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-22: China Exascale, Twitter in play, Tech Society
New research paper puts China’s Exascale systems back in the news. And impending acquisition of Twitter leads to a discussion about the positive impact and policy challenges of our tech society.
@HPCpodcast-21: HPC Storage with Gary Grider of LANL
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.
@HPCpodcast-20: New Segment Top-of-the-News, Storage
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.
Mktg_Podcast-6: April Fools Day, Signals and Psychology, JTBD
Join in another lively episode as we discuss why April Fools’ Day is more challenging nowadays, how the potato earned its own viral moment, Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) and other marketing recipes, and the importance of leaving room for happy accidents when pursuing innovation.
@HPCpodcast-19: ORNL’s Jeff Nichols on Frontier Exascale, Past, Future
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.
@HPCpodcast-18: GTC22, Groundbreaking Advances, and Geopolitics
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.
Mktg_Podcast-5: Logos, Verbal Real Estate, Employment Marketing, Cost of Metrics
A lively discussion about 1) the most effective logos, branding and strategy, and the importance of verbal real estate; 2) recruitment marketing and how employee/employer dynamics are shifting; and 3) the high cost of metrics and how projects can turn into products.
@HPCpodcast-17: American Competitiveness and Future of Supercomputing, with Dan Reed
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.
Mktg_Podcast-4: Digital Retail, Metaverse, Outsourcing
We start with the news of Amazon closing their physical retail (not grocery) stores and the interplay between physical and digital commerce, which leads us to emerging applications of the Metaverse and the difference between the promise of a tech trend and the reality of today’s use cases. We end with a discussion of outsourcing and its impact on business profits and identity.
Mktg_Podcast-7: Gadgets, Advertising, Funnel, Insight
Episode 7 of the Marketing Podcast covers topics ranging from the usefulness of gadgets and “mean time to garage sale”, to advertising, marketing mix, and conversion factors in a funnel, and depth of knowledge.