Following his highly anticipated and always-insightful closing night keynote at the recent ISC conference, we caught up with Prof. Thomas Sterling to discuss the state of HPC. Dr. Sterling is professor of intelligent systems engineering at Indiana University School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, and president and co-founder of Simultac, a technology company focused on […]
@HPCpodcast: Parallel Processing Systems Pioneer Dr. Thomas Sterling on the State of HPC
June 17, 2022 by
@HPCpodcast: On the Scene at ISC 2022 – HPE, AMD Make TOP500 News; Intel Makes News of Its Own
June 7, 2022 by
ISC 2022 in Hamburg was notable for a number of reasons – it was not only the first in-person ISC since 2019, it also provided a plethora of major news. This included big changes at the top of the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, and the Frontier HPC system at Oak Ridge National Lab surpassing of the exascale milestone. While AMD, whose chips power Frontier, and HPE, which built Frontier, were the conference’s spotlight vendors, Intel also made some impressive product announcements, as analyzed in this discussion by Shahin Khan. You can find our podcasts at insideHPC’s @HPCpodcast page, on Twitter and at the OrionX.net blog. Here’s the RSS feed.
@HPCpodcast: Google Cloud’s 9 Exaflop AI Supercomputer, Chip Price Hikes, HPC Helps Photograph a Black Hole in Our Galaxy and IBM’s Quantum Ambitions
May 18, 2022 by
@HPCpodcast was so pleased with our last episode, an extensive interview with the University of Tennessee’s (and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s) Jack Dongarra (our followers liked it too), that we decided to let that episode stand as a special, double podcast edition podcast. Now Shahin and Doug are back behind our mics talking about a raft of interesting news in the HPC/AI world, including what Google Cloud bills as the fastest AI supercomputer, price hikes on chips from TSMC and Samsung, the role of the Frontera supercomputer in the visualization of a black hole in our Milky Way galaxy and IBM’s ambitious and well-executed quantum computing roadmap.
@HPCpodcast: Oak Ridge Assoc. Director Dr. Jeff Nichols on Frontier, on History-making HPC – and on His Retirement
April 6, 2022 by
In this episode of the @HPCpodcast, join us for a rare, behind-the-scenes glimpse at the Frontier exascale supercomputer, how it was built in the middle of a pandemic and how it’s being prepared for full user-readiness. Frontier is a $600 million, 30 MW system comprised of 50-60 million parts in more than 100 cabinets, deployed at the Oak Ridge….
@HPCpodcast: The GTC Cornucopia
April 1, 2022 by
Last week’s rendition of NVIDIA’s bi-annual GTC extravaganza unveiled a raft of new HPC/AI announcements, the latest public performance of a company in its prime led by a leather-clad CEO generally regarded as a master marketer. Ok, roll your eyes at that gushing statement if you like, but it reflects the sentiment of Wall Street, which pushed NVIDIA stock up 10 percent the day CEO Jensen Huang delivered his GTC keynote, and of most (if not all) in the HPC industry analyst community. In this episode of the @HPCpodcast….
@HPCpodcast: Dan Reed on the Challenges to U.S. Global Supercomputing Competitiveness
March 23, 2022 by
In a recently published paper, “Reinventing High Performance Computing: Challenges and Opportunities,” three HPC luminaries have started an important discussion about the future of HPC and its impact on American competitiveness. In this episode of the @HPCpodcast, we talk with one of the authors, Dan Reed of the University of Utah, on the challenges facing the United States as it strives to compete globally in high-end supercomputing.
@HPCpodcast: Argonne’s Rick Stevens on AI for Science (Part 2) – Coming Breakthroughs, Ethics and the Replacement of Scientists by Robots
March 11, 2022 by
In part 2 of our not-to-be-missed @HPCpodcast with Argonne National Laboratory Associate Director Rick Stevens, he discusses some of the important advances that had, by 2015, likely ended the cycle of AI for science winters. He also delves into the major challenges in AI for science, such as building models that are transparent and unbiased while also robust and secure. And Stevens looks at important upcoming AI for science breakthrough use cases, including the welcome news – for researchers beset by mountains of scientific papers – of utilizing large natural language modeling to ingest and collate existing knowledge of a scientific problem, enabling analysis of the literature that, Stevens said, goes well beyond a Google search….
@HPCpodcast: Argonne’s Rick Stevens Surveys Trends and Technologies Driving AI for Science — Part 1
March 5, 2022 by
If HPC had a band of rock stars, Rick Stevens might well be lead guitarist and do the vocals. The associate lab director and Exascale Computing Initiative leader at Argonne National Lab (and professor at the University of Chicago) has one of the most impressive records of sustained achievement in the HPC community. Here, in part one of a two-part episode of the @HPCpodcast, Stevens takes up the topic of AI is changing the face of science from the points of view of a scientist and a computer scientist.
@HPCpodcast Special Edition: HPC/AI-Powered Geopolitcal Cyberwar and Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
February 28, 2022 by
The Russian invasion of Ukraine may involve a heavy measure of cyberwar, a new and shrouded form of espionage and sabotage with potentially devastating impacts. Here we offer a special edition of the @HPCpodcast to discuss the role of “geopolitical cyberwar” — nation-state cyber strategies driven by combinations of HPC and AI, and the relative sophistication of the Russians vs. the U.S. and western Europe. Our guest: Richard Stiennon (his Google Books profile), he is a cyber security industry analyst and author who was formerly of Gartner’s IT Security Research Practice and a Forbes columnist. Stiennon told us he is surprised
@HPCpodcast: The Potboiler HPC Chip Business
February 23, 2022 by
It’s a data center server chip industry that in five years has altered profoundly from Intel’s unilateral dominance. The new, multilateral landscape delivers an endless source of innovation, rapid change and drama. Can Intel regain technology leadership? Can AMD and Nvidia — in partnership with TSMC — continue to executive at such high levels? With all three leading players offering CPUs and GPUs, how will it all shake out? Competition is good; intense competition is even better.
