The backdrop of this year’s SC22 conference is the rising trade conflict between the U.S. and China and the Administration’s increasing restrictions on exports of technology driving the development of advanced chips — the chips that poweer supercomputers. Our special guest on the @HPCpodcast is author Chris Miller, whose new book, Chip War, is a history and analysis of the growing role of the semiconductor industry in global economic and military competitiveness. Miller is associate professor of international history at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy….
@HPCpodcast: Chip War Author Chris Miller on the Escalating U.S.-China Technology Trade Conflict
November 12, 2022 by
@HPCpodcast: SC Tags, the Tech Trade War and Scaling Up in the Cloud
November 8, 2022 by
With SC22 approaching we take a quick look at the taglines for the conference going back to SC14 (watch for the repeats!). How many do you remember? A short discussion of this year’s tag then moves on to technology trade disputes between the U.S. and China and the impact they could have on scientific collaboration (our next episode will be an entire show on chip wars with a special guest, so watch this space).
@HPCpodcast: UC Berkeley’s and LBNL’s Kathy Yelick on Exascale, the Future of Supercomputing, Partitioned Global Address Space and Diversity in HPC
October 17, 2022 by
Today, on the eve of Exascale Day, the @HPCpodcast is delighted to have Kathy Yelick as our special guest to observe Oct. 18 (1018 – a billion billion calculations per second). Dr. Yelick is the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and the Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Berkeley, and Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
@HPCpodcast: Intel Shipping Aurora Blades; Rocky Linux vs. CentOS; Tesla’s ‘Dojo’ AI Supercomputer
October 13, 2022 by
In this edition of the @HPCpodcast, Shahin and Doug kick things off on the news from Intel Innovation Day that the company is shipping Sapphire Rapids CPU / Ponte Vecchio GPU-powered blades to the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility for use in the lab’s Aurora exascale supercomputer, due for delivery by late 2022 or early 2023. It’s encouraging news, but still …
@HPCpodcast: Industry Analyst Steve Conway Ranges Across the Global HPC Scene
September 29, 2022 by
In this episode of @HPCpodcast, Shahin and Doug caught up with Steve Conway, former senior advisor at Hyperion Research and now head of his own consulting firm, Conway Communications. A well-known HPC executive and analyst who was formerly with IDC and Cray, Conway engages us in a wide ranging discussion – we start with edge HPC and trends towards massively-distributed, massively-heterogeneous computing, which takes us to the convergence of HPC and AI, mixed precision spectrum, the importance of simulation, the impact of exascale on general computing, the “indigenous technology” trend that has taken root in the U.S., China and Europe and it’s impact on scientific collaboration, U.S.-China funding model differences, and the necessary ingredients for attracting top talent.
@HPCpodcast: Cluster Pioneer John Gustafson Talks Gustafson’s Law, Unums and Richard Feynman on the Bongos
September 21, 2022 by
Here at the @HPCpodcast, Shahin and Doug are treated to speaking with some of the world’s leading HPC computer scientists, the ones who have made a deep and lasting impact. We spoke with one of them this week: commercial cluster pioneer John Gustafson, CTO of Ceranovo and previously an AMD senior fellow, holder of senior positions at Intel, Massively Parallel Technologies, Inc. and ClearSpeed. How did Richard Feynman end up playing the bongo drums? How did a new take on Amdahl’s Law help propel massively parallel computing and become Gustafson’s Law? And what’s wrong with the IEEE 754 number format that the new Posit format fixes? We go to the source as for answers to all these quetions.
@HPCpodcast: AWS, Sun, eBay, Netflix (and Others) Vet Adrian Cockcroft Talks Cloud HPC-AI and the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative
September 14, 2022 by
In our converesation with Adrian Cockcroft, we start with Netflix’s move to the cloud, a significant event that helped put cloud computing on the map. Then it’s on to Environment, Sustainability, and Governance (ESG), Formula-1 racing, and cloud configurations and interconnects for HPC and AI workloads. And we talk about accessing the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) and its petabytes of data, including weather observations, ocean temperatures, climate projection data and satellite imagery, used by researchers and scientists….
@HPCpodcast: Hot Chips Conference, UCIe, 3D Packaging, CXL and a Revival of Moore’s Law?
September 9, 2022 by
This week’s episode takes a look at emerging technologies driving new chip design and performance, which is to say many of the topics highlighted at the recent Hot Chips conference. Shahin and Doug talk about UCIe and why it could cause an industry ripple effect, the potential rebirth of Moore’s law and 3D packaging, silicon photonics, inference in the device or in the data center, silicon for the edge, CXL, and code generation. This is followed by an update on quantum computing, discussing two important new papers on quantum machine learning and unstructured NP-complete problems. The field remains in its infancy, quantum remains various years away (depending on who you to talk to), all the while people in the field are making progress taking on different aspects of the quantum puzzle.
@HPCpodcast: CXL News, the CHIPS Act, Chips and Nm and Chip ‘Sprawl’
August 19, 2022 by
We’ve heard so much about the CXL interconnect – including the recent announcement of CXL v3.0 – and components that are CXL-ready, that it may come as a surprise that CXL v1.1 “hosts” are only just now shipping. It’s a technology that could play a central role in the ever-more heterogenous, more memory-intensive systems of the future. And now, after several years of experimentation and various interconnect consortia, CXL is emerging as the standard for advanced functionality for fabric technologies. Along with CXL we also discuss some of the details of the CHIPS and Science Act….
@HPCpodcast: Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Strategies – A How-to Guide for HPC Managers
August 5, 2022 by
While it’s safe to assume that most senior managers in the HPC community are in favor of hiring and promoting more women and people of color within their organizations, many don’t know how to make it happen. At last week’s annual meeting of the Dell Technologies HPC Community, Melyssa Fratkin of the Texas Advanced Computing Center offered this piece of advice: using same-old-same-old hiring practices won’t work.
