NSF, QIS Funding, But First...

18th Listener Awards!

Run-of-the-mill start as we introduce the team. Henry has quite a bit of echo since he’s now firmly ensconced in his rammed earth survival compound.

Big news this week! We finally received our 18^th email in our first ever RadioFreeHPC email-to-win contest. First, let’s see what they win…

The first item in our Grand Prize bundle is a circa 1999 suede leather IBM S/390 laptop bag. It’s roomy at a generous 16”x14”, large enough to house the biggest 17” laptop or maybe 15 or 20 tablets. If that’s not enough room, it also expands an additional 4-5” on the bottom. There are compartments galore under the flaps and you’d better fill them up with soft foam since there’s really no padding around the laptop compartment.

The suede leather is a nice touch that adds weight to the bag, it’s not a lightweight in any sense of the word. We’d advise covering the bag if you’re going to be out in the weather, because the suede is sure to stain if it is exposed to water.

This bag is in brand new condition and has never been used. Ever.

The second piece of this cornucopia of delight is a IBM Mainframe 50^th anniversary medallion. It’s a very light weight metal medallion housed in a stunningly clear plastic frame. Put it on your mantle at home and impress your friends and family with how important you must be to have such a keepsake.

The final gift is a cassette tape of an IBM Talk S/390 episode covering S/390 integrated solutions. If you still have a cassette player, this will provide minutes of mainframe tech talk, marketing tips and keys to closing that big deal.

So you want to know who won this amazing collection of swag? Listen to the show and find out, or follow us on Twitter and look a couple of weeks back!

Government Bills Aim to Up the Ante for Science

In the rest of the show we discuss some recent government news. First is that the US House is looking to devote an additional $1.25 billion over the next five years. But even bigger is the proposal to expand the US National Science Foundation by $100 beeelion – which is more than 4x the size of the existing organization. We discuss the implications of this and how this might change the game in terms of base research. There is also a bill to significantly dial up funding for Quantum Information Science. All good and the team s excited to see these moves and hopes they'll proceed swimmingly!

Reasons Why No One Should Ever be Online. Ever.

Brace yourselves, GitHub has been attacked! Developers and users alike unaware that they’re downloading malware when they’re getting their open source on. Ouch.

Catch of the Week

Jessie:  Campaign Zero and Police Scorecard aim at reducing police violence.

Henry:  UK broadband performance is holding up in these virus-rampant times. Yay for the UK, great job.

Dan:  Skinny gene discovered! Eat all you want and never gain weight. Is it true?

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New Top on the TOP500 – 415 PF!

Breaking News Edition

We have a new #1 on the TOP500 list of most powerful supercomputers! Big gets bigger by a factor of 2.8x as Fujitsu’s “Supercomputer Fugaku” tops the list at 415 PFlops.  There are also an additional three new entries in the top ten. We break down the top of the list in this fascinating episode of RadioFreeHPC.

Listen to us now! It will help you to amaze your friends and dismay your enemies with your newfound knowledge of the list. We have it here and first! Or at least not much later than others!

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@HPC_Guru Speaketh! Kind of.

Our Guest Today is...

In this extraordinary episode of Radio Free HPC, the crew interviews the industry icon that is @HPC_Guru. This is the first time that anyone has been granted an interview with him and we’re proud to have been chosen for this honor.

We posed an even dozen questions and received very thoughtful responses, which we rendered out in a machine voice in order to fit our podcast format. In the interview, HPC_Guru tells us his top five cool things in HPC today, why he remains anonymous, where he thinks HPC hardware will be in 10 years and who he thinks will be the first to reach exascale. And that’s just four of our 12 questions!

We don’t have to tell you that @HPC_Guru is a legend in the industry, as is his Twitter account. He has more than 15,000 followers and has tweeted over 38,000 times. Just to put that in context, if his average tweet is 150 characters, then he’s tweeted 5.7 million characters. Or if you look at it as words, HPC Guru has beaten the hell out of Leon Tolstoy’s War & Peace. Tolstoy came up with a piddling 587,287 words in his novel while HPC Guru has written roughly 712,500 words – and HPC Guru has written about more difficult content. Supercomputing is much more complex than Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. While this is impressive, it’s not quite as many words/characters as Timothy Prickett Morgan writes in a typical year.

If you printed up HPC Guru’s tweets, the tome would come in at more than four pounds, and that’s single spaced. That’s as much as a high-end laptop, including the storage and maybe even the power brick. Looking for another metric? If @HPC_Guru printed out each of his tweets, two per sheet of 8.5 by 11 inch paper, and laid them end to end, it would stretch a little over 3.3 MILES.

Give this groundbreaking episode a listen, in fact, listen to it twice to get the full impact.

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HPC on the Edge

Edge Computing Book Makes Sense of It All

After our typical inane opening, which includes an update on Henry’s Las Cruces bunker with  21” rammed earth walls, we get quickly down to business and begin our interview with very special guest, Dr. Cody Bumgardner, Assistant Professor of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine at the University of Kentucky.

Our topic? Edge computing, what it is, what is isn’t, and why it’s important. Cody has just authored a book “Making Sense of Edge Computing.”

Dan starts us off with a question about the definition of edge computing, which as it turns out, covers a lot of ground. Henry comes in with a question about how 5G might impact edge computing and Shahin follows up by asking if 5G really has much to do with edge computing at all. There is some overlap, but 5G is a transmission mechanism rather than a computing mechanism, meaning that it’s the 5G device and what it is tasked to do that can make it either an edge device or not an edge device.

As the show goes on, we talk about the edge capacity in place and what still needs to be built, along with current and potential use cases. A good time is had by all.

Reasons Why No One Should Ever Be Online. Ever.

Henry shocks us yet again with news that people are being scammed by work-at-home deals that are actually ‘money mule’ schemes to help criminals launder their ill-gotten gains. Dan seems a little too curious about the mechanics and potential pay-offs of these deals. 

Catch of the Week

Jessi: Jessi is pointing out that she has now moved for the third time in one academic semester and that she has more books than anything else. Ouch.

Henry:  Henry is off yelling at his contractors when his turn comes up, so no catch from him this week.

Shahin:  Article about how to program Aurora, highly recommended by Shahin.

Dan:   Discusses how the ISC2020 Student Cluster Competition will be virtual this year. He’ll be covering it as usual, but with a LOT of Zoom. Every team is going to be using the same cluster, but sharing it. Stay tuned for more news.

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A is for Ampere, Nvidia A100's Public Debut

NOTE:  The publication of this episode was delayed due to the untimely passing of our partner and pal Rich Brueckner. So what we’re announcing as "breaking news" isn’t so fresh today, but our takes on what NVIDIA’s new A100 processor brings to the table are still valid. 


Breaking News! This special edition of RadioFreeHPC takes a deep dive into NVIDIA’s spanking new A100 GPU – which is an impressive achievement in processor-dom. The new chip is built with a 7nm process and weighs in at a hefty 54 billion transistors and capped at 400 Watts. It sports 6,912 FP32 CUDA cores, 3,456 FP64 CUDA cores and 422 Tensor cores.
This 8^th generation GPU, using what the company calls its Ampere technology, is a replacement for both their V100 GPU and Turing T4 processors, giving the company a single platform for both AI training and inferencing.
We talk about the specs of the A100, breaking down its game both in terms of typical HPC FP64 processing and FP32 (and lower precision) computing for AI workloads. On the HPC side, the new GPU seems to offer an across the board 25% speedup, which is substantial. But the A100 really shines when it comes to tensor core performance which the company reports at an average speed up of 10x on Tensor Core 32 bit vs. V100 FP32.
New features of the A100 include Sparsity (a mechanism that doubles sparse matrix performance), a much speedier NVLink (2x), and a hardware feature that allows the A100 to be partitioned into as many as 7 GPU instances to support individual workloads.
All in all, this is an amazing new processor, a behemoth large and hot, but so fast, chip that is heavily tilted towards new AI and Tensor workloads with a passing but welcome nod to 64-bit HPC apps.

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Tribute to Rich Brueckner, 1962-2020

by Dan Olds



This is a tough blog to write for this RadioFreeHPC episode.

This is the episode where we say a final goodbye to our co-founder and comrade in arms Rich Brueckner. Rich passed away suddenly last week leaving us shocked and shaken. The whole genesis of RFHPC came out of Rich and I sitting around the press area of GTC 2012 and talking about what we could do to bring a little more life into the HPC community. We batted around several ideas but finally came up with the idea of a long-form podcast that would tackle every topic in tech – as long as it was big and fast. With that idea in mind, we recruited Henry Newman, started production, and the rest is history as they say.

We added Shahin Khan to our host lineup to add more technical heft and to give us increased flexibility to cover our travel schedules. But after nearly six years, Rich’s ultra-busy schedule didn’t allow him to continue working with us on RFHPC, but he remained a friend of the show, promoting it on his InsideHPC site. Our latest addition to our roster is rookie host Jessie Lanum, an outstanding university student who has added enthusiasm and a youthful viewpoint to our show.

In this episode, we pay tribute to Rich, sharing our own thoughts about him - plus the thoughts and memories from HPC community members. There are several funny stories in here, along with heartfelt  acknowledgement of the vital role Rich played in our HPC community. So please give a listen and share your thoughts and stories.

I’d also like to call your attention to the following links. These are shows that either feature Rich prominently or have us talking about Rich in depth. They really show his sense of humor, how highly we regarded him and his commitment to HPC. Take a look or listen, I think you’ll enjoy them….



RF-HPC Episode 18-1: This is our first holiday episode. In this show, Henry and I discuss the perfect Christmas gifts for Rich and make fun of his Apple addiction. Check out the videos on these picks, they’re funnier than the audio version.

RF-HPC Episode 18-2:  In this one, Rich and Dan talk about the perfect Christmas gifts for Henry. The picture of Henry as a Tibetan monk is one of Rich’s all-time favorites.

RF-HPC Episode 18-3:  To finish out this series, Rich and Henry talk about what they’d give me for Christmas.




RF-HPC Episode 218:  A Hard Look at Santa’s Big Data Challenges

RF-HPC Episode 214:  Rich & Dan report on the CHPC South African conference, plus the CHPC cluster competition too!

Thank you for all the memories and all of your hard work, Rich. You did good for a lot of people.

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Debate This: Server Sales Up 30% in Q1, Says Analyst Firm

We start off with an update from our crew. Jessie is at Purdue putting her belongings into storage in order to clear out her current abode. Shahin is doing fine, all quarantined up down in Silicon Valley. Henry has big news:  he’s completed his north-south journey and is now staying in a hotel very close to his newly constructed survivalist bunker near scenic Los Cruces, NM. What’s great for the workers finishing up the house is that Henry will now be there EVERY DAY to help them expedite construction and offer pro tips. That must be a dream come true for them.

Henry also announced that he’s going to host us RadioFreeHPC hosts for a live broadcast from his compound sometime in August. He’ll have his home pizza oven fired up and we’ll have a veritable feast while taking copious video of his new bunker and putting together a couple of shows. It should be a lot of fun.

Getting to our main topic, we discuss how the server business has been very healthy in the first quarter – growing more than 30% - which is astounding given these virus laden times. Henry links these results to his research that shows that Akami’s bandwidth use has grown a similar 30% during the first quarter. We speculate (and argue a little) over whether the bump in server sales can be attributed to folks buying pre-emptively to handle anticipated demand or whether they’re meeting current demand. Shahin and Dan feel that there was already excess capacity, since there haven’t been any reports of internet speed/capacity problems during the quarantine.

Our discussion continues on with speculation about just when the supply chain kink caused by the virus impacting component makers will hit the market. The lost production can’t be made up instantly and we also believe that there is probably going to be a demand shock at least with enterprise and, to a lesser extent HPC customers, because they simply don’t have the will to launch new IT projects in this environment. We’re not entirely sure we buy these numbers, since it’s from an analyst firm we’re not familiar with.

Reasons Why No One Should Ever Be Online. Ever.

Henry dug up a very timely hack this week, with an article detailing how hackers have built a Trojan Horse version of the widely-used Zoom video conferencing software. If you download Zoom from the wrong place, it will install Zoom – but with added ‘features’ that will allow hackers to pown your box – definitely not fun. So be sure you get your Zoom from either the company itself or from a reputable source.

Catch of the Week

Jessi:  Her topic is how spending on cyber security lobbying has more than tripled in the last few years. The cybersec folks are, thankfully, lobbying in favor of more security and privacy, often in direct opposition to industry giants Facebook and Google.

Henry:  The above referenced Akami article is Henry’s catch. He discusses how Akami is pumping out 167 terabits of data per second, but warns that this won’t be nearly enough when you consider the potential additional traffic due to the conversion to 5G. He puts forward a compelling argument that web infrastructure isn’t ready for the data deluge that is 5G. Nicely done, Henry.

Shahin:  Brings up our recent “Charles Babbage:  His Life & Times” dramatic presentation (it was awesome) to discuss how Baidu is now able to clone voices with just 3.7 seconds of samples. With more samples, it can change accents and even genders. He suggests that this could be good for our next drama foray.

Dan:  Starts a group discussion about how some college students are now suing their host institutions over Covid19 disruptions in order to get a portion of their tuition and fees returned or reduced.  Jessi, as our resident undergrad, weighs in with several powerful points while the others chip in with their old man knowledge.

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