in order to ensure supply of critical good. Jessi and Dan counter that having many smaller suppliers is less efficient than having few large-scale suppliers, thus, even if more suppliers were spread out geographically, competitive pressure would soon force them to consolidate in order to be competitive.

Why Nobody Should Ever be Online. Ever.

Henry brings up an article that discusses how only THREE of every 100,000 cyber-crimes are ever prosecuted, a shocking stat no matter how you look at it.

Catch of the Week

Jessi:  The Pentagon is requiring defense contractors to be cyber-security certified before they can take on new contracts. Definitely a step in the right direction.

Henry:  Comes up short this week due to spectacular snowfall at, and possibly in, his current home.

Shahin:  A book, The History of Fortran, has captured Shahin’s interest this week. In another catch, Shahin lauds AMD’s burgeoning strength in the HPC market, which is still building and should continue for some time into the future. Henry sounds a cautionary note about how AMD has to continue to execute and can’t whiff on the next generation of chips. Dan points how out AMD was first to 64 bit and first to multiple cores, which led to their first big market success over Intel, but how the company fumbled the ball later on and faded away.

Dan:  Avast Antivirus, developer of the free Avast antivirus software, was caught selling customer browser data, reinforcing the fact that nothing is really free in the world today. If you’re not paying for a product, then you ARE the product. It also reinforces Dan’s belief that if the software is free, it’s a virus.

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Faster Weather, Pizza, Tires

And High Powered Radio Towers, too

The show starts out in the usual way with check ups on the health and happiness of our hosts. Jessi finished a 50-mile race over the weekend, which is admirable, particularly when you consider she was on foot.

With a reasonable decent segue, Dan moves the conversation to the topic of this show:  the shiny new ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) supercomputer. This new system will give them roughly 5x more compute power than their current system. The new box is an Atos BullSequana XH2000AMD fueled by high-end AMD 7742 Epyc processors, which will be the most powerful weather computer in the world. During the conversation we look at the history of ECMWF vendors, discuss the implications on weather forecasts given the power of this new system and the computational difficulties inherent in weather prediction.

Why Nobody Should Ever be Online. Ever.

This week, Henry tells us about the Microsoft 250 million customer records exposure, but it’s a head fake! Henry explains how this is actually an example of how a company should handle an exploit and how this one wasn’t very bad. The verdict? Clickbait. But still stay offline.

Catch of the Week

Jessi:  Dominos is using GPUs and AI to drive their production and make their deliveries more efficient. Very cool.

Shahin:  Pirelli is making a cyber tire that is sensor enabled and can communicate road conditions to other tires/cars via a 5G network.

Shahin dips into his net again to highlight how a fantastically ambitious man built a radio station in Ohio that went from 50 watts to 500 watts, 50k watts, and eventually to 500k watts. See the video in the link and marvel at the ambition, work, and complexity.

Henry:  From empty net to a catch that will make Shahin’s catch obsolete, Henry makes a last second save with his story about how contact lenses will give us augmented reality and let us see road temperatures better than our tires will.

Dan:  Relates his triumphant but ultimately tragic drone lessons. Henry and Dan relate how they’ve both suffered grievous injuries at the hands of a .49 Cox gas engine.

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ZFS, AI for System Design, Power in GCE

Surprise! It's Snowing in Minnesota

The show starts on a combative note with Henry refusing to discuss how much snow is arrayed around his house. Dan shares his dream running a snowblower and Henry offers up his house but doesn’t offer airfare, which, assumedly, would be a deal breaker for the ever-cheap Dan Olds.

ZFS

With no big news in the industry this week, it’s a grab-bag show covering various topics. Shahin is up first with his discussion of  Linus Torvals’ dissing the ZFS file system. Henry weighs in on the evolution of ZFS and how his opinion of ZFS has changed over the last decade or so. Both Shahin and Henry feel ZFS is unique and highly useful and that maybe Linus isn’t up on current ZFS capabilities. Dan brings up the licensing issue with ZFS, in the context of Oracle typically acting like a rabid dog in defense of their intellectual property. In further conversation, Shahin makes the brilliant point that “Data is Data” to the confusion and delight of the others.

AI to Help Design Systems

Dan brings up the topic of machine learning being use for computer architecture design. Shahin is a bit skeptical and has several questions. Henry chips in with some comments about how this will probably aid app-specific hardware design. Dan then relates this article to another story about how MIT is using machine learning to predict how code will perform on a processor. Shahin states his belief that he's dubious about many of today’s proposed use cases for AI. After some coaching from Dan, Shahin is moved to a neutral position, maybe.
As a tangent, we discuss benchmarking and speculating with SPECint and SPECfp to figure out competitive performance.

More Power to GCE

Shahin then brings up a story about Google bringing IBM’s Power systems into their cloud, which leads to a brief discussion of why they’re doing it and what types of applications will be supported.

Why Nobody Should Ever be Online. Ever.

Henry Newman’s Reasons Why No One Should Ever Be Online. Ever:  in this week’s installment, Henry discusses how an online organization was hosting 56 million records of US citizens, including names, addresses, etc., in the open. Ouch.

Catch of the Week

Jessi:  her net is empty and there’s nothing on the hook. It’s her first week back in school, so we can cut her some slack this time. We do make the announcement that Jessi is now part of the RadioFreeHPC team as a co-host, which is pretty cool. We also discuss that one requirement for the position is that we get to monitor her transcripts, starting in high school. We’ll analyze major trends and developments in a comprehensive spreadsheet that will be posted online at some point in the distant future. Dan demurs when asked to show his transcripts.

Shahin:  Discusses LEO Labs, a company that tracks items in space and evaluates the probability of collisions. The company analyzes as many as 800,000 potential collision scenarios per day – wow – that’s a lot of number crunching. Shahin explains how they do this and the results.

Henry:  Not only has nothing in the boat, he didn’t even get a nibble this week.

Dan:  Eulogizes the late, great, Mira supercomputer. After eight long years, Mira will be laid to rest later on this year. Mira is one of the last IBM Blue Gene/P systems and propelled the system to the third spot on the TOP500 list. It was the go-to system for ‘one in a billion’ simulations, drug discovery, and particle physics to name a few. It was a great system and it will be missed. Job well done, Mira, job well done.

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2020 Predictions, Get it?!

Shiny Crystal Ball

It’s our first episode of 2020, yay! The first that was recorded in 2020 anyway.  It's a predictable 20/20 joke (more of a meh comment really) but the topic today is... PREDICTIONS. More specifically, it's our predictions of what’s going to happen in the next year. We may not always be correct, but we think maybe we’re always certain. We look at compute, interconnects, security, and general innovations:

Compute

Dan says that we’re going to have more of it. Henry predicts that we’ll see a RISC-V based supercomputer on the TOP500 list by the end of 2020 – gutsy call on that.  This is a double down on a bet that Dan and Henry have, so he’s reinforcing his position. Dan also sees 2020 as the “Year of the FPGA” when we start to see more and more HPC boxes fueled by FPGA, which is something Shahin mostly agrees with while Henry disputes it. We also touch on liquid cooling and process size as part of this topic.

Interconnects

Dan thinks that InfiniBand will announce 400 GBs interconnect by the end of this year – a bold prediction. On a communications note, Henry says that 20% of the US user base will have access to 5G phone coverage by the end of the year. Shahin asserts that only 3% of the market will actually buy it, but Dan and Henry say not so fast – it’ll be closer to 10%. Shahin is looking for a 5G connection for servers. Not as an interconnect, but more as a WAN or a cluster that spans an entire county. On another note, Shahin believes that HPE will formally get into the interconnect business, selling the Slingshot interconnect.

Security Trends

Dan says we need more of it but doesn’t see anything that’s going to move the needle back towards the users. Jessi thinks that security education has improved things security-wise and that will continue in 2020. Henry and Dan disagree. Jessi is adamant.

Innovation/Trends

Dan pegs in-memory computing as a field that will blossom over the coming year(s). Shahin agrees that in-memory is very interesting and ripe for innovation as well. But he also sees a lot of developments in the AI processor space. Henry talks about a new application workflow that will go something like this:  Object > MemMap > Compute on the MemMap file/data > back to Object, with no POSIX in the way. Shahin also sees more quantum supremacy in the news in the coming year.

Letter(s) to the Editor!

We discuss our first letter to the editor, from a listener who wasn’t a fan of the episode where we answered Jessi’s question about why tape is still used. His term for that feature? “Poor.” This prompted Shahin to quip, “I’m surprised we don’t get more of these…..”  Please keep those comments (good, indifferent, or critical) coming, our email is podcast@radiofreehpc.com.

Why Nobody Should Ever be Online. Ever.

This week, Henry doesn’t have a “Reason Why No One Should Ever Be Online. Ever.” He was offline all week, so thus doesn’t have anything to scare us with.

Catch of the Week

Henry:  has no catch, his net came up empty.

Shahin:  was practicing Catch & Release this week, so his creel is fishless.

Jessi:  discusses her new phone. She lost her old one in a Czech toilet (nasty, yikes). This is her first phone upgrade since junior high school – probably 6-7 years – and she’s agog at how the phones have advanced. She can now take pictures and use apps. Yay Jessi!

Dan:   Encourages listeners to have a good year and to let us know what you think via email (podcast@radiofreehpc.com) and twitter (@radiofreehpc). He also highlights the new RadioFreeHPC logo along the way.

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Quantum, Quantum, Quantum

 This episode was recorded back in 2019 but then the holiday episode had to go out during holidays and cut in line, messing up the cogs of the well-oiled machine that is the RFHPC production process. Regardless, the episode starts out with Henry being cranky. It also ends with Henry being cranky. But between those two events, we discuss quantum computing and Shahin’s trip to the Q2B quantum computing conference in San Jose. His walkaway, as someone else put it, and he quotes: “Quantum computing is overhyped and underestimated.”

Not surprisingly, there is a lot of activity in quantum, with nearly every country pushing the envelop outward. One of the big concerns is that existing cryptography is now vulnerable to quantum cracking. Shahin assures us that this isn’t the case today and is probably a decade away, which is another way of saying nobody knows, so it could be next week, but probably not.

We also learn the term “NISQ” which is a descriptive acronym for the current state of quantum systems. NISQ stands for “Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum” computing. The conversation touches on various ways quantum computing is used now and where it’s heading, plus the main reason why everyone seems to be kicking the tires on quantum:  the fear of missing out.

It’s a very exciting area, but to Shahin, it seems like how AI was maybe 8-10 years ago, so still early days.

Why Nobody Should Ever be Online. Ever.

Henry lays out a dizzying scenario where hackers contact a person, telling them that their credit card is about to be used by an unauthorized party and advising them to call the police. When the person calls the police, the hackers intercept the call and, while pretending to be the authorities, extract personal details, credit card numbers, etc. This is possible because the hackers have taken over the telephone switch. Ouch, scary stuff.

But to finish out the year on a high note, Henry touches on reasons why people should be online, which was, well, nice.

Things You Think You Know, But Maybe Don’t.

In keeping with the theme of the show, Jessi asks for a quickie intro into quantum computing, why it’s such a big deal, and how it will really be used. Shahin obliges with a discussion of a vast array of quantum stuff, even including a reference to Schrodinger’s half-dead cat. He also discusses how quantum can provide exponential speed ups over traditional computing and the promise of quantum in the future.

Catch of the Week

Dan has managed to catch the team catching their catch:




Henry’s net was empty this time.

Jessi:  Brings up how Emotet malware hackers are using high-school environmental activist Greta Thunberg as a lure to infect users with Emotet and other malicious software. The hook is in the form of an attachment, “Support Greta Thunberg.doc”, which, when opened, will launch a malicious macro that downloads the Emotet Trojan and executes it. Nasty stuff. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/emotet-malware-uses-greta-thunberg-demonstration-invites-as-lure/

Shahin:  Never one to leave well enough alone, Shahin brings up quantum computing yet again by discussing a quantum comic strip (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) that does a great job of explaining quantum concepts in cartoon form. What’s next? Using sock puppets to explain HPC? http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3

Dan:  In the interests of time, Dan skips over his lame Catch of the Week.

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2019 Holiday Episode (video): Family Dinner at RFHPC

It's become a tradition at RadioFreeHPC to celebrate the holidays with a video of the holiday episode. The new logo launches the video: celebrating a truly family style dinner and dreaming big (maybe too creatively, however) as the team exchanges "if-only" gifts!

Click here to see the Director's Cut version of the video followed by the edited audio-only in the usual link below.

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South Africa CHPC National Conference

SA Students Get Ready to take ISC by storm

Probably 15% more scintillating than usual, Dan promises as he calls this episode "fantastic"!
Now a 5-day conference with two days of workshops as book-ends, multiple tracks and many speakers, and yes, a very exciting Student Cluster Competition, the CHPC National Conference has developed into a very important event in the HPC/AI world.  Dan takes us through what he saw, who won, and what we can expect at the competition at ISC in 2020, and just how impressive the whole thing was. You've got to hear it.

Why Nobody Should Ever Be Online. Ever

The Big Easy Battles Big Bad Breach: in a segment that wants to be shortened to "Ever.Ever.", Henry focused not just on yet another cybersecurity incident (the ransomware attack on New Orleans), but on the fact that they city, to its immense credit, actually had a plan! Once the problem was detected, plan kicked into action, systems were shut done, damages narrowed if not avoided, and generally good progress on preparedness was on display. Nice job!

Things You Think You Know, But Might Not

Anyone remember tape drives? Some of you do. Some of you work with them now. Well, Jessi asks about tape storage. Is it still necessary? This is very much in Henry's wheelhouse so he covers it. Shahin seems unconvinced, really, but Henry is way closer to actual use cases, so he reluctantly waves it through!

Catch of the Week

Shahin: Covers the RISC-V Summit that was just held in San Jose. With 2,000 attendees, 435 member companies, lots of great talks, and expecting to grow by another 50% next year, and for something that started only in 2010, it's quite a flywheel that's forming. Also, remember that we had the pleasure of having the RISC-V Foundation CEO, Calista Redmond as a special guest of the podcast, so make sure you listen to that episode.

Shahin also notes that the media coverage of the chip space is starting to show that competition is brewing. Comments from vendors about other projects are sounding sharper and sharper!
He also says RISC "started" at Berkeley and Stanford. "What he meant to say" was modern RISC got its big boost there. He says he's fully aware of the history of RISC going all the way back to Turing, Cray, Flynn, IBM 801 (and we cut him off, convinced already!)

Dan: Speaking of sharper competition and what people meant to say: in an interview with CNet, Apple's top brass made a comment about Chromebook vs Apple gear that's also in the category of "what he meant to say was...". Henry skillfully segues into how more and more services are cloud based, and Jessi highlights the importance of the bring-you-own-device (BYOD) trend in schools.

Jessi: Goes over the US Government Accountability Office report on on airline IT outages. Just what you need for the holiday travel season. "One IT malfunction per month" is one stat you can remember.

Henry: The great $50m African IP address heist. IPv4 addresses are in demand and an enterprising person in Africa has parlayed that into a $50m windfall for his crafty self.  Upshot is? You should all consider gifting IPv4 addresses for the holidays!

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