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-28: LaMDA and AI Sentience, Crypto Price Collapse
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.
@HPCpodcast-27: Thomas Sterling, The State of HPC
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
Mktg_Podcast-10: Cost, Complexity, Hiring, Succeeding
Topics today center around the cost and complexity of marketing, hiring marketing talent, and the unique challenges that CMOs face within the C-Suite. Fun times as usual!
@HPCpodcast-26: ISC22 Postview: Frontier, Covid, Vendors, Students
ISC22, the annual International Supercomputing Conference was held last week in Hamburg, Germany, meeting in person after two years. This is a “postview” of the notable developments at this news-rich event.
Mktg_Podcast-9: D2C Retail, Personalization Data, Startups and TV Advertising
Shahin and Doug discuss the value add of retail stores versus direct-to-consumer options, whether or not personalization works, and the potential traps of using data in marketing. They also examine the use of television advertising by startups, and whether hesitancy to use TV ads is about money or a larger push away from the “old” way of doing things.
@HPCpodcast-25: Satoshi Matsuoka, TOP500, Fugaku Supercomputer, Nintendo
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!
@HPCpodcast-24: Fastest AI Supercomputer, Chips Prices, IBM Quantum
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.
Mktg_Podcast-8: Pandemic, WFH, and B2B vs. B2C Marketing
Shahin and Doug talk about the impact of pandemic on financial results, changes in customer buying behavior as a result of work-from-home (WFH) and depending on demographics, and segue into the differences between B2B and B2C marketing.
@HPCpodcast-23: ACM Turing Award Winner Jack Dongarra
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!
@HPCpodcast-29: Up Close and Personal with Frontier, and What Lies Beyond
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.