Podcast: ExaScale is a 4-way Competition

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discusses the 4-way competition for Exascale computing between the US, China, Japan, and Europe.

The European effort is targeting 2 pre-exa installation in the coming months, and 2 actual ExaScale installations in the 2022-2023 timeframe at least one of which will be based on European technology. This presumably refers to the European Process Initiative.

After that, the cover some highlights from ISC 2019:

• 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 by Lenovo.
  The software ecosystem is an important consideration and how they all evolve and whether or not they converge will be a big issue.
• Another heated competition at the ISC Student Cluster Competition with the team from South Africa claiming the top spot. Dan has developed an efficiency metric that he will unveil in a future episode. This could separate the prowess of the team from that of the system!

After that, they do their Catch of the Week:

• Henry point out the challenge for customers when the company that breached their data goes out of business:
  • Collections Firm Behind LabCorp, Quest Breaches Files for Bankruptcy A medical billing firm responsible for a recent eight-month data breach that exposed the personal information on nearly 20 million Americans has filed for bankruptcy, citing “enormous expenses” from notifying affected consumers and the loss of its four largest customers.
• Shahin highlights a paper on the beginnings of the programming language APL. A cool historical account.
  • The Socio-Technical Beginnings of APL, by Eugene McDonnell. This paper gives some of the history of implementations of APL, and concentrates on the system aspects of these implementations, paying special attention to the evolution of the workspace concept, the time-sharing scheduling strategy, and the handling of the terminal. It contrasts the development of APL with the development of other time-sharing systems which were being built at the same time.
• Dan relays the sad story of the multi-year demise of a the honor bar at the hotel near ISC.

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