Big Ideas. Simplified.
Join the OrionX team and guests in lively discussions of Big Ideas in Tech, covering trends and products that can impact your investment decisions and change the technology options you consider.
HPC, AI
Join Shahin Khan and Doug Black, insideHPC’s editor-in-chief, in their weekly discussion of key technology trends that drive high performance computing and artificial intelligence.
Podcasts
@HPCpodcast-46: Year in Review 2022
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.
Mktg_Podcast-21: Barbie, ChatGPT, HBS Product v. Financial Engineering
Barbie-the-movie was announced and it is a big, and so-far effective, move. It also offers such a rich set of marketing topics for discussion. Conversational AI, ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) exceeded expectations at least for the first few interactions, impressed, disappointed, and scared, all at the same time while becoming a tool that marketing teams started testing and using immediately. A quote on impression data leads to a quick discussion again of the role of the CMO, while an old quote about Harvard Business School leads to product innovation vs. financial engineering.
@HPCpodcast-45: Quantum Networking, Sensing, Computing at Brookhaven National Lab
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.
Mktg_Podcast-20: Agency Payment Terms, The CMO Role
Physical events are back. Did you say 360-day payment terms? What do companies and candidates get wrong about the CMO role? And the minefield that is marketing data! Join us.
@HPCpodcast-44: SC22 Postview
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!
Mktg_Podcast-19: Rebranding Office, Low-Margin M&A, Brand Loyalty
We start with Microsoft’s Decision to rebrand Office again, this time to Microsoft 365: eliminating “Office” and aligning “365” with the whole company. Retail mergers are next, and interesting because it’s a competitive low margin business. Buying vs. shopping maps well to online vs. in-store and we have a funny story to discuss that next. We end with meat alternatives and how difficult it is to grow in that market, and a big discussion on brand loyalty and brand love.
@HPCpodcast-43: TOP500 at SC22
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.
@HPCpodcast-42: Chris Miller on Chip War
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.
@HPCpodcast-41: SC Taglines, Trade Wars, Shared Memory Tech
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.
Mktg_Podcast-22: CES, Who Decides?, DiffDist Again
In the first episode of 2023, Shahin and Doug discuss their takeaways from CES, differentiation versus distinction in marketing, the importance of authenticity in advertising campaigns, and whether inside marketing staff can make good decisions on behalf of the end-user/consumer.