….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!
HPC Guru Speaketh! Kind of…
June 19, 2020 by
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!
Radio Free HPC Episodes ….In Case You Missed It
June 18, 2020 by
There are fresh episodes of Radio Free HPC out in the wild and, in case you missed them, here’s what’s new: ColdQuanta Serves Up Some Bose-Einstein Condensate May 7, 2020 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 […]
Podcast: ColdQuanta Serves Up Some Bose-Einstein Condensate
May 6, 2020 by
“ColdQuanta is headed by an old pal of ours Bo Ewald and has just come out of stealth mode into the glaring spotlight of RadioFreeHPC. When you freeze a gas of Bosons at low density to near zero you start to get macroscopic access to microscopic quantum mechanical effects, which is a pretty big deal. With the quantum mechanics start, you can control it, change it, and get computations out of it. The secret sauce for ColdQuanta is served cold, all the way down into the micro-kelvins and kept very locally, which makes it easier to get your condensate.”
Podcast: David Barkai book to chronicle the History of HPC
May 3, 2020 by
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team catches up with special guest today, David Barkai, a 50-year veteran of HPC. David has worked in a wide variety of positions at NASA, Intel, Cray, SGI and others. His current project is writing a book to chronicle the last 50 years in HPC told from the perspective of those who were there. “The main emphasis in the book is examining the good that HPC has done in the world, which is quite the story.”
Podcast: Honeywell Traps, Zaps Ions for Science
April 25, 2020 by
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at Honeywell’s Trapped Ion Quantum computing initiative. Quantum computing initiative. “Shahin gives us a good overview of digital vs. analog and classical vs. quantum science. The Honeywell system is in the ‘quantum-gate’ quadrant of Shahin’s model, suspending ions in space through magnetics and then hitting them with lasers to produce entanglement. The Honeywell system is interesting because it is scoring well on the emerging Quantum Volume metric – showing very high fidelity for its qubit count. This system is the culmination of over 10 years of R&D and should be on the market later on this year.”
Podcast: AI for Science
April 15, 2020 by
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the AI for Science program coming out of Argonne National Laboratory. “This is one of the biggest potential changes in our industry and well worth the investigation. But figuring out where AI fits into the traditional world of research and simulation is a difficult problem. Henry points out that nearly every grant proposal needs to include ‘AI’ in order to get serious consideration.”
Podcast: Supercomputers Battle Coronavirus
April 9, 2020 by
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at how supercomputers are being used to battle the coronavirus. “We discuss how the supercomputing community has joined the fight and the impact on the battle against the virus. We do our best to keep the conversation light, knowing that everyone out there is suffering from the virus – it’s the one thing we all have in common these days.”
Podcast: A Look inside the El Capitan Supercomputer coming to LLNL
April 1, 2020 by
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at some of the more interesting configuration aspects of the pending El Capitan exascale supercomputer coming to LLNL in 2023. “Dan talks about the briefing he received on the new Lawrence Livermore El Capitan system to be built by HPE/Cray. This new $600 million system will be fueled by the AMD Genoa processor coupled with AMD’s Instinct GPUs. Performance should come in at TWO 64-bit exaflops peak, which is very, very sporty.”
Podcast: One Big Debate over OneAPI
March 17, 2020 by
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at Intel’s oneAPI project. “The OneAPI project is a highly ambitious initiative; trying to design a single API to handle CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and other types of processors. In the discussion, we look under the hood and see how this might work. One thing working in Intel’s favor is that they’re using data parallel C++, which is highly compatible with CUDA – and which is probably Intel’s target with this new initiative.”
