Radio Free HPC Podcast

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 ta

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 ge

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

The show starts with Dan, Jessi and Shahin in attendance. Henry is traveling from his old home base in Minnesota to his new command bunker in lovely Las Cruces, NM. Last we heard he was in Kansas City and making good time. We’re not sure how long we’re go

A typical show opening, but we’re missing Henry – he was away packing for his big move from his long-time home base in Minnesota to his new bunker in Las Cruces. He’s packing up all of his memorabilia, like his first punch card sets, his core memory colle

Dan starts this episode with, as usual, an introduction of the cast. Henry reports that he’s only three weeks away from his epic move from Minnesota to Los Cruces, New Mexico. Trapping Those Unruly IonsWe quickly move to our main topic:  Honeywell’s

RadioFreeHPC Studios PresentsSlightly Inaccurate History of Great Leaps in Computing (SIHOGLIC)Edition OneIn this groundbreaking production, RadioFreeHPC Studios reenacts dramatic moments in the life of computing genius Charles Babbage. We breath life int

We fire up the show with introductions and a little snippiness on Dan’s part. Henry reports that the weather in Minnesota is nearly human. AI in ScienceJumping into our main topic, Shahin introduces an article from HPCwire interviewing Argonne’s Associate

The conversation today begins with discussing how long it will take until Henry moves into his rammed earth Los Cruces bunker. For those of you keeping track at home, the correct answer was 41 days at the time of taping, which, by the time the podcast is

 Supercomputer Leaps to New PeaksAt the top of the show we discuss whether Indiana (where Jessi is located at Purdue) is in the heartland or not. We all agree that it is and, yes, Jessi sees Larry Bird all the time. Getting into the heart of the epis

For RF-HPC aficionados, it’s a typical opening for this episode. Henry is counting down the days until he moves to sunny Los Cruces and we have a lull in the conversation right after the introductions. We recover quickly and move onto the main course of t

This week we have Dan, Jessi, and Shahin on the call. Henry is off in Los Cruces overseeing construction of what can only be called a bunker. Why? Its main feature is 21-inch rammed earth walls, guaranteed to withstand withering heat waves, cold snaps, an

At the top of this episode, Henry notes that the temperature in his city will be touching -15F, which is plenty cold. However, it’s very good overclocking weather as Dan and Shahin point out. Not quite quantum weather, unfortunately. Cray Slingshot Interc

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

And High Powered Radio Towers, tooThe 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 reas

Surprise! It's Snowing in MinnesotaThe 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, assu

Shiny Crystal BallIt’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

 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 bei

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

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 ex

SC19 Postview Our show today is all about what we saw at the “State Fair for Nerds” that is SC19. Where there weren’t any livestock shows or supercomputers carved out of butter, there was a lot to see and hear. Shahin talks about the European Processor In

 SC19 Student Cluster Round UpThe show starts in the usual way, with Henry complaining about snow and us laughing at him. Our special guest, student clusterer extraordinaire Jessi Lanum, complains about recording again with Henry in a definite shot a

Live from SC19In this Breaking News edition of RadioFreeHPC, we look over the newly released TOP500 list in all its glory. We talk about the changes in this version of the list (100 new systems, but none in the top 24), how the major countries stack up ag

Blood Sweat Glory, But No Tears“This is a groundbreaking episode of RadioFreeHPC….groundbreaking, I tell you! We have a very special guest, our first post-millennial commentator, Jessi Lanum who is a Student Cluster Competition veteran and is on the show

You never write, you never call, you never send flowers “just because.” But that’s ok, we welcome you back to another scintillating episode of Radio Free HPC anyway. Henry is traveling on yet another business trip, lodged in the Washington, DC area, and n

What's All Happening at SC19 in Denver? Supercomputing '19 is coming to Denver this year and who better than Rich Brueckner to give us a sneak peak. Super excited to have Rich and his signature laugh on this show again. In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC

RadioFreeHPC Celebrates a Number in its PrimeWelcome to a historic milestone:  Our 251st Radio Free HPC episode! We’re celebrating 251 rather than 250 for a couple of reasons. First, everyone celebrates round numbers and that’s boring. And 251 is rou

How Many Episodes, Did You Say?!The show is geographically skewed today with all three hosts on the west coast. Henry is gracing Seattle with his presence, resulting in plunging coffee inventories and skyrocketing sushi prices. The first item of discussio

RISC-V, Historic Passwords Revealed, End of the WorldWe’re missing Henry S. Newman this week, who is down in Los Cruces inspecting and overseeing the construction of his new crib. Dan and Shahin discuss just how little they’d want to be the general contra

Solving Exponential Problems in Polynomial TimePretty much all of computing rests on the strong foundation of the Turing Machine, a general purpose formulation of computing which happens to be very sequential. It transfers that attribute to the Von Neuman

Quantum Supremacy Is and Is NotHow quantum is that?! The RadioFreeHPC team discusses the Google/NASA paper, titled "Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor", that was published and then unpublished. But it's the internet and

@RadioFreeHPC Has Entered The BuildingFirst things first, you can call us @RadioFreeHPC now, thanks to our new Twitter account. We decided maybe this social media thing is not a fad after all. We are also pleased to inform you that our Twitter account is

The Dos and Donts of RFP BenchmarksIn today’s show we only have Dan and Henry on deck, Shahin is away at the “HPC and AI on Wall Street” event where he’ll be hosting various panel discussions. But Dan and Henry soldier on with a discussion based on a rece

Yes, You Can Be More Efficient!Dan is back from way Down Under bearing intellectual gifts from the recent HPC-AI Advisory Council meeting in Perth. The RadioFree HPC team drills down on one interesting presentation focused on extracting more from power an

IO500 Benchmark Gets TractionStorage is complicated and benchmarking it has too many complexities for the traditional kernel-like or application-specific approaches. Thanks to a few experienced and tenacious researchers, and the community that supports th

The 31st Hot Chips ConferenceShahin reports from the Hot Chips conference with Henry and new guest Glenn Heinle, a veteran of AI, HPC, and Storage worlds and currently at Keeper Tech. The team discusses and debates the highlights of the conference and the

Cray Pulls an Exascale Hat TrickGuess 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

AMD Victory LapAMD 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

Spoofing the SpoofersHenry has a brilliant idea to weaponize his password generator against phishing attacks. Intel Drops Omni-PathHenry and Shahin take a close look at the history of High Performance Interconnects, recent news, and how the market is chan

The Veracity and Provenance of Surveillance DataControversy 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 product

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 D

"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 quant

HPC Market Eyes $44BNew 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 reall

In this post-ISC show, the RadioFree team discusses Magical cooling technology from Europe. Dan goes over magic beads that draw heat away and can carry-on doing it pretty much forever in a technology from the venerable Fraunhofer Institute and showcased b

Why did HPE buy Cray?The RFHPC team tackles the HPE-Cray acquisition as it reviews the companies' recent moves and strengths and market conditions in the context of: the 5-tier data center application architecture: Embedded, Mobile, Desktop, On-premises,

Quantum Computing and HPCAnother scintillating and insightful episode of RFHPC is about Quantum Computing and HPC and how the two spaces are evolving and cooperating. We welcome a a distinguished guest with a most suitable background to talk to us about H

The new TOP500 list of most powerful supercomputers is out and we do our usual quick analysis. Not much changed in the TOP10 but a lot is changing further down the list. Here is a quick take: There are 65 new entries in 2019.US science is receiv

What are we going to do with 40+ different AI chips?This week, the team looks at AI chips again, this time motivated by an article in EE Times about once such chip, Graphcore, and touts it as "the most complex processor" ever at some 20 billion trans

Results of the Asian Student Cluster CompetitionIn this episode, Dan has just come back from China and reviews the results of the Asian Student Cluster Competition and HPC workshop.For the first time, a non-mainland-Chinese team wins the top spot. Taiwan

Asian Student Cluster CompetitionThe ever-popular "calendar segment" is back (yes, that is us being sarcastic) as Dan describes his upcoming trip to Dalian, China for the Asian Student Cluster competition. 20 teams are expected to compete, mostly from mai