Menu

Exascale

@HPCpodcast-106: TOP500 at SC25 Conference

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-102: TOP500 at ISC25 Conference

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.

@HPCpodcast-93: TOP500 at SC24 Conference

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.” 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.

@HPCpodcast-86: DOE Exascale Project w Christine Chalk

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.

@HPCpodcast-81: Matt Sieger of ORNL on “Discovery” after “Frontier”

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 plans 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.

@HPCpodcast-75: Rick Stevens, Mike Papka – Argonne National Lab (ANL)

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.

@HPCpodcast-73: Peter Ungaro – 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. In this episode of Industry View, we cover many topics including the Cray journey, the HPE acquisition, the opportunities and challenges of AI, the geopolitics of high tech.

@HPCpodcast-70: Paul Messina – Journey to Exascale

With the annual observance of Exascale Day on October 18th, we were delighted to get a chance to discuss the journey to Exascale with Dr. Paul Messina who led the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) program from 1998 to 2000, and was the first director of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) from 2015 until late 2017.

@HPCpodcast-62: Exascale Software with Sunita Chandrasekaran

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.

@HPCpodcast-59: HPC Software

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.

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

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. 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.

 

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

We are delighted to havet 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.

@HPCpodcast-23: ACM Turing Award Winner Jack Dongarra

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, and discuss proliferation of new architectures. This is another episode you’d want to listen to more than once!

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

Special guest Dr. Jeff Nichols oversees DOE’s National Center for Computational Sciences, and a key figure in the installation of breakthrough supercomputers such as Titan, Summit, and now Frontier.
We discuss the past and future of supercomputing as we get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of Frontier, the $600 million 30 MW supercomputer at ORNL, comprised of 50-60 million parts in 100+ cabinets and slated to be the first exascale computer in the US.

@HPCpodcast-8: Intel Points to Zettascale in 2027

After SC21, Patrick Kennedy of Serve the Home online publication got quite the scoop when he met with Intel’s Raja Koduri to discuss Zettascale projections and plans, stipulating a 2027 timeframe. Is that realistic? Tune in and let us know what you think.

The Return of Vector Processing

Vector processing was an unexpected topic to emerge from the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC)held last week. On the Monday of the conference, a new leader on the TOP500 list was announced. The Sunway TaihuLight system uses a new processor architecture that is Single-Instruction-Multiple-Data (SIMD) with a pipeline that can do eight 64-bit floating-point calculations per […]

Benchmarks, Schmenchmarks: Big Iron Data and the November 2015 TOP500

There has been much discussion in recent years as to the continued relevance of the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark as a valid measure of the performance of the world’s most capable machines, with some supercomputing sites opting out of the TOP500 completely such as National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois […]

Big Data and HPC: Convergence? (Part 2 of 2)

Last week, in Part 1 of this two-part blog, we looked at trends in Big Data and analytics, and started to touch on the relationship with HPC (High Performance Computing). In this week’s blog we take a look at the usage of Big Data in HPC and what commercial and HPC Big Data environments have in […]

Big Data meets HPC: Convergence? (Part 1 of 2)

Data volumes, velocity, and variety are increasing as consumer devices become more powerful. PCs, smart phones and tablets are the instrumentation, along with the business applications that continually capture user input, usage patterns and transactions. As devices become more powerful each year (each few months!) the generated volumes of data and the speed of data […]