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@HPCpodcast-93: TOP500 at SC24 Conference

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SC24 is off to a great start with over 17,000 attendees, 480 exhibitors from 29 countries, and new TOP500 list that features a new champion! “The new El Capitan system at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, U.S.A., has debuted as the most powerful system on the list with an HPL score of 1.742 EFlop/s. It has 11,039,616 combined CPU and GPU cores and is based on AMD 4th generation EPYC processors with 24 cores at 1.8GHz and AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators. El Capitan relies on a Cray Slingshot 11 network for data transfer and achieves an energy efficiency of 58.89 Gigaflops/watt. This power efficiency rating helped El Capitan achieve No. 18 on the GREEN500 list as well.”

Join Shahin and Doug as they analyze and discuss the new list. As usual, they go over notable additions, performance efficiency, power efficiency in the Green500 list, the difficult HPCG benchmark that usually sets the lower bound of system performance.

 

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@HPCpodcast-92: Torsten Hoefler on Age of Computation

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Special guest and a leading light of the HPC industry, Prof. Torsten Hoefler of ETH-Zurich joins Shahin and Doug in a lively discussion about the Age of Computation, Ultra Ethernet, datacenter power and cooling, the creative process for AI, model certainty for AI, AI and emergent behavior, and other HPC topics.

Torsten is a professor at ETH Zurich, where he directs the Scalable Parallel Computing Laboratory. He is also the Chief Architect for machine learning at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center, as well as a consultant for Microsoft on large scale AI and networking.

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20241111

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– TSMC revenue jump
– TSMC barred from making leading-edge chips abroad
– AMD-Fujitsu team up for a new superchip?
– AMD, Intel, Nvidia datacenter revenue
– Green energy momentum in the US

 

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@HPCpodcast-91: David Kanter of ML Commons on AI Performance Measurement

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Special guest David Kanter of ML Commons joins Shahin Khan and Doug Black to discuss AI performance metrics. AI is everywhere and destined to run on everything from devices to big systems. So, in addition to the well-known MLPerf benchmark for AI training, ML Commons provides a growing suite of benchmarks and data sets for other aspects of AI such as inference, storage, and safety. David is a founder, board member of ML Commons and the head of MLPerf benchmarks. David has more than 16 years of experience in semiconductors computing and machine learning. He was a founder of a microprocessor and compiler startup. He was also at Astor Data Systems and has consulted for NVIDIA, Intel, KLA, Applied Materials, Qualcomm, Microsoft, and others.

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20241028

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– TSMC delivers good news for chip manufacturing in the US
– Denmark builds AI supercomputer with Eviden and Nvidia
– White House tasks NNSA/DOE with assessing AI risk for National Security

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20241021

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– Exascale Day, Zettascale, Avogadro’s Number
– Did a Chinese quantum computer crack military grade encryption?
– The great Rear admiral Dr. Grace Hopper
– The First Computer Bug
– Hyperion Research innovation award
– Q2B Conference

 

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@HPCpodcast-90: Lenovo on Memory-Centric Architectures – Industry View

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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 CPU-Memory-I/O dynamics and the emergence of memory-centric architectures. We are joined by Patrick Caporale who is Executive Director, Distinguished Engineer, and Chief I/O Architect at Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group. Patrick has served in a variety of senior technical roles at Lenovo for the past 10 years, and for 20 years before that at IBM, leading into the Lenovo acquisition.

We touch on many topics including the CPU-Memory-I/O gap, memory-centric architectures, Non Von-Neumann architectures, NUMA, advances in I/O, computational storage, disk, tape, Ultra Ethernet Consortium, Ultra Accelerator Link, CXL, tiered storage, power and cooling, heat capture, and more.

 

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@HPCpodcast-89: Rick Stevens and Mike Papka of Argonne National Lab

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Last year about this time, we had the opportunity to discuss the state of HPC and the Aurora supercomputer with Rick Stevens and Mike Papka of Argonne National Lab. In the run up to SC24, we are delighted to do the same!  Rick and Mike kindly carved out some time to join us for another wide ranging discussion.

We discuss Aurora, Exascale, AI, reliability at scale, technology adoption agility, datacenter power and cooling, cloud computing, quantum computing.

We’d like to encourage you to also listen to episodes 15 and 16 where we discuss AI in science with Prof. Stevens, and epsideo 75 referenced above, just before SC23.

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).

 

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@HPCpodcast-88: Mike Heroux of Sandia on ECP, HPC Software

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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.

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20240819

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– 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

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20240729

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– 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

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– 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?

 

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@HPCpodcast-87: Penguin Solutions on AI Infrastructure – Industry View

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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.

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20240701

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– 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

 

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@HPCpodcast-86: DOE Exascale Project w Christine Chalk

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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.

 

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20240617

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– 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?

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20240610

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– 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

 

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@HPCpodcast-85: Stanford AI Index w Nestor Maslej

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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

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20240527

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– 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

 

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@HPCpodcast-84: TOP500 at ISC24 Conference

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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.

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20240513

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– 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

 

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@HPCpodcast-83: Attack of Killer Chiplets, w John Shalf

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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.

 

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@HPCpodcast-82: Cristin Merritt on Women in HPC

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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.

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20240429

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– 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

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20240415

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– 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

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20240408

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– 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

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20240401

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– 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

 

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@HPCpodcast-81: Matt Sieger of ORNL on “Discovery” after “Frontier”

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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.

 

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@HPCpodcast-80: Live from Nvidia GTC24

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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.

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20240311

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– 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

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20240304

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– 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

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20240226

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– 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

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– 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

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20240212

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– 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

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20240205

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– 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

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20240129

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– 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

 

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@HPCpodcast-79: Travis Humble of ORNL on Quantum Tech

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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.

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20240122

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– 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

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20240115

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– 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

 

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@HPCpodcast-78: 2023 Year in Review

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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

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20231218

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– 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

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20231211

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– 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

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20231204

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– 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

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20231127

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– 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

 

@HPCpodcast-76: TOP500 at SC23

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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.

 

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@HPCpodcast-75: Rick Stevens, Mike Papka – Argonne National Lab (ANL)

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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).

 

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@HPCpodcast-74: Karl Freund, AI Chips

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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.

 

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@HPCpodcast-73: Peter Ungaro – Industry View

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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.

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20231030

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– 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

 

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@HPCpodcast-72: Vanessa Sochat and Alan Sill – HPC.social Community

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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.

 

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@HPCpodcast-71: Alain Andreoli – Industry View

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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.

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@HPCpodcast-70: Paul Messina – Journey to Exascale

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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.

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HPC News Bytes – 20231002

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– 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


 

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HPC News Bytes – 20230925

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– 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

 

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@HPCpodcast-69: David Barkai author of Unmatched: 50 Years of Supercomputing

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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.

 

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@HPCpodcast-68: Mike McGrath of Red Hat on Linux Controversy

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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).

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20230904

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– 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

 

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@HPCpodcast-67: Greg Kurtzer of CIQ on Linux Controversy, OELA

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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.

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20230828

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– 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”

 

HPC News Bytes – 20230821

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– 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

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20230814

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– 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

 

HPC News Bytes – 20230807

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– 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

 

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@HPCpodcast-66: Argonne AI Testbed w Venkat Vishwanath

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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.

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20230724

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– Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC)
– Meta Microsoft Llama 2 Open Source AI
– NTT Tokyo Tech 300 GHz 6G
– 64-way Cerebras CG-1 system with G42 Group
– NREL grid optimization with quantum tech and Atom Computing

 

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@HPCpodcast-65: Linux Wars w Joe Landman

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Dr. Joe Landman joins us to discuss how the open source OS community has found itself in the middle of the kind of Linux wars that can change the industry. The recent firestorm in the Linux world erupted when Red Hat changed the access mechanism and distribution rights of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We unpack what happened, who it affects, and how the landscape might change. Joe has been a business and technology leader, a hands-on engineer and architect, and a data analyst and researcher. A computational physicist by training he has was one of the early pioneers of custom and accelerated systems.  Read his blog on this and other HPC software here.

 

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