In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC looks at Cray’s series of big wins for DOE Exascale systems.
Guess 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 by the DOE Coral program and the commercial markets are watching as their computing needs start looking like those of the national labs. In that context, Cray’s clean sweep makes its leadership in this area very important. All of this is happening as Cray gears up to become what we hope to be an important part of HPE. The last time Cray sold anything like this to anyone was Cray BSD going to Sun, and that ended up being a multibillion dollar juggernaut. Exascale is a bigger deal, especially as supercomputing goes mainstream because of AI and data science. Exciting times. And kudos to HPE for snapping up Cray at the right time.
Further highlights:
- Argonne Town Halls. The RFHPC team discusses a series of town halls is being held around the nation by Argonne National Labs “aimed at collecting community input on the opportunities and challenges facing the scientific community in the era of convergence of High Performance Computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and the expected integration of large-scale simulation, advanced data analysis, data driven predictive modeling, theory, and high-throughput experiments. The term we are using to represent the next generation of methods and scientific opportunity is ‘AI for Science’.” Co-chairing the town halls are Rick Stevens of Argonne, Kathy Yelick from Berkeley Labs, and Oak Ridge Labs’ Jeff Nichols. Dan references a very good interview with Rick Stevens.
- Henry’s Feel Good Security Corner. Henry delights us all once again by describing how your camera can be an “Enter Here” sign for malware. Vulnerabilities in the image transfer protocol used in digital cameras enabled a security researcher to infect with ransomware a Canon EOS 80D DSLR over a rogue WiFi connection. A host of six flaws discovered in the implementation of the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) in Canon cameras, some of them offering exploit options for a variety of attacks.
