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HPC News Bytes – 20251124

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– SC25 quick takes
– Thank you St. Louis
– Hyperion Research annual SC briefing
– Hyperion quantum computing update
– New public-private partnership model for DOE’s new supercomputers

 

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@HPCpodcast-106: TOP500 at SC25 Conference

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SC25 showed continued strength of the HPC community with about 16,500 attendees, 560 exhibitors, and the usual fastest network, SCinet, this time with a pack bandwith of 13.7 TBytes/s. And as usual, the latest edition of the TOP500 list was released on Monday. Not a lot of changes in the TOP10 this time, but several noteworthy developments, including the first officially rated exaflop system in Europe at the Julich Supercomputer Center.

Join Shahin and Doug as they analyze and discuss the new TOP500 list. They go over HPL, HPL-MxP, HPCG, Green500, geographical distribution, vendor distribution, and other observations.

@HPCpodcast-105: Dan Nystedt on Chips, China, AI Tech

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If you’ve been following Dan Nystedt on social media, you are familiar with his insightful commentary and his unique perspective. Dan is vice president of research at Tri-Orient Investments, a private institutional investor that has been active in Asian markets since 2010. A former journalist, fluent in Chinese, based in Taiwan, and deeply familiar with the tech scene in one of the most vibrant technology centers in the world, Dan is a source of important market and technology signals. We caught up with him last week to discuss the Asian tech scene: geopolitical tensions and Taiwan’s role, rivalries in chip manufacturing and AI, complexities of the global tech supply chain, and China’s rare earth dominance and geopolitical impact. Join us!

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20251027

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– Google Claims Verifiable Quantum Advantage
– Quantum Computing Applications and Current Status
– US Govt’s Rumored Interest in Equity Stakes in Quantum-Computing Firms
– NextSilicon’s New Chip
– A Bit of History on Reconfigurable Computing, Data Flow Architecture, Systolic Arrays

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20251020

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– How about an AI system that needs 2x the energy NYC uses?
– A GPU for every person
– HPC-Quantum hybrid systems
– Exascale Day 10/18, ExaFlops or ExaWatts?
– Seymour Cray 100th birthday
– Cray-1 50th anniversary
– US Mint’s new dollar coin featuring the Cray-1
– Cray-1 masterclass in… branding!

 

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@HPCpodcast-104: Silicon Photonics, w Keren Bergman (2)

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We had the opportunity to catch up again with Keren Bergman to discuss the latest developments in fast moving optical technologies: co-packaged photonics/opto-eletcronics/silicon photonics, photonic integrated circuits (PICs), and optical computing.

We also discuss the sate of the market, the impact of AI, manufacturability, the software stack, ease of deployment, and the well-funded and promising start up, Xscape Photonics, co-founded by Professor Bergman.

Professors Bergman is the Charles Batchelor Professor of Electrical Engineering, Faculty Director of the Columbia Nano Initiative, and Principal Investigator of Lightwave Research Laboratory at Columbia University. She is the recipient of the 2016 IEEE Photonics Engineering Award and is a Fellow of Optica (Optical Society of America) and IEEE.

Our last conversation was in epsidoe 54 when we discussed a wide range of topics including: “Silicon Photonics vs. Fiber Optics used in telecommunications, the use of photonics c0mmunication vs. computation, what aspects of light are used to achieve  efficiencies, packet switching vs circuit switching, current advances and speeds, economic considerations and likely first uses, supply chain, fabrication, assembly, and packaging technologies for photonics.”

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250929

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– “World Models” aim for the next big thing in AI
– Microsoft’s $3.3B datacenter, with a $4B one to Follow
– OpenAI talks central-park-sized datacenter, times 13
– In-Chip ‘Microfluidics’ cooling
– Caltech tames 6,100 neutral atom qubits with 12,000 optical tweezers

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250922

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– Nvidia, Intel, and $5 Billion
– Is APU the way to go?
– Nvidia, Enfabrica, and $0.9 Billion
– Interconnects and Networking key to AI Data Center
– PsiQuantum and $1 Billion
– Investment continues to grow for Quantum Tech

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250908

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– Cooler AI: Cutting energy costs with Adiabatic Reversible Computing
– More Heat in Chip Wars: OpenAI joins the race to design custom AI silicon
– Ironwood Rising: Google’s next-gen chip may debut in Neoclouds
– Made in India: Nation unveils its latest fully homegrown chip
– HPC User Forum 2025
– Europe’s Exascale: Jülich unveils its 64-bit powerhouse
– Quantum Cash Flow: Industry kicks off September with billion-dollar momentum

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250825

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– FugakuNEXT, Japan’s next leadership supercomputer led by RIKEN
– Fujitsu MONAKA CPU
– Fujitsu’s 1000-qubit Superconducting Quantum Computer
– CPU-GPU-QPU hybrid systems coming
– US Government’s equity stake in Intel: “Arsenal of Democracy” or “intervention”?
– Softbank bets on Intel
– New geopolitical football: H20 GPUs

 

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@HPCpodcast-103: Stanford AI Index 2025 w Nestor Maslej

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We are delighted to again welcome Nestor Maslej of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) at Stanford University to discuss the latest edition of the the annual Stanford AI Index and Stanford Global AI Vibrancy Tool.  Nestor has degrees from Harvard and Oxford in addition to being a fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation. We touch on several of the 12 key findings of the report as we highlight important issues in AI such as its impact on jobs, geopolitics, and social trust.

This year’s report is 456 pages covering a wide range of topics in eight chapters:
1) Research and Development
2) Technical Performance
3) Responsible AI
4) Economy
5) Science and Medicine
6) Policy and Governance
7) Education
8) Public Opinion

We discussed last year’s report in episode 85 on June 7th, 2024. We recommend that you listen to both podcasts to get a more complete view.

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250811

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– TSMC employees caught in 2nm espionage charges
– Trump calls for Intel CEO to resign
– Curtain fall for Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer
– Paper review: Generative AI as a Geopolitical Factor in Industry 5.0
– David Patterson on federal cuts for research
– Jack Dongarra on supercomputing, AI, quantum computing, and geopolitics

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250714

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– SemiAnalysis on the business of AI: GPUs, Neoclouds, Inference Providers, Applications
– 2nm fab race: TSMC, Intel, Samsung aim to ship this year
– IFS external customers
– Nvidia valuation: a trillion here a trillion there!

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250707

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– IDC projects a $366B global server market in 2025, 45% y/y growth annually over 2024, 134% y/y growth in Q1
– The European Quantum Act announced its Quantum Strategy aiming to leverage deep science for global quantum leadership by 2030
– TSMC’s 3nm fab in Arizona ahead of schedule, first batch of wafers expected in 2027
– US lifts EDA software export restrictions to China

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250630

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– GPU-ASIC War
– Hyperscalers’ CPUs, “GPUs”, DPUs, QPUs
– Google TPU-7 and Open AI?
– Meta’s AI chip tape out
– Microsoft’s AI chip delays
– Why do engineering projects get delayed?
– Chip co-designers break into chip supply chain

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250623

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– Fault Tolerant Quantum Computer in 2029?
– Quantum computing roadmaps, performance benchmarks, industry metrics, M&A
– RIKEN and Fujitsu team up again for Fugaku.next, Japan’s next-gen flagship supercomputer

 

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@HPCpodcast-102: TOP500 at ISC25 Conference

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The new TOP500 list of the most powerful supercomputers was released today at the ISC conference, with a new addition to the top 10. Tune in as Shahin and Doug go through the list with their commentary and analysis as they go over the details, key takeawats, how continents, companies, and architectures fair, and cover the full suite of benchmarks: HPL, Green500, HPCG, HPL-MxP (AI), IO500, and MLPerf.

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250602

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– Nvidia Earnings
– US Senators react to Nvidia’s plans for facility in China
– New compliant chips for China by Nvidia and AMD
– Trade restrictions reach EDA software
– Vertical integration reaches China: Sugon-Hygon merger
– AMD-Sanmina split ZT Systems
– DOE NERSC’s “Doudna” supercomputer
– UK-EU dial up supercomputer re-collaboration

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250526

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– Big AI in hot pursuit of AGI and SI
– Stargate plans for US center with 400K GPUs, other sites in Mid-East and Asia
– Would Nvidia invest in PsiQuantum?
– Photonic and silicon-based Quantum Computing line up
– D-Wave rolls out new Advantage 2
– RISC-V turns 15, positions itself “as a pillar of digital sovereignty on the world stage”
– ISC25 June 10th in Hamburg with 195 exhibitors from 31 countries

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250519

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– Computex 2025
– NVLink Fusion, DGX Cloud Lepton
– Intel 18A Fab Panther Lake, Gaudi 3 PCIe, Intel Arc Pro
– Jack Dongarra, US Leadership in HPC
– Matrix Algebra, 64 bit precision
– Chiplet Alliance, UCIe consortium
– “Motherchip” vs. Motherboard

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250512

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– SMIC, China’s Semiconductor Industry
– Cisco in quantum networking, quantum scale-out
– HPSF.io open source HPC stack
– The journal Nature sees US science brain drain as EU allocates €500m to attract international scientists

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250414

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– Argonne’s nuclear reactor digital twin helps monitor, manage, train
– An AI factory in the sky? Building data centers in space or on the moon using Space Based Solar Power (SSP)
– TSMC may face US$1B penalty
– Chinese AI players order $16B of Nvidia H20s
– Hyperion Research says HPC-AI market grew a whopping 23.5% in 2024, poised to exceed $100B by 2028

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250407

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– US Tariffs and Technology Sector
– Intel-TSMC Joint Venture?
– DARPA fuels Waferscale co-packaged optics via Cerebras and Ranovus
– Sandia National Lab to test laser-based photonic cooling via Maxwell Labs
– 8 Tbps optical UCIe chiplet for scale-up by Ayar Labs
– Lightmatter 3D co-packaged optics

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250331

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– AMD MI355X to debut with a 30,000 GPU cluster at Oracle cloud
– ASML to open repair hub in China
– EuroHPC-JU’s CINECA selects 140-Qubit Pasqal system
– ORNL sees a path for quantum performance advantage for Fluid Dynamics
– Classiq, Deloitte Tohmatsu, and Mitsubishi Chemical compress quantum circuits by 97% and 54%
– Prof Torsten Hoefler of ETH wins ACM Prize in Computing

 

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@HPCpodcast-101: Live from Nvidia GTC25

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In what is becoming an annual tradition, we are “Live from Nvidia GTC25” AI-everywhere show. We cover everything from industry landscape to Hopper to Blackwell to Rubin and Feynman, plus silicon photonics for cluster interconnect fabric (star of the show, really), the complexity of inference for customers, low-end systems, power and cooling (did we hear 600 KW per rack?), software including cluster-level AI-workload-focused open-sourced Dynamo “OS”, and storage (the semantic kind).

 

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@HPCpodcast-100: Dr. Ian Cutress on the State of AI and Advanced Chips – In Depth

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Just before the GTC25 conference, and in the 100th episode of the full format @HPCpodcast, we welcome a very special guest, the great Dr. Ian Cutress, Chief Analyst at More Than Moore and host of the popular video channel TechTechPotato to discuss the state of AI and advanced chips, new technologies and architectures, the startup scene, and top trends in semiconductor design & manufacturing. Join us!

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250310

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– TSMC $100B investment in Arizona Factories
– EuroHPC Project DARE using RISC-V
– Jülich Hybrid Supercomputer with D-Wave
– Quantum Computing Stock Price Volatility
– Chinese Quantum Computer Betters Google’s Willow
– Supercomputing Asia 2025 (SCA25) held this week in Singapore

 

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@HPCpodcast-99: Dr. Handel Jones on Geopolitics of Technology – In Depth

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Dr. Handel Jones, author of the book When AI Rules the World: China, the U.S., and the Race to Control a Smart Planet, and CEO of International Business Strategies, Inc.  joins us again to discuss the geopolitics of technology. Dr. Jones was a specia; guest of this podcast in episode 48 in January 2023. Fast moving technologies matched with big changes in global politics and policy creates a potent mix. So we were delighted to have the opportunity to revisit many of the topics we covered last time and explore new topics.

 

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@HPCpodcast-98: Hyperion Research on HPC, AI, Quantum – In Depth

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We are delighted to have as special guests today three of the top analysts in the HPC, AI, Cloud, and Quantum fields, representing the industry analyst firm Hyperion Research. Earl Joseph is Hyperion CEO with oversight for Hyperion’s overall research and consulting efforts along with the firm’s HPC User Forum, which conducts conferences in the US and around the world throughout the year, Mark Nossokoff, Research Director and Lead Analyst for Storage and Interconnects and Cloud, and Bob Sorensen, Senior VP of Research, who focuses on Exascale, Supercomputing, Quantum, and other future technologies.

Join us for an In Depth discussion of the current state and future trends in HPC, AI, Quantum, Cloud Computing, Exascale, Storage, Interconnects and Optical I/O, and Liquid Cooling.

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250224

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– New in-house-manufactured Microsoft QPU: Majorana 1
– DARPA US2QC program
– (Funding) and harnessing idle GPUs anywhere on the internet
– France’s CEA advances in fusion energy research

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250217

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– Arm to sell its own CPU? Meta as first customer?
– Big AI, Big Power, Big Chill… Big Pollution?
– Intel’s fate puts national security and market forces into focus
– Europe falls in-line to avid falling behind in AI
– GE Aerospace gains access to exascale power via DOE INCITE program

 

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@HPCpodcast-97: Addison Snell on HPC, AI, Hyperscalers – In Depth

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In this In-Depth feature of the @HPDpodcast, Addison Snell, co-founder and CEO of Intersect360 joins Shahin and Doug as they discuss a wide range of topics in HPC, AI, and Quantum Computing.  They touch on HPC-AI market size, the impact of hyperscalers on AI, the future of leadership computing facilities (exascale.next), AI nationalism, DeepSeek AI, Nvidia’s leadership and challenges, the state of quantum computing, AI storage, optical computing and interconnects, and of course, Addison’s crossword puzzles features in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal! Make sure, especially,  to look up the crossword puzzle in the Sunday Times of October, 30th, 2022.

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20250203

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– DeepSeek, 1+5 lessons
– Rack Scale Arch redux, Intel GPU roadmap change
– LANL and OpenAI, national security apps, fully on-prem?
– Google and Kairos Power, Small Modular (nuclear) Reactors

 

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@HPCpodcast-96: DDC Solutions on Datacenter Cooling – Industry View

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Datacenter power and cooling has rapidly emerged as a critical topic in HPC and AI. System roadmaps only point to additional requirements. Chris Orlando, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of DDC Solutions joins us to discuss high density cooling, dynamic control, safety and compliance, and the enduring role of air cooling in the datacenter.

This episode is part of the @HPCpodcasts Industry View feature, which takes on major issues in the world of HPC, AI, and other advanced technologies through the lens of industry leaders.

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@HPCpodcast-95: Adrian Cockcroft on SC24, RISC-V Summit, AWS Reinvent

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This is a great time to review what we learned at some of the key conferences that were held towards the end of last year. Adrian Cockcroft joins Shahin Khan and Doug Black to discuss SC24, RISC-V Summit, and AWS Reinvent. Topics include: HPC and AI Clouds, CXL, Liquid Cooling, Optical Interconnects, Optical Computing, Novel CPUs and GPUs, the state of RISC-V in servers and supercomputers, TOP500, Chiplets, AWS CPU and GPU strategies. We recorded this episode just before the always-good Q2B conference on quantum technologies, which is mentioned here and will be covered in a future episode.

 

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HPC News Bytes – 20241216

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– Google “Willow” quantum chip: hype or reality?
– European supercomputing site chooses US vendor: LRZ’s Blue Lion
– China-US technology clash and mutual retaliation
– ORNL supercomputers accelerate research on this fast-growing tree

 

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@HPCpodcast-94: Penguin Solutions on HPC-AI Managed Services – Industry View

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Special guest Ryan Smith joins Shahin and Doug to discuss the vexing challenges of implementing HPC class AI systems in a managed services model, the landmines organizations need to avoid, and the opportunities for seizing success. A 25 year veteran of the technology industry, Ryan is Director of Managed Services at Penguin Solutions. He was previously a Director of Solution Services at Stratus, the continuous availability (fault-tolerant) systems company.

This episode is part of the @HPCpodcasts Industry View feature, which takes on major issues in the world of HPC, AI, and other advanced technologies through the lens of industry leaders.

 

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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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HPC News Bytes – 20230710

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New in the @HPCpodcast, a weekly news show, 3-5 min, on important industry news.
– LLNL El Capitan
– LLNL Director Kim Budil named as one of the Most Creative People in Business for 2023 by Fast Company
– Inflection AI’s 22k GPU system
– NYS DFS AI
– Intel & Nvidia collaborate on Confidential Computing
– Photonics News
– Linux Wars

 

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@HPCpodcast-64: RISC-V CTO Mark Himelstein

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Mark Himelstein, CTO of RISC-V joins us to discuss the latest developments with the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) and its growing community and footprint. Topics include HPC type use cases from sensor to supercomputer, achieving customization without loss of compatibility, AI and its impact on chips and systems, and the question on everyone’s mind: when do we see RISC-V in servers and supercomputers!

You may also be interested in Shahin’s conversation with Mark in August 2020 and see how things have evolved.

 

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@HPCpodcast-62: Exascale Software with Sunita Chandrasekaran

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University of Delaware Professor Sunita Chandrasekaran joins us to discuss exascale software, directive based parallel programming, the emergence of research software engineering as a career, what AI will mean for the industry, and the importance of communication and community among teams.

This episode is sponsored by Lenovo.

 

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@HPCpodcast-60: TOP500 at ISC23 Conference

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Doug is in Hamburg, Germany for the ISC23 conference where the 61st edition of the TOP500 list has just been published. 30+ years of systematic data on the highest performing computer architecture and configurations is a treasure trove and we look at the top line insights from this installment, including the GREEN500, HPCG, and the AI-inspired mixed precision benchmark HPL-MxP.

This episode is sponsored by Lenovo.

 

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@HPCpodcast-59: HPC Software

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This episode starts to look at HPC software and its convergence with traditional enterprise IT software. We cover the evolution of software through phases of IT, the roster of relevant HPC software from development environment to system administration, and end-user requirements, and traditional and emerging applications. Future episodes and guests will focus on various aspects of HPC software.

This episode is sponsored by Lenovo.

 

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@HPCpodcast-58: Liquid Cooling in Supercomputing

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Liquid cooling in supercomputing came up in our last episode on decarbonization and environment, sustainability, and governance (ESG). We cover liquid cooling in this episode: everything from chilled doors to direct-to-chip, immersion cooling, vapor chambers, and even under-water data centers.

This episode is sponsored by Lenovo.

 

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@HPCpodcast-55: Post-Exascale Computing for the NNSA

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Post-Exascale Computing for the NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration) is the subject of a new report by a distinguished working and review committes comprised of notable supercomputing experts. The report examines the trajectory of high-end supercomputing to date, future needs, emerging technologies, advances in scientific disciplines and computational methods, and the workforce, industry partnerships, and roadmap necessary for successful deployment. We bring you a summary of the report’s key findings and recommendations. @HPCpodcast is delighted that two of the panelists were guests of this show in recent months.

 

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@HPCpodcast-54: Silicon Photonics, w Keren Bergman

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We discuss Silicon Photonics with Keren Bergman, the Charles Batchelor Professor of Electrical Engineering, Faculty Director of the Columbia Nano Initiative, and Principal Investigator of Lightwave Research Laboratory at Columbia University. Prof. Bergman is the recipient of the 2016 IEEE Photonics Engineering Award and is a Fellow of Optica (Optical Society of America) and IEEE.

The wide range of topics includes: Silicon Photonics vs. Fiber Optics used in telecommunications, the use of photonics c0mmunication vs. computation, what aspects of light are used to achieve  efficiencies, packet switching vs circuit switching, current advances and speeds, economic considerations and likely first uses, supply chain, fabrication, assembly, and packaging technologies for photonics.

 

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@HPCpodcast-53: Warfare as Product Development, Intel Roadmap

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When soldiers are software engineers a new warfare emerges. Modern warfare is similar to, and needs, high tech product development with fast cycles and incremental improvement. The new Technopolitics section starts with the role of software engineers enlisted in the Ukrain war. Next is the House Committee on Science Space and Technology hearing on “US, China, and the Fight for Global Leadership: Building a U.S. National Science and Technology Strategy”. New and substantial funding (£800m) for the UK Exascale program promises to bring the UK into the exascale world by 2046. (This was subsequently complemented by another £2.5B for quantum technologies.) Under the HPC-AI section of the podcast, we discuss the recent changes to the Intel high-end GPU roadmap and lament the lost opportunity to communicate that better.

 

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@HPCpodcast-51: Bob Coecke on Quantum in Pictures (Book)

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In the The Messenger Lectures in 1964 at MIT, Richard Feynman said “On the other hand, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. … Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ‘But how can it be like that?’ because you will get ‘down the drain’, into a blind alley from which nobody has escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.”

Why is that? And can the teaching and understanding of Quantum Mechanics be simplified without loss of accuracy or mathematical rigor? For the answer, you have come to the right podcast!

Bob Coecke, co-author with Stefano Gogioso of the recently-released book Quantum in Pictures: A New Way to Understand the Quantum World joins us to discuss why quantum mechanics is so hard, the inspirations behind the book, and how he’s working to make quantum computing more accessible through his work.

Bob is Chief Scientist at Quantinuum, Distinguished Visiting Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Emeritus Fellow at Wolfson College Oxford. For the previous two decades, he was Professor of Quantum Foundations, Logics and Structures at the Department of Computer Science at Oxford University, where he co-founded and led a multi-disciplinary Quantum Group that grew to 50 members and supervised close to 70 PhD students. He pioneered Categorical Quantum Mechanics, ZX-calculus, DisCoCat natural language meaning, mathematical foundations for resource theories, Quantum Natural Language Processing, and DisCoCirc natural language meaning. His work has been headlined by various media outlets, including Forbes, New Scientist, PhysicsWorld, ComputerWeekly. He’s also a musician and painter.

 

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@HPCpodcast-49: 12 Myths & Legends with Satoshi Matsuoka and Torsten Hoefler

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So many great ideas in tech but how do you assess them scientifically? In “Myths and Legends in High-Performance Computing“, Satoshi Matsuoka, Jens Domke, Mohamed Wahib, Aleksandr Drozd, and Torsten Hoefler tackle 12 important topics, from major technology areas to specific capabilities in future HPC systems, to application performance. They help formulate the right questions, and instigate the important discussions, by posing the topics as myths and legends in an enjoyable and humorous paper.  Also check out InsideHPC’s coverage of the article: “Conventional Wisdom Watch: Matsuoka & Co. Take on 12 Myths of HPC.” We caught up with Prof. Matsuoka and Hoefler, one in an airport, to discuss the paper and some of the major topics. Really fun and insightful.

 

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@HPCpodcast-48: Handel Jones on China and the AI Race

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Join us for an insightful discussion with Dr. Handel Jones, author of the recent book When AI Rules the World: China, the U.S., and the Race to Control a Smart Planet, and CEO of International Business Strategies, Inc.  Subjects covered include where the United States stands compared to China in advanced technologies, trade wars, chip fabrication economics and capacity, battery technologies, demographics, Taiwan, rare earths, Covid, and what the future might hold.

 

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@HPCpodcast-47: New Chips from Intel, 2023 Predictions, AI

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In the first episode of 2023, Shahin and Doug discuss the recent chip announcements and their implications for HPC. Also covered are industry predictions for the year to come that were featured in the InsideHPC article, An AI-Flavored Set of HPC Predictions for 2023, AI for public use, and a promise to invite Prof. Matsuoka to discuss his recent paper on common myths in HPC.

 

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@HPCpodcast-46: Year in Review 2022

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In this year-in-review double-issue episode, we continue what is becoming a tradition, covering some of the notable topics of the past year including: HPC market growth, China, exascale and future of supercomputing, quantum tech, SC22, AI, ACM Turing Award, interconnects, the Nvidia-Arm deal, the Chips and Science Act, HPC software, and fusion energy.

 

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@HPCpodcast-45: Quantum Networking, Sensing, Computing at Brookhaven National Lab

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Kerstin Kleese van Dam, Gabriella Carini, and Meifing Lin of Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) join Shahin and Doug to discuss all things Quantum, covering Quantum Sensing, Quantum Networking, and Quantum Computing. We also get a glimpse of BNL and its global leadership across a wide range of research that it conducts.

 

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@HPCpodcast-44: SC22 Postview

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In this SC22 postview, we go over what happened at the show in Dallas last week. Topics include: the energy and attendance at the show, liquid cooling, PCIe, CXL, AI Chips, Open Standards, Storage, Future of Supercomputing, global players, and yes, where SC23 will be held and what its tagline is!

 

@HPCpodcast-43: TOP500 at SC22

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The 60th edition of the TOP500 list is here, reresenting 30 years of systematic data on the highest performing computer architecture and configurations. Whether or not the list surprises in a big way (you’ll have to look at the GREEN500 list for the surprise this time), it always offers important historical data and valuable “tea leaves” to anticipate the future. We look at the highlights of what changed and what can be expected to change in systems, technologies, and geographies.  The Frontier system at Oakridge National Lab continues its commanding lead over the list. Europe shows interesting growth. China continues to not play. AMD shows unsurprising leadership in CPUs and growing presence at the high-end in GPUS while Nvidia retains its comfortable lead in GPUs. Ethernet is a flood that gently rises every time but the interconnect landscape is evolving in important ways. HPCG puts it all in perspective, and the mixed precision benchmark HPL-MxP points to the evolution of HPC and AI as they impact each other.

 

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@HPCpodcast-42: Chris Miller on Chip War

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Chris Miller, author of the important and riveting book Chip War, joins us to discuss the crucial nature of the semiconductor industry and and the global competition that has been a part of its history since early days. He is Associate Professor of International History at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Jeane Kirkpatrick Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Eurasia Director at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Chip War has been shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year award.

We had a long list of topics and questions:

  • How did we get here? Was it poor risk management, shear complexity, or too many black swans?
  • The impact of political dysfunction, social polarization, and policy inconsistency on waging such wars.
  • Might Western values and standards of privacy and individual freedom a competitive disadvantage in the age of AI where raw data superiority can lead to economic superiority?
  • Has technology shifted from a situation where it’d be used first in govt/military, then companies, then consumers to now, when it’s the reverse: the consumer market, then companies, then government?
  • How much time is there to regain competitiveness? Why did the US not learn its lessons after Japan’s rise in memory chip fabrication technology? Is there something missing in the public-private partnership model in the US?
  • Is supercomputing its own race or is it subordinate to the bigger tech issue?
  • Was there a lost opportunity to formulate a different, more harmonious, world order?
  • What is the impact of current trade barriers? What options do other countries have?
  • Several of the leading cast in the book seem to have had challenging personal journeys before they became prominent. Is that a coincidence or a requirement to build a world-leading semiconductor company?! Can it be that it is an effective way to instill the kind of discipline and culture that is required to succeed in the chip business?

And we got through most of them.

Join us for this fascinating discussion.

 

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@HPCpodcast-41: SC Taglines, Trade Wars, Shared Memory Tech

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SC22 is approaching and we take stock of the taglines for the show going back to SC14. Do you remember any of them? This years tagline leads us to trade wars and the impact they could have on scientific collaboration. We’ll have an entire show on ship wars next week with a special guest. Also covered is new shared memory capabilities in the cloud.

 

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@HPCpodcast-40: Kathy Yelick on Exascale Day, Research, New College

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We are delighted to have Kathy Yelick as our special guest to celebrate the Exascale Day (10/18). 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. Her expansive perspective and expertise led us through a wide ranging discussion including the impact of exascale computing on society, the role of HPC in helping set public and international policy, multi-physics research, advancing software technologies, diversity in HPC, the recent RFI from DOE and what the future might hold, the enormous contributions of UC Berkeley to computing technologies and scientific research and how it stays in the forefront, and proposals for a new college. We also touch on a few of Dr. Yelick’s research projects such as Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) and the ExaBiome project and the Berkeley Benchmarking and Optimization (Bebop).

 

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@HPCpodcast-39: Aurora, Intel Day, Linux Wars, Tesla Day

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The storied Aurora exascale supercomputer at Argonne National Lab is making progress as blades for the system are reportedly shipping. This was part of the news from the well-crafted and executed Intel Innovation Day. Open source software is a big part of the HPC/AI puzzle and Linux wars are heating up. The Tesla AI day provided some info on what is new with their home-grown AI chip and the associated system.

 

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@HPCpodcast-38: Steve Conway on HPC Technology and Policy Trends

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We caught up with Steve Conway, well-known HPC executive and analyst formerly with IDC and Hyperion Research, in an engaging and wide ranging discussion. We start with Edge HPC and trends towards massively-distributed massively-heterogeneous computing, which takes us to convergence of HPC and AI, mixed precision spectrum, the importance of simulation, the impact of exascale on general computing, global policies, China and Europe, the impact on scientific collaboration, differences in funding models, and the necessary ingredients to attract top talent.

 

@HPCpodcast-37: John Gustafson on Feynman, Gustafson’s Law, Posit Format

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How did Richard Feynman end up playing the bongo drums? How did a new take on Amdahl’s Law helped propel massively parallel computing and become Gustafson’s Law? And what’s wrong with IEEE 754 number format that the new Posit format fixes? We go to the source as we welcome special guest John Gustafson in another very lively conversation.

 

@HPCpodcast-36: Adrian Cockcroft on Cloud, HPC Data, ESG, and Netflix

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Cool stories and valuable insights in this episode as we get together with Adrian Cockcroft who recently joined OrionX having served as a vice president at AWS for the past several years. 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.

 

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@HPCpodcast-35: Hot Chips Conference, Quantum Update, Frontier

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Highlights from the recent Hot Chips conference with discussions of UCIe and why it could cause a ripple effect in the industry, 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 following two important papers on quantum machine learning and unstructured NP-complete problems. The field continues to be in its infancy while making rapid and significant progress. We end with a review of the dedication ceremonies for the Frontier exascale system. Join us.

 

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@HPCpodcast-34: CXL, CHIPS Act

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After several years of experimentation and various consortia, CXL is emerging as the standard for advanced functionality for fabric technologies. We also discuss some of the details of the CHIPS and Science Act that was recently passed in the US.

 

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@HPCpodcast-33: Equity-Diversity-Inclusion in HPC

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Our special guest today is Melyssa Fratkin, Industrial Programs Director at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), who also co-chairs Texas Women in HPC with Carolyn Devany, Executive Chair at Data Vortex Technologies. Following her excellent talk at the Dell HPC Community meeting in Austin last week, we caught up with Melyssa to discuss the state of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in HPC and her recommendations on how to accelerate progress in this important area. We ask lots of questions and cover lots of topics, including why this is such a hard problem, the burden of being a pioneer, the impact of political environments and changing laws, how to post jobs that attract a diverse set of candidates, why you need support from the top and across the organization, and more. Join us!

 

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@HPCpodcast-32: The Role of Marketing in HPC

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One of the most recognized names in strategic marketing and communications in HPC, and an “SC Perennial“, special guest Mike Bernhardt joins Doug and Shahin to discuss the important role that the marketing function plays in HPC. A lot has changed in HPC and a lot has changed in marketing. What should smart organizations do to improve their market presence and build a loyal customer base?

 

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@HPCpodcast-31: ASML Export Control, HPC Software Stack

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Following reports that ASML is under diplomatic pressure to regulate the export of its fabrication equipment to China, we discuss market data, other suppliers of fab equipment, and a quick view of some of ASML’s own suppliers. Also covered are the differences between the approach to Exascale in China and the US based on recent research by Hyperion. We end the episode by setting up the vast universe that is the modern HPC software stack as we prepare to cover it systematically over several episodes. We welcome suggestions for guests who can shed light on the state of software in specific layers.

 

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@HPCpodcast-30: DOE RFI with Horst Simon, from System to Ecosystem

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Following the Request for Information (RFI) issued last week by the DOE, we caught up with Dr. Horst Simon, Special Advisor to the Laboratory Director at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and co-editor of the TOP500 list since 2000, to take us through how the DOE is gearing up to go beyond Exascale. A very insightful conversation touching on many aspects of what’s next!

 

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@HPCpodcast-29: Up Close and Personal with Frontier, and What Lies Beyond

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The HPC User Forum held a special event at Oak Ridge National Laboratory last week, complete with an opportunity to get a viewing of the facilities (not quite a tour) and discussions of Exascale Computing and beyond. Doug Black was on the scene and we discuss what all went down. Of special note is the staffing challenges of HPC sites, and the brewing strategy about how future leadership computing systems would look like. This is an important topic that we have covered with our guests in previous episodes and some patterns are emerging as we continue to analyze the future of supercomputing hardware and software.

 

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@HPCpodcast-28: LaMDA and AI Sentience, Crypto Price Collapse

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The conversational AI, LaMDA seems to represent a significant advance in AI, bringing up discussions of AI sentience, consciousness, and personhood. It also underscores the urgency of thoughtful social policies based on ethical and legal frameworks. Also discussed is the state of Crypto and NFT: cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens. Should we look at them as technologies that might find valid use cases, investment vehicles that require close scrutiny, or both? These are very important topics in our times.

 

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@HPCpodcast-27: Thomas Sterling, The State of HPC

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Following his always-anticipated and always-insightful closing 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 the Indiana University (IU) School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, and President and Co-founder of Simultac, a technology company focused on non-von-Neumann memory-based system architectures. Since receiving his Ph.D from MIT as a Hertz Fellowm Dr. Sterling has been a pioneer of parallel processing systems in HPC. His many achievements include the creation in 1994 of  the “Beowulf cluster” with Donald Becker at NASA, a system that helped drive the scale-out computing architecture.

Here are the topics and the time-stamp in the podcast when they are discussed:

  • 01:23 Supercomputing “Race”
  • 04:15 HPC in Society
  • 06:40 Climate Change, Controlled Fusion
  • 09:00 HPC’s Role in Informing or Helping Set Social Policy
  • 10:37 Machine Intelligence
  • 15:50 Future of HPC
  • 22:25 Beowulf Bash story
  • 25:07 Getting into Parallel Processing
  • 28:10 Skill-set, Workforce, Software, Accessibility
  • 31:09 Performing at the Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center
  • 34:68 Leonard Bernstein
  • 35:30 ISC22 Closing Keynote

 

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@HPCpodcast-25: Satoshi Matsuoka, TOP500, Fugaku Supercomputer, Nintendo

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Recent winner of the Purple Ribbon Medal, one of Japan’s highest honors, Prof. Satoshi Matsuoka, director of the RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) and professor of computer science at Tokyo Institute of Technology, joins us in a super fun conversation that covers a wide range of topics (time stamps inside parenthesis).

At RIKEN, Prof. Matsuoka oversaw the development and launch of the Fugaku supercomputer, currently holding the number 1 spot on the TOP500 list. As the list is about to get updated, next week, there is an expectation that the Frontier supercomputer at ORNL (which we covered in a previous episode) will claim the number 1 spot but Fugaku will likely retain its lead in some benchmarks. Previously, he was lead developer of another well-know supercomputer, TSUBAMI, the most powerful supercomputer in Japan at the time.

Here are the topics and the time-stamp in the podcast when they are discussed:

  • (start) The Purple Ribbon Medal of Honor
  • (minute 2:15) The role of Japan in supercomputing
  • (3:45) TOP500 and ORNL’s Exascale system
  • (5:00) Fugaku and Arm
  • (8:00) Why not SPARC
  • (11:30) The balance and beuty of Fugaku and its predecessor the K-Computer
  • (15:15) Notable applications of Fugaku, including Covid research
  • (25:00) Future of supercomputing and what’s next after Fugaku
  • (31:45) FPGA and CGRA
  • (36:00) Quantum Computing
  • (40:30)  Nintendo days and working with the late great Iwata-san
  • (48:30) Pursuit of perfection, with a mention of the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Enjoy!

 

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@HPCpodcast-24: Fastest AI Supercomputer, Chips Prices, IBM Quantum

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Major news since our last (double edition) episode included what’s billed as the fastest AI supercomputer by Google, price hikes on chips by TSMC and Samsung, visualization of a black hole in our own galaxy, and IBM’s ambitious and well-executed quantum computing roadmap. We discuss how an AI supercomputer is different, an unexpected impact of chip shortages and price hikes, what it takes to visualize a black hole, and what IBM’s strategy looks to us from a distance.

 

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@HPCpodcast-23: ACM Turing Award Winner Jack Dongarra

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We been fortunate to host some of the most distinguished scientists and technologists in the world who have shaped supercomputing as they have advanced human knowledge. Today we welcome Jack Dongarra who was recently honored by the ACM Turing Award for “Pioneering Concepts and Methods Which Resulted in World-Changing Computations”.

Jack Dongarra is a leader in supercomputing technologies, parallel programming tools and technologies, and linear algebra and numerical algorithms. He holds appointments at the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the University of Manchester, and is the recipient of several awards and honors.

In a wide ranging discussion, we cover the Turing Award, TOP500, the state of HPC benchmarks, China’s Exascale systems, and future directions in algorithms. We also talk about future of supercomputing and AI systems, reminisce about a period where a proliferation of system architectures provides a fertile ground for experimentation, and discuss whether we are entering a similar era now. This is another episode you’d want to listen to more than once!

 

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@HPCpodcast-21: HPC Storage with Gary Grider of LANL

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Another must-listen episode, covering HPC storage with Gary Grider, leader of the high performance computing division of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and a leading light of advanced storage solutions for four decades. Gary has led, driven, helped fund, instigated, influenced, or otherwise significantly touched nearly every storage technology out there, from Lustre to Burst Buffers to Ceph (software-defined object storage) to Computational Storage to the Grand Unified File Index GUFI and on and on. Among the topics discussed: how storage is changing with AI, and what is next in HPC storage.

Top of the news includes quantum computing metrics and Quantiniuum passing Quantum Volume  of 4096, investigating war crimes with computational methods and open source intelligence, funding opportunity for Mathematical Multifaceted Integrated Capability Centers, and TSMC’s quarterly revenues.

 

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@HPCpodcast-20: New Segment Top-of-the-News, Storage

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A new segment, Top of The News, covers top HPC stories, this time Federal funding for PsiQuantum and Global Foundries, AMD’s proposed acquisition of Pensando, and Fujitsu’s cloud offerings. The main topic is storage, which we will cover in multiple episodes going forward, including a very special guest next week. This week we discuss Computational Storage, Erasure Coding, Storage-Class Memory, and Data-Centric AI.

 

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@HPCpodcast-19: ORNL’s Jeff Nichols on Frontier Exascale, Past, Future

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Join us as we get a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse of how the Frontier supercomputer came to be, how it was built in the middle of a pandemic, and how it is going through its paces. Frontier is a $600 million 30 MW supercomputer, comprised of 50-60 million parts in 100+ cabinets, deployed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) by HPE using AMD CPUs and GPUs. It is slated to be the United States’ first exascale computing resource with a target performance of about 1.5 exaFLOPS in double-precision (64-bit) arithmetic.

Our special guest, Dr. Jeff Nichols, oversees the Department of Energy’s National Center for Computational Sciences, and as such he has been a key figure in the installation of breakthrough supercomputers such as Titan, Summit, and now Frontier. Dr. Nichols is Associate Laboratory Director for Oak Ridge National Lab’s Computing and Computational Sciences organization. He has been in that position since April 2009.  His appearance today is something of a valedictory because he plans to retire this year after 20 years at Oak Ridge. We discuss the past and future of supercomputing as well as the current state of the Frontier supercomputer.

 

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@HPCpodcast-18: GTC22, Groundbreaking Advances, and Geopolitics

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Shahin and Doug go over what was unveiled at the NVIDIA GTC22 conference, vendor strategies, groundbreaking advances in the industry, and the geopolitics of semiconductors.

 

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@HPCpodcast-17: American Competitiveness and Future of Supercomputing, with Dan Reed

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In recently published Reinventing High Performance Computing: Challenges and Opportunities, Daniel Reed, Dennis Gannon, and Jack Dongarra, three of the most celebrated thought leaders and luminaries of supercomputing have started an important discussion about the future of HPC and its impact on American competitiveness. Readers of this site would know that those topics have played a big role in driving our research agenda at OrionX and have helped shape our thinking.  So we are very fortunate to welcome Dan Reed as a special guest of the @HPCpodcast to go a level deeper. Dan is Presidential Professor of Computational Science, and Professor of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Utah.

 

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@HPCpodcast-16: AI in Science, a Conversation with Rick Stevens of ANL (part 2)

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This is part 2 of a special 2-episode discussion of AI in Science with Rick Stevens, Associate Laboratory Director and leader of Exascale Computing Initiative at Argonne National Laboratory and Professor at University of Chicago. In addition to the new ways AI can help advance science, we also discuss ethics, bias, robustness, security,and explainability of AI, and whether AI can replace scientists. We end with a snapshot of Quantum Information Science (QIS), a promising area albeit in its earlier stages of development compared to AI.

 

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@HPCpodcast-15: AI in Science, a Conversation with Rick Stevens of ANL (part 1)

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A special 2-episode discussion of AI in Science with Rick Stevens, Associate Laboratory Director and leader of Exascale Computing Initiative at Argonne National Laboratory and Professor at University of Chicago. Rick also led a series of Town Halls during 2019 focused on the relevance and applications of AI in scientific research. Held at Argonne, Oak Ridge, and Berkeley National Laboratories, the events were attended by over 1,000 scientists and engineers. This is part 1 of our conversation. Join us.

 

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@HPCpodcast-13: Intel, AMD, Nvidia

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On the occasion of Intel’s analyst day and the 1st anniversary of Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, Shahin and Doug discuss the global recognition of chips as engines of economic growth, supply issues, and the competitive landscape. Topics include the growing importance of Washington and EU, Intel’s renewed vigor and promise, AMD’s rapid ascend, Nvidia’s strong posotion, and the many other chip players vying for position.

 

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@HPCpodcast-12: Framework for Top-10 Tech Trends

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Web3, IoT/Edge, AI, HPC, Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, GPUs and Quantum, Cyber Risk, 5G, and BioTech point to opportunities and threats. Why are there so many big technology trends right now? Doug and Shahin discuss a framework to help make sense of why these trends point to important changes, how these trends are related, and what they mean individually and together.

 

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@HPCpodcast-8: Intel Points to Zettascale in 2027

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After SC21, Patrick Kennedy of Serve the Home online publication got quite the scoop, Raja’s Chip Notes Lay Out Intel’s Path to Zettascale, when he met with Raja Koduri, SVP and GM of Intel’s Accelerated Computing Systems and Graphics (AXG) Group, to discuss Zettascale projections and plans, stipulating a 2027 timeframe. Is that realistic when Exascale has not quite been made official? Tune in and let us know what you think.

 

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@HPCpodcast-7: China, TSMC, and War Games

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In this week’s episode of the @HPCPodcast, Doug Black and Shahin Khan discuss how global competition around advanced technologies has turned geo-politics into “techno-politics” and techno-nationalism. What instigated the discussion this time is a recently published and widely-read academic paper Chip Geopolitics: If China Invades, Make Taiwan ‘Unwantable’ by Destroying TSMC.

 

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@HPCpodcast-6: Year in Review 2021

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From COVID to Climate Change, Edge to Exascale, and AI to Autonomy, 2021 was an impactful year for HPC and Supercomputing, leading some of the most notable global technology advances and some of the most exciting business opportunities of our time. This episode is a lightning “year in review 2021” as we look back and look forward. Join us!

 

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@HPCpodcast-4: Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure (CDI)

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Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure (CDI) is emerging as good way to pool, share, and flex resources to increase utilization. We discuss what makes CDI effective as we touch on the status of the Nvidia-Arm deal and the new Graviton-3 CPU from AWS. Give this episode a listen and remember to tweet us with questions you’d like answered on the podcast.

 

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@HPCpodcast-3: Metaverse and HPC

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Shahin Khan and Doug Black discuss the Metaverse, its consumer and industrial uses, competition for data, avatars and more realistic digital twins, commerce in the metaverse, and why so many parts of it, from immersive graphics and gaming to physics based simulation and 5G, include computationally intensive components. Give it a listen and let us know what you think.

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@HPCpodcast-2: TOP500 at SC21

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TOP500 at SC21 was highly anticipated but failed to ignite. Rumored high-end systems opted not to play while entering the conversation anyway.  However, the list is about more than the TOP10 or whether there are systems that should be there and those that should not. Looking at the whole list, we saw a few surprises.