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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.