The OrionX Podcast Channel
Big Ideas. Simplified.
Join the OrionX team and guests in lively discussions of Big Ideas in Tech, covering trends and products that can impact your investment decisions and change the technology options you consider.
HPC, AI
Join Shahin Khan and Doug Black, insideHPC’s editor-in-chief, in their weekly discussion of key technology trends that drive high performance computing and artificial intelligence.
Marketing
News and happenings in the world of marketing, from the board room to customer programs, with Shahin Khan and Doug Garnett of Protonik.net.
Podcasts
HPC News Bytes – 20240902
– Nvidia Blackwell delays
– Inference champions
– AI regulations
– Supercomputing in Russia
HPC News Bytes – 20240826
– Hot Chips 2024 conference
– LANL electricity needs enter the senate race
– A small modular nuclear reactor in a 30-inch borehole a mile under?
– AMD in $4.9B deal to buy ZT Systems
@HPCpodcast-88: Mike Heroux of Sandia on ECP, HPC Software
We are delighted to have Dr. Mike Heroux as special guest to discuss HPC software in general and the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) software efforts in particular. Topics include performance vs. portability and maintainability, heterogeneous hardware, the impact of AI on workloads and tools, the emergence of Research Software Engineer as a needed role and a career path, the convergence of commercial and HPC software stacks, and what’s on the horizon.
Dr. Heroux is a senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories and scientist-in-residence at St. John’s University in Minnesota. He’s been with both of those organizations for more than 25 years. Mike was also the ECP’s Director of Software Technologies. While that project has been completed, Mike’s software work has continued to receive funding. Earlier in his career, Mike was with SGI, and Cray. His focus is on all aspects of scalable scientific and engineering software for parallel computing architectures.
SimOps with Peter Ungaro and Burak Yenier of Simr
The “big idea” in this episode is SimOps, an important shift in the industry. Three of the so-called “magnificent seven” (most valuable companies in the world) are already practitioners of SimOps and have helped shape the products that support it.
Peter Ungaro, one of the most celebrated captains of the supercomputing and AI industry, formerly the CEO of Cray, SVP and General Manager of HPC, AI, Mission Critical Systems, Edge, and HP Labs at HPE, and a board member of Simr, and Burak Yenier, CEO & Co-Founder of Simr, join Shahin Khan to discuss this emerging trend.
Just as DevOps helps traditional software development/deployment become more automated, productive, scalable, and much else, SimOps does the same for the digital workflow and dataflow associated with product engineering and scientific discovery. Whether you are designing golf clubs or smart goggles, a bridge, cars, planes, medical devices, or medicines simulation is the norm and defines the whole process. It will become even more important with the advent of Digital twins, which need to be realistic, which means they need to be built with more math, physics, chemistry, etc.
HPC News Bytes – 20240819
– AI-centric servers form new market segment
– NIST announcement heralds Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) milestone
– English Professors win NSF grant to study supercomputing’s impact on society, geopolitics
HPC News Bytes – 20240812
– UK Govt. cuts funding to exascale and AI projects
– Investment in AI inference rises
– AI models: open source vs. guardrails
– Will SC24 be the largest supercomputing event ever?
Mktg_Podcast-46: Resilience, Crisis, Improvisation, Decisions
Join Shahin and Doug for a lively discussion of resilience, crisis, and decisions, all motivated by the Crowdstrike cybersecurity event:
– This meeting could have been an email I wouldn’t read
– Resilience, Crisis Management
– Decision Making, Improvisation
HPC News Bytes – 20240805
– Intel financial results
– Nvidia Blackwell delays
– Which programming language is most energy efficient?
– Discoveries led by exascale software
HPC News Bytes – 20240729
– Nvidia to build GPUs specially for the Chinese market to comply with export control
– Morgan Stanley report projects 60,000 to 70,000 Nvidia AI racks in 2025
– China and TOP500, no new news
– NTT and U. Tokyo use Graphene Plasmon in pursuit of faster opto-electronics
HPC News Bytes – 20240722
– ORNL’s RFP for post-exascale “Discovery” system
– Forced mate in 12 moves? New chess puzzle challenges engines
– Solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) to power GPU Datacenter
– Keep your data for 5,000 years, anyone?
HPC News Bytes – 20240715
– AI survey by S&P Global Market Intelligence commissioned by Vultr
– OpenAI proposes 5 levels of AI based on capability
– SoftBank acquires Graphcore
@HPCpodcast-87: Penguin Solutions on AI Infrastructure – Industry View
The @HPCpodcasts Industry View feature takes on major issues in the world of HPC, AI, and other advanced technologies through the lens of industry leaders. Today, we discuss the design and deployment of large scale AI infrastructure: why AI at scale is such a critical need, where the challenges lie, and what it takes to do it right. We are joined by Jonathan Ha who is Senior Director of Product Management for AI at Penguin Solutions. Jonathan has been in the industry for more than 25 years has previously held senior positions in product management at Microsoft, AMD, and AWS.
HPC News Bytes – 20240708
– SMIC Wafer Yields for Huawei Ascend 910B AI Chip
– Goldman Sachs Report on Gen AI ROI, Readiness
– New Startup Fuels Special-Purpose Chip Trend
Mktg_Podcast-45: Mahta Emrani on Research, AI, Data
Special guest Mahta Emrani joins us to discuss the hot topic of AI and synthetic data for market research:
– AI will usher in fast, cheap, high quality research, right?
– It’s all about details and nuances
– Why do research?
HPC News Bytes – 20240701
– Intel’s Silicon Photonics Milestone
– Intel’s 144-core-now-288-core-next-year Xeon Sierra Forrest CPU
– Quantum Advantage: Time vs. Space
– Microsoft Concludes Undersea Datacenter Project
@HPCpodcast-86: DOE Exascale Project w Christine Chalk
We are delighted to be joined by Christine Chalk, physical scientist at U.S. Department of Energy and federal program manager for the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. Christine is also responsible for budget formulation for Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) and management of the Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee and the Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. Topics include the ECP project and what made it so successful, how policy turns into a budget, and the growing importance of the role of women in HPC.
HPC News Bytes – 20240624
– GPU price wars?
– Rectangular wafers for more/bigger chips
– AI assistant for science
– AI Supercomputer in Japan, New exascale in the EU
HPC News Bytes – 20240617
– New paper on “Managing extreme AI risks amid rapid progress” with an all-star author list
– Investments in Taiwan, Chip War
– AI Chip Landscape, Specialty AI Chips gain traction
– Where would AI datacenters fin energy? Fusion, Geothermal, Hydrogen Fuel Cells
– Apple Silicon in Datacenter?
Mktg_Podcast-44: Obsession, Hedgehog and Fox
– Obsession
– Competition
– What Market Share?
– Hedgehog and Fox
HPC News Bytes – 20240610
– Clinical trials for cancer fighting drug discovered by LLNL and BridgeBio
– Sandia and Submer say immersing the whole rack can get big power savings
– In defense of the CHIPS Act
– New paper “Scalable MatMul-free Language Modeling” promises low memory low power AI
@HPCpodcast-85: Stanford AI Index w Nestor Maslej
Shahin and Doug are joined by Nestor Maslej of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) at Stanford University. He tracks the advancement of AI in his role as Research Manager and Editor in Chief of the annual Stanford AI Index and Stanford Global AI Vibrancy Tool. Nestor has degrees from Harvard and Oxford and is also a fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation.
A 502 page report, the AI Index covers a wide range of topics in nine chapters:
1) Research and Development
2)Technical Performance
3) Responsible AI
4) Economy
5) Science and Medicine
6) Education
7) Policy and Governance
8) Diversity
9) Public Opinion
HPC News Bytes – 20240603
– Computex-24, Nvidia Rubin, Nvidia Vera, AMD MI325X, AMD Turin
– Ultra Accelerator Link (UAlink)
– EU’s 2nd Exascale System at CEA France
– Is AI getting ahead of itself?
HPC News Bytes – 20240527
– Techno-politics, China, TSMC, and ASML remote disablement
– CryptoSuper500 report on Bitcoin as Specialized Supercomputing
– X-ai says it will build AI supercomputer with 100,000 H100 GPUs
– AI regulations in EU go into effect next month
– Nvidia GPUs continue strong in earnings season
Mktg_Podcast-43: SBUX, It’s Not the Data, Org Privacy, Fake AI Projects
– Hitting the target
– Starbucks, Mobile Orders
– It’s Not the Data
– Private Internal Communications?
– Faking AI Projects
HPC News Bytes – 20240520
– Who will join the Exascale club next?
– Nvidia “paints it green”
– Other AI chips impress
– Student Cluster Competition winners
@HPCpodcast-84: TOP500 at ISC24 Conference
The new TOP500 at ISC24 conference is here with a new addition to the Exaflop Club, a new HPL-MxP (AI) champion, new top three in Green500, and also a look at HPCG, the difficult benchmark that usually sets the lower bound of system performance. Tune in as Shahin and Doug go through the list with their commentary and analysis.
HPC News Bytes – 20240513
– ISC24 conference begins today
– Substantial investments in Quantum Tech continue
– Geopolitics of chips and scenario planning around TSMC, again
– Electricity shortage and grid capacity for AI datacenters
@HPCpodcast-83: Attack of Killer Chiplets, w John Shalf
Reminiscent of the so-called “Attack of Killer Micros” which heralded the arrival of microprocessors in the early 1990s, the “Attack of Killer Chiplets” and similar technologies like Coarse-Grain Reconfigurable Arrays (CGRA) are coming to enable specialized architectures, re-define computing, and provide new avenues for advancing supercomputing speed and energy efficiency.
Special guest and last year’s ISC-2023 program chair John Shalf joins Shahin and Doug to discuss the rise of specialized architectures in the Post Moore’a Law era. This is a topic John will discuss at Wednesday night’s keynote at the ISC conference in Hamburg, Germany next week. John is department head for computer science research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). He formerly was CTO at the National Energy Research Supercomputing Center (NERSC).
John is a coauthor of over 60 publications in the field of parallel computing software and HPC technology, including three best papers and the widely cited report “The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley” (with David Patterson and others). He also coauthored “ExaScale Software Study: Software Challenges in Extreme Scale Systems,” which sets the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA’s) information technology research investment strategy for the next decade. He was a member of the Berkeley Lab/NERSC team that won a 2002 R&D 100 Award for the RAGE robot.
HPC News Bytes – 20240506
– ASML and US-China Trade Wars
– Tik Tok Ban Bill in the US
– Intersect360 HPC-AI Market Size in 2023
– Women in HPC at ISC24
@HPCpodcast-82: Cristin Merritt on Women in HPC
Cristin Merritt joins Shahin and Doug to discuss Women in HPC (WHPC), its goals and mission, six lessons learned about “moving the needle” on the organizational transformation that is needed to address lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and the activities planned by International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) and WHPC for the ISC24 conference to be held in Hamburg, Germany next week from May 12–16.
Cristin is Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Alaces Flight, a UK-based advanced computing and HPC class systems integrator and service provider. She is also the a leader of the Women in HPC organization where her official title is business manager. WHPC operates 28 chapters and affiliates around the world.
HPC News Bytes – 20240429
– Infra-Tech, Datacenter Shortage of Parts, Property, and Power
– AI winter, AI bubble, dot-AI bust
– Trade bans, Chain of Custody
– Sandia National Lab’s Hala Point Neuromorphic Supercomputer
Mktg_Podcast-42: Math and Marketing, Seinfeld-Bergman Spectrum
– Eclipse-like markets
– Featuring your competition in your ad?
– Chevy Nova’s naming myth
– Math and Marketing
– The Seinfeld-Bergman Spectrum!
HPC News Bytes – 20240422
– New supercomputers at Los Alamos and France-CEA
– Stanford AI Index Report
– Bitcoin Halving
– Argonne-UIC Crabtree Institute for Discovery and Sustainability
HPC News Bytes – 20240415
– Intel Vision 2024 Event, Intel Gaudi 3, Xeon 6
– Meta MTIA accelerator chip
– Nvidia GPU shortage easing
– Category Theory, Categorical Deep Learning, Geometric Deep Learning
– China economic growth plans, high end manufacturing industrial policy
HPC News Bytes – 20240408
– TSMC Arizona back on schedule
– Dutch government support for ASML
– Intel Foundry profitability
– TSMC expands CoWoS capacity
– SK Hynix $3.9B for Indiana HBM fab and R&D with Purdue
– Quantinuum and Microsoft show major improvement for qubit fidelity
Mktg_Podcast-41: JP Castlin on Strategy, Efficiency, Resilience
Special guest JP Castlin joins us as we discuss a broad set of topics:
– Did you say “Praxis”?
– Strategy and Marketing
– Apple and DOJ
– Amazon’s Frequency of Sale Events
– Marketing and Math
– Efficiency and Resilience
– Strategy and Change
HPC News Bytes – 20240401
– Microsoft OpenAI $100B Stargate supercomputer
– Eviden winning deals, growing and hiring
– Alibaba RISC-V datacenter chip
– Linear Pluggable Optics Multi-Source Agreement, LPO-MSA
– Nvidia banning CUDA translation software like ZLUDA
@HPCpodcast-81: Matt Sieger of ORNL on “Discovery” after “Frontier”
What does a supercomputer center do when it’s operating two systems on the TOP-10 most powerful computers? Well, it starts planning for what’s next. The center is Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL), and that’s exactly what it is doing. We caught up with Matt Sieger, Project Director for the 6th iteration of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF-6) to get a glimpse of the project, its objectives, status, and timelines.
Meet Discovery, the supercomputer that is being planned to succeed Frontier (the current #1 at 1.19 exaflops in 64 bits) while Summit (the current #7 at 148.8 64-bit petaflops) continues to work alongside it.
With a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and stints at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Intel’s fabrication facilities in Portland, Oregon, and a Knoxville-based startup as Chief Software Architect, Matt joined ORNL in 2009. He moved to OLCF as Deputy Project Director for the Frontier project in 2018, and was selected to lead the effort to procure the successor to Frontier in 2021.
HPC News Bytes – 20240325
– Nvidia GTC24
– Intel fab and US CHIPS Act
– Who isn’t in the Ultra Ethernet Consortium?
– Samsung HBM-or-GPU blend
@HPCpodcast-80: Live from Nvidia GTC24
Live from Nvidia GTC24 AI-everywhere show, Doug and Shahin get together in the usual coffee-shop-chat style of the @HPCpodcast. They cover the wide range of announcements made by Nvidia, discuss the contrast between the Nvidia model and some other players, and share some color on the event itself.
HPC News Bytes – 20240318
– European AI Act
– 5nm Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine 3
– A faster matrix-multiply algorithm?
– Meta’s GenAI Infrastructure
HPC News Bytes – 20240311
– IndiaAI Mission, including a 10,000-GPU supercomputer
– Countries court chip manufacturers for local fabs
– AI value-chain consolidation from fabs to apps to clouds
– Atos spinout of Eviden caught in financial complexity
Mktg_Podcast-40: CX in Digitized Mkts, Mktg-Finance Alignment, Poetry
– Customer experience in the digitized markets. Where’s the competition?
– Marketing-Finance Alignment
– Poetry! What do you lose when you analyze? What’s missing when you synthesize?
– Kicking the can on conversion
– Dune merch?
HPC News Bytes – 20240304
– GPU Shortage, HPE, Dell Financial Results
– GPU allocation: CSP, On-prem, AI PCs, Embedded AI
– Chip Capacity, Intel Fabs in Germany, Japan Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing
– Singapore AI program, Mid-career Training
– AI business justification, AI talent shortage
HPC News Bytes – 20240226
– Intel Foundry Event, “Systems Foundry” Era
– Nvidia Earnings,Valuation, AI Learning vs AI Inference, In-Memory Computing for AI
– HPC in Space, Data Centers on the Moon
– ISC-24 Conference
HPC News Bytes – 20240219
– AI Security, Safety, Containment, Governance
– U.S. AI Safety Institute Consortium (AISIC)
– Running CUDA Apps On ROCm
– Exascale software linear algebra software library
– Chinese chipmaker Loongson tapes out 16-core DragonChain-powered CPU
– Photonic computing chip at University of Pennsylvania
Mktg_Podcast-39: Mix, Apple Vision Pro, Market Research, Strategy
– Marketing Mix, can you brand, nurture, activate, sell all at the same time?
– Marketing of Apple Vision Pro
– Market Research, Quantitative, Qualitative, pitfalls
– Strategy, Change Management, Praxis
HPC News Bytes – 20240212
– Honda taps Cadence Design System digital twin supercomputer for CFD, air taxi R&D
– Chip news: Nvidia, TSMC, SKHynix, IBM AIU, OpenAI
– Kathy Yelick to Deliver ISC 2024 Keynote on Post-Exascale Computing
– Google settles with Singular Computing over claims of stolen AI chip tech
HPC News Bytes – 20240205
– Argonne National Lab’s Nexus Integrated Research Infrastructure (IRI)
– Delays in Intel’s Fab in Ohio, CHIPS Act
– Mitchel Institute report on Quantum Information Science and Technologies
– Controlling Emergent AI, High Calory Data
Bitcoin ETF, Bitcoin Halving, CBDCs – OrionX Download Podcast
Bitcoin ETF and Bitcoin halving have fueled renewed excitement in the cryptocurrency world and it is time to catch up with the state of the market again. Dr. Stephen Perrenod joins Shahin Khan to go over the latest hot topics: Wall Street entering the Bitcoin market with about a dozen Bitcoin Exchange Traded Funds (ETF), the upcoming halving of newly minted Bitcoins, and the state of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC).
HPC News Bytes – 20240129
– Italy’s Eni Acquiring 600 PFLOPS System
– Intel’s Advanced Fab in New Mexico, UMC partnership
– NSF’s Advanced Computing National AI Research Resource Pilot
– D-Wave’s 1,200+ Qubit Advantage2 Prototype
– IonQ’s 35 algorithmic qubit system
Mktg_Podcast-38: Sam Brealey on Strategy, Small Business Mktg, AI
Special guest Sam Brealey joins us as we discuss marketing strategy and execution, specially for small businesses, “pivot to video, and AI in marketing. Cartoon of the week on marketing (or is it sales?) strategy kicks off the discussion. Join us!
@HPCpodcast-79: Travis Humble of ORNL on Quantum Tech
We discuss the state of Quantum Information Science with our special guest Dr. Travis Humble, a global authority on the subject, director of the Quantum Science Center, a Distinguished Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and director of the lab’s Quantum Computing Institute. QSC is a partnership funded by Department of Energy comprised of leading academic institutions, National Labs, and corporations. Dr. Humble is editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Quantum Computing, Associate Editor for Quantum Information Processing, and co-chair of the IEEE Quantum Initiative. He also holds a joint faculty appointment with the University of Tennessee Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education. Please join us for an insightful discussion of quantum technologies and their impact on supercomputing and scientific discovery.
HPC News Bytes – 20240122
– Synopsys to Acquire Ansys
– Meta is spending billions on Nvidia chips
– OpenAI CEO raising billions to build new chips and new chip factories
– Pawesey selects QuEra, US Geological Survey selects Q-CTRL, Quantinuum Raises $300M
HPC News Bytes – 20240115
– RIKEN Hybrid Quantum-HPC Platform with Quantinuum
– Google in $1.67B AI Chip Patent Infringement Trial
– Crack in Cloud Egress Fees
– ORNL Post-Exascale RFP for next generation OLCF-6 to be delivered in the 2027 time frame
– HPE Acquires Juniper Networks
HPC News Bytes – 20240108
– Intel 4 fab, IDM 2.0, Ericsson
– CXL, Samsung, Red Hat
– AI startup funding
– Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) landscape
HPC News Bytes – 20240101
– Moore’s Law slows down, Intel, TSMC
– TSMC 1nm Chips, Arizona plant
– Huawei results, Mate 60 Pro smartphone, Kirin 9000S chip
– DARPA US2QC, PsiQuantum, Microsoft
@HPCpodcast-78: 2023 Year in Review
2023 Year in Review is our annual special edition as we look back at one of the more eventful years in recent history for HPC, AI, Quantum Computing, and other advanced technologies. The list below includes time stamps (in minutes and seconds) and the associated topic in the podcast.
02:00 – HPC
03:45 – AI
08:03 – Metaverse
12:01 – Chips, GPUs, Accelerators
14:00 – GPU Competition
14:00 – GPU Competition
15:46 – Open Source
17:54 – Aurora Supercomputer
20:21 – TOP500
20:55 – Cloud in TOP10
21:53 – China
24:15 – Europe
25:55 – Quantum Computing
30:12 – Photonics
31:35 – Cryptocurrencies
HPC News Bytes – 20231225
– EU Exascale, HLRS, MareNostrum Inauguration
– Neuromorphic AI gets active
– ASML’s 1st High-NA EUV system goes to Intel
– Argonne’s Bimetallic All-optical Switch
HPC News Bytes – 20231218
– Intel launches Gen-5 Emerald Rapids
– New York State’s own “Chips Act”: $10B for NanoTech Complex with IBM, Micron, others
– Quantum Computing market size from Hyperion Research
– AI “Benchmarketing”: Nvidia takes AMD’s bait
Mktg_Podcast-37: Agency Pricing Models, What is Quality?
– Cartoon: your product v. pictures of cats
– Agency/freelance pricing models
– How do you define quality?
HPC News Bytes – 20231211
– AMD MI300 availability as AI Chip Party heats up
– Q2B Silicon Valley quantum conference update
– Linux foundation’s High-Performance Software Foundation and DAOS Foundation
– Int’l consortium for trustworthy and reliable generative AI models for science
– EU agrees landmark deal on regulation of AI
– ISC Submission Deadlines extended
Mktg_Podcast-36: Value of Time vs Experience, Marketing Supercomputers
– Cartoon: Ven diagram
– What’s the value of Time? of Experience? Creativity? Luck?
– Do you like your customers?
– Marketing Supercomputers, case study
HPC News Bytes – 20231204
– Why would The New Yorker cover HPC technologies?
– Open Benchmark Council’s TOP100 lists
– Intel as one of the largest customers of TSMC’s high-end fab?
– Digital Twins for hyropower at ORNL and PNNL
@HPCpodcast-77: Adrian Cockcroft on Future Architectures
Adrian Cockcroft joins us again after SC23 to discuss TOP500 trends, the AI-HPC crossover, liquid cooling, chiplets, and the emergence of UCIe and CXL advancements. Be sure to listen to previous episodes with Adrian; Episode 36 on HPC in cloud and sustainability data and Episode 55 on decarbonization and ESG.
HPC News Bytes – 20231127
– NVIDIA Ethernet push with Dell, HPE, Lenovo
– Research and Engineering Studio on AWS
– Latest on Chinese exascale
– HPC-Quantum integration: Riken’s Fugaku + NTT Ei and Simulated systems
HPC News Bytes – 20231120
– SC23 stats
– Exascale update and future
– Raft of new chips
– Quantum Village at SC23
– UCIe, PCIe, Ultra Ethernet
@HPCpodcast-76: TOP500 at SC23
We provide details and our analysis of the latest TOP500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. This round sees quite a shake-up in the top 10 and reveals interesting changes in the market.
HPC News Bytes – 20231113
– SC23 Starts, TOP500 later today
– Storage at Scale, DAOS, Aurora, Linux Foundation
– Sandia National Lab and DDN
– TSMC 1.4nm, SMIC financials
@HPCpodcast-75: Rick Stevens, Mike Papka – Argonne National Lab (ANL)
As SC23 approaches, we were fortunate to catch up with Rick Stevens and Mike Papka of Argonne National Lab for a wide ranging discussion. In addition to an update on the Aurora supercomputer and TOP500, we also discuss the need and challenged of building a national exascale capability, developing teams and bench strength, the risks and opportunities of AI for science and society, the trend towards integrated research infrastructure (IRI), and what’s next for the exascale initiative. We’d like to encourage you to also listen to episodes 15 and 16 of this podcast where we discuss AI in science with prof. Stevens.
Rick Stevens is Argonne’s Associate Laboratory Director for the Computing, Environment and Life Sciences (CELS) Directorate and an Argonne Distinguished Fellow. He is also a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He was previously leader of Exascale Computing Initiative at Argonne.
Michael Papka is a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory where he is also deputy associate laboratory director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences (CELS) and division director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF).
@HPCpodcast-74: Karl Freund, AI Chips
Karl Freund, founder and principal analyst at Cambrian-AI Research joins us to discuss the, well, “Cambrian explosion” that we are witnessing in AI chips, the general state of the AI semiconductor market, and the competitive landscape in deep learning, inference, and software infrastructure in support of AI. Karl has a deep background in HPC and AI, having served in executive roles at Cray, IBM, AMD, and Calxeda, a pioneer of Arm-based system-on-chip (SoC) for servers. Karl is a frequent contributor to Forbes.
HPC News Bytes – 20231106
– UK Summit on AI, AI Supercomputers in the UK
– US Presidential Executive Order on AI
– Peter Ungaro on full episode of @HPCpodcast
– Intersect360 Market Update
@HPCpodcast-73: Peter Ungaro – Industry View
In this episode of Industry View, we are delighted to have a rare opportunity to catch up with none other than Pete Ungaro, long time luminary and admired leader in HPC/AI. Mr. Ungaro is a globally recognized technology executive, among the “40 under 40” by Corporate Leader Magazine in 2008, and CEO of the year by Seattle Business Monthly for the year 2006. He was most recently SVP/GM of High Performance Computing (HPC), Mission Critical Systems (MCS), and HPE Labs at HPE. Previously, he was president and CEO of Cray Inc. until its acquisition by HPE. Prior to joining Cray in 2003, Mr. Ungaro served as Vice President of Worldwide Deep Computing Sales for IBM.
In this episode of Industry View, we cover the Cray journey as it became the clear winner in exascale systems, the HPE acquisition, the challenges of delivering a new extreme-scale system during COVID, a look at HPC software, storage, power and cooling, and quantum computing, the opportunities and challenges of AI, and the geopolitics of high tech.
Mktg_Podcast-35: Outputs and Outcomes, Self Organizing Units
– Cartoon of the week: double feature
– Are movies getting longer?
– Self Organizing Units, micro metrics for micro management
– Even the best companies face complexity
HPC News Bytes – 20231030
– SC23 Conference “all in” with Streaming
– Intel Financials, On-track with Fab, Progress in AI
– Quantum Computing Round-up, Still Early Days
– Oxide Computer All-Custom Cloud Computer
@HPCpodcast-72: Vanessa Sochat and Alan Sill – HPC.social Community
Vanessa Sochat and Alan Sill ,the creators of the HPC.social project join us as we discuss the broad HPC/AI community and their efforts to enable it digitally through a broad multi-channel platform that includs Slack, Discord, Mastodon, GitHub, a jobs board, a community map, and the effort’s main site HPC.social.
The HPC community has grown but continues to have a very special tight-knit feel to it, as if everyone knows everyone else. While ISC, SC, and other conferences physically bring HPC (and increasingly AI) practitioners together, the digital community has been scattered and evolving. The work led by Vanessa and Alan puts a welcome focus on this digital aspect of the HPC community.
Vanessa is a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. She is a software engineer working with the converged computing team mapping out the space between cloud and HPC, both technologically and culturally. Previously, she worked in research computing at Stanford where she earned a PhD in biomedical informatics, and she was a researcher at Duke University where she earned a degree in psychology and neuroscience. Alan is managing director of the High Performance Computing Center at Texas Tech where he has also been a professor of physics and where he has been for 31 years. He is also co-director of The National Science Foundation’s Cloud and Autonomic Computing Center and is president of the Open Grid Forum. Alan has an extensive background in distributed and grid computing.
@HPCpodcast-71: Alain Andreoli – Industry View
We are starting a new feature, looking at HPC, AI, and other advanced technologies through the lens of industry leaders. In this episode, we have the pleasure of a very lively conversation with Alain Andreoli, a longtime luminary of HPC and IT. Mr. Andreoli was with HPE for more than 7 year where he served as group president and EVP of the Hybrid IT Group, helping shape HPE’s strategy for HPC including the acquisition of SGI in 2017. Earlier he was at Sun Microsystems where he was president of the European operations. He was also a senior executive at Ntt, Oracle, and Texas Instruments.
HPC News Bytes – 20231023
– HPE Cray at Crusoe Flared Gas Data Centers
– IBM NorthPole AI Chip
– TSMC financials: AI, 3nm, Inventory
– AI Frenzy, AGI, Brain Waves as Input
– Exascale, Aurora, TOP500
@HPCpodcast-70: Paul Messina – Journey to Exascale
From the early days of supercomputing through the stellar success of the Exascale Project, few HPC luminaries have played such an integral and leadership role in supercomputing as Dr. Paul Messina. So as we look at the annual observance of the Exascale Day on October eighteenth, we were delighted to get a chance to discuss the journey to Exascale with someone who has led and overseen 10 orders of magnitude in performance improvement. Dr. Messina’s distinguished career dates back to the early 70s. After earning his PhD at the University Of Cincinnati, Paul joined Argonne National Lab in 1973. He was involved in building programming language for the original Cray 1. At CalTech, he was the director of the Center for Advanced Computing Research. In 1998 to 2000 he led the DOE-NNSA Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) program which was at the heart of DOE’s Science Based Stockpile Stewardship strategy and a significant catalyst for supercomputing innovation. Dr. Messina was also the first director of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) starting from 2015 until late 2017.
HPC News Bytes – 20231016
– China Exascale Investment
– Samsung 3nm, Intel, TSMC
– Exascale Day
– Women in HPC, Why Women Stopped Coding
– GPU Shortage and Competition, Nvidia H100, AMD MI300, Intel Gaudi-2
HPC News Bytes – 20231009
– 1st Exascale Supercomputer in Europe
– Hyperion Rseaech Survey on the use of LLMs in HPC
– AD Little report on Quantum Computing myths and opportunities
– Human Immortality in 2030
Mktg_Podcast-34: Self Organization, J&J’s New Logo, Critics as Media, Buzzwords
– Buzzword Density
– Critics as Media
– J&J’s New Logo
– Emergent Phenomena, Self-Organization in Marketing
HPC News Bytes – 20231002
– AMD’s Lisa Su at the Code Conference Discusses Generative AI, MI300, Open Strategy
– EUV armed Intel-4 Fab in Ireland Starts Volume Production
– AI Impact on Jobs, Case in the Legal Field
– Supercomputing Conference coming: SC23, Denver, Nov 12-17
HPC News Bytes – 20230925
– Intel Gaudi2, Collaboration with Dell, Satability AI
– Samba Nova SN40L, LLMs
– Air Force Research Lab 12 PFlop System
– Small Modular nuclear Reactors (SMRs)
– CHIPS Act: DOD $238m award for Microelectronics Commons Regional Innovation Hubs
Mktg_Podcast-33: NPS, IKEA, Complexity
– Is anything wrong with Net Promoter Score (NPS)?
– Surprising customer reaction to IKEA’s store layout
– Complexity, and why Doug is writing a book about it
HPC News Bytes – 20230918
– Intel Innovation Event, FPGA, Open Source
– AI-Oriented Papers in Science
– Arm IPO and Strategic Shift
– AMD EPYC 8004
@HPCpodcast-69: David Barkai author of Unmatched: 50 Years of Supercomputing
Special guest David Barkai discusses his new book, Unmatched: 50 Years of Supercomputing. Dr. Barkai is a 50 year veteran of the HPC community whose new book chronicles the extraordinary progress of supercomputing over the past half century, and how HPC emerged as a “powerful demonstration of our relentless drive to understand and shape the world around us.” David entered HPC shortly after receiving a PhD in theoretical physics and has focused on relationships between applications and architectures. He served at several technology companies during their heydays such as Control Data, Floating Point Systems, Cray Research, SGI, and others along with stints at NASA Ames and Intel. Unmatched the book is broken up into five decade-long epochs defined by the system architectural themes of “big iron” vector processors, multiprocessors, microprocessor, clusters, and accelerators and cloud computing. The final part of the book examines key issues of HPC and discusses where it might all be headed. We were delighted to host David and have the excellent conversation that ensued. Join us.
HPC News Bytes – 20230911
– NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM
– Honeywell Leverages Quantum Computing Encryption Keys
– TSMC Silicon Photonics
– Microsoft Copilot AI Indemnification
– HPC Forum Tuscon
Mktg_Podcast-32: Confidence, AI Copyright, Strategy
– Competence v. Confidence v. Complexity
– Bad Data v. Bad Attitude
– AI-Generated Content’s Copyright and DRM
– Strategy v. Change Management
@HPCpodcast-68: Mike McGrath of Red Hat on Linux Controversy
A change in distribution policy by Red Hat started the biggest open source controversy in years. We continue our coverage of this topic with Mike McGrath, whose two blogs from Red Hat in late June announced the company’s new policy. Mike is Vice President of Core Platforms at Red Hat where he leads the development of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and related platforms. He has been at Red Hat for nearly seventeen years and in the IT industry since 2004.
Our coverage started with special guest Joe Landman, and then with Greg Kurtzer of CIQ. Be sure to listen to all three episodes to get a full perspective on the various issues and nuances, and there are a few, including how the Open Source community has changed, how the software supply chain in Open Source has worked and why it is now a point of contention, and in what happened to Free Open Source Software (FOSS).
HPC News Bytes – 20230904
– Google Cloud with TPU v5e and Nvidia H100
– Arm Neoverse Compute Subsystem
– ETH’s Torsten Hoefler now also CSCS Chief Architect for Machine Learning
– @HPCpodcast: Greg Kurtzer on Red Hat and the RHEL Source Code Controversy
@HPCpodcast-67: Greg Kurtzer of CIQ on Linux Controversy, OELA
The Linux open source controversy was kicked off about two months ago when Red Hat announced it was changing access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code. This has thrown the open source community into a major disruption. We discussed this in a previous episode with our special guest Joe Landman. We also spoke with Greg Kurtzer of CIQ and Mike McGrath of Red Hat to get their perspectives.
This episode is our conversation with Greg Kurtzer, founder and chief executive officer of CIQ. He’s a 20+ year veteran in Linux open source and HPC. His focus has been on designing scalable architectures for performance-intensive computing while working for the US Department of Energy and holding a joint appointment to UC Berkeley. Greg has led several large open source projects such as CENTOS Linux and its successor Rocky Linux. Related to this conversation is a new industry alliance led by CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE called the Open Enterprise Linux Association. Stay tuned for an in-depth discussion with Mike McGrath of Red Hat.
HPC News Bytes – 20230828
– Gartner predicts accelerated growth for CDI
– MPI ABI to simplify parallel apps
– AMD buys AI software Mipsology, pointing to where chip companies will seek use cases and growth
– HPC in the Cloud gets “recycled”
Mktg_Podcast-31: The Unicorn Barbie, Bad Ads, Complexity the book
– The unicorn Barbie
– Sequels v. One-Time Phenomenon v. Fresh New Material
– Bad Ads? Who’s to say?
– Complexity, the book Doug is writing
HPC News Bytes – 20230821
– Intel calls off Tower Deal
– HotChips Conference Preview
– GPU Shortage as AI Leadership Grows in Importance Globally
– Samsung 4nm Chip Factory in Texas with Groq as 1st customer Projected for 2nd Half of 2024
HPC News Bytes – 20230814
– Linux Wars continue: Oracle, SUSE, and CIQ form Open Enterprise Linux Association
– China’s tech companies place $5 billion of orders on US chips
– Intel improves hardware for on-chip AVX (or APX) vector instructions
– 2023 Gordon Bell Prize Finalists also point to TOP500
Mktg_Podcast-30: AI for Market(ing) Mix Modeling
– Cookies and “sketchy data”
– WARC WARNS: AI for Market(ing) Mix Modeling
– GM’s new CMO hailing from digital; and CVS?
HPC News Bytes – 20230807
– Domain Specific Architecture (DSA) – McKinsey Report
– Intel Expands in Oregon, its biggest site
– Photons are coming: PCIe over optical
– Oak Ridge QC Hat Trick: Singlet Fusion simulation of linear H4 molecule w Quantinuum
@HPCpodcast-66: Argonne AI Testbed w Venkat Vishwanath
The Cambrian explosion of AI chips has made it hard to tell what chip is good for what. Venkat Vishwanath, Data Science Team Lead at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), and a Gordon Bell finalist, joins us to discuss the ALCF AI Testbed. Currently working with systems such as Cerebras, Graphcore, SambaNova, Habana, Groq, Untether, Tenstorrent, Esperanto, and others, the Testbed evaluates accelerators from a usability and performance standpoint.
Technopolitics, a Technology Lens to Guide Policy – OrionX Download Podcast
Why is technopolitics a good lens? Technology has always had a big impact on geopolitics and global competitiveness. What’s special now?
A major topic that we’ve wanted to cover for a few years is technopolitics. The impact of technology on national competitiveness, and therefore on policy and supply chain, is growing. We see that in the global gold-rush frenzy towards advanced technologies: exascale supercomputers, quantum computing, AI, space tech, biotech, robotics, and so on. The first question is: what’s different now? Over the course of history, technology has always had a big impact on geopolitics, on human condition, on global competitiveness. So what’s special now? Join us!