Radio Free HPC: Liqid Gets Hot, NSF Billion for AI

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We have our full staff for this show – first time in a long time. We start out with introductions….Henry still lives in a survivalist compound in Las Cruces, NM, Jessi is still on crutches, and Shahin is still living in the smokie Silicon Valley. Download the MP3

Jumping right into our topic:  DOD is getting two new, and sporty, Liqid built supercomputers. These aren’t going to be used for traditional simulation workloads but to run AI routines that will help inform their simulations – a very smart move and one that is being duplicated in other labs. We talk some speeds and feeds, which is on brand for us. One of the very interesting capabilities of these Liqid systems is that they are composable platforms – meaning that customers will be able to devote hardware components, like GPUs, to particular workloads regardless of the physical components on a node. In other words, they’ll be able to, for example, radically change the ratio of GPUs to CPUs for individual workloads. Liqid says that their composability is “on the fly” which typically means dynamically, without taking a reboot, but we’re not positive on this point. We also manage to give Jessi some grief about the Marines not stepping up to the plate when it comes to HPC and HPC systems.

Changing gears, we then discuss the $1 billion dollars that the NSF will receive to pursue AI opportunities. This is a great idea and also one that leaves out the Marines, much to Jessi’s chagrin. Henry gives Shahin a lesson in “How a Bill Becomes a Law” much like the immortal Schoolhouse Rock episode.

Henry Newman’s Reasons Why No One Should Ever Be Online. Ever:  Henry brings up a Krebs on Security article entitled “Confessions of an ID Theft Kingpin” which details the rise and fall of one of the biggest ID scammers ever. Great reading and very informative!

Old School Technology Term Quiz: In this game our proctor de jure is Jessi Lanum asks Henry, Shahin, and Dan to define terms from the IBM Handbook of Terminology, 1997 Edition. Contestants score by providing the right definition for a term, which sort of makes sense, right? Our terms this week are:

  1. Dinosaur Mating
  2. ESCON
  3. Calisto
  4. Zipperhead

To find out what the terms mean, along with our usual off the wall guesses, you’ll have to listen to the show…..

Download the MP3