Sunday, December 24, 2017

Twelve Days of Christmas Rants from Dan Olds

In this podcast, Dan Olds from Radio Free HPC offers up his rant-filled rendition of the 12 Days of Christmas. "To all of our listeners, we wish you a very happy Holiday Season!"  

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Monday, December 18, 2017

Goodbye Net Neutrality

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the FCC's move to abolish Net Neutrality regulations put in place during the Obama administration. Dan thinks this is a good move to remove unnecessary regulations, but rest of the crew is worried about where this will lead the future of the Internet.
Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers must treat all data on the Internet the same, and not discriminate or charge differently by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or method of communication. For instance, under these principles, internet service providers are unable to intentionally block, slow down or charge money for specific websites and online content.
After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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Thursday, December 14, 2017

Podcast: The New Ellexus Container Checker

In this podcast, Dr. Rosemary Francis describes the new Ellexus Container Checker, a pioneering cloud-based tool that provides visibility into the inner workings of Docker containers.
Container Checker will help people using cloud platforms to quickly detect problems within their containers before they are let loose on the cloud to potentially waste time and compute spend. Estimates suggest that up to 45% of cloud spend is wasted due in part to unknown application activity and unsuitable storage decisions, which is what we want to help businesses tackle.”
Container Checker is the first tool aimed directly at the cloud market from Ellexus, the I/O profiling company. The software provider has seven years’ experience in providing dependency analysis and performance tools in big-compute environments. Ellexus Container Checker brings this expertise to a much wider audience and will enable organizations of all sizes in many sectors to scale rapidly.

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Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Infinite Memory Engine: HPC in the FLASH Era

In this RichReport slidecast, James Coomer from DDN presents: Infinite Memory Engine: HPC in the FLASH Era. "DDN’s Infinite Memory Engine (IME) is a scale-out, flash-native, software-defined, storage cache that streamlines the data path for application IO. IME interfaces directly to applications and secures IO via a data path that eliminates file system bottlenecks. With IME, architects can realize true flash-cache economics with a storage architecture that separates capacity from performance." James Coomer’s career has been spent entirely in High Performance Computing. James began with a PhD in Theoretical Physics working on the fastest machines in Europe performing large scale atomic simulations. Subsequently James has occupied the breadth of technical roles in HPC including back line support, installation, consultancy, training, and latterly pre-sales and design in organisations including Sun Microsystems, Streamline Computing and Dell. James enjoys daily direct contact with customers across all sectors in HPC and presents widely on HPC topics. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * Subscribe to RSS  Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

Monday, September 25, 2017

A Closer Look at the 95 Petaflop Tianhe-2A Supercomputer

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at China's massive upgrade of the Tianhe-2A supercomputer to 95 Petaflops peak performance. As detailed in a new 21-page report by Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, the upgrade should nearly double the performance of the system, which is currently ranked at #2 on TOP500 with 33.86 Petaflops on the Linpack benchmark.

The upgraded system, dubbed Tianhe -2A, should be completed in the coming months. Details about the system upgrade were presented at the conference opening session. While the current system derives much of its performance from Intel Knights Corner co-processors, the new system swaps these PCI devices out for custom-made 4-way MATRIX-2000 boards, with each chip providing 2.46 Teraflops of peak performance.

After that, we do our Catch of the Week:
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Thursday, September 21, 2017

A Look at Optalysis Optical Processing

In this RichReport slidecast, Dr. Nick New from Optalysis describes how the company's optical processing technology delivers accelerated performance for FFTs and Bioinformatics.
Our prototype is on track to achieve game-changing improvements to process times over current methods whilst providing high levels of accuracy that are associated with the best software processes.”
Earlier this week, the company raised $3.95 million U.S. dollars from angel investors. Optalysys will use the funds to manufacture the first commercially available high-performance computing processor based on its patented optical processing technology.   

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Friday, May 12, 2017

How Volta GPUs will Power Next-Gen HPC and AI

In this podcast, Marc Hamilton from Nvidia describes how the new Volta GPUs will power the next generation of systems for HPC and AI. Download the MP3

Monday, May 8, 2017

ASC17 Student Cluster Competition Results

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews the results from the ASC17 Student Cluster Competition finals in Wuxi, China. In the end, Tsinghua University won the overall competition, beating 20 teams from around the world.  

"As the world's largest supercomputing competition, ASC17 received applications from 230 universities around the world, 20 of which got through to the final round held this week at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi after the qualifying rounds. During the final round, the university student teams were required to independently design a supercomputing system under the precondition of a limited 3000W power consumption. They also had to operate and optimize standard international benchmark tests and a variety of cutting-edge scientific and engineering applications including AI-based transport prediction, genetic assembly, and material science. Moreover, they were required to complete high-resolution maritime simulation on the world's fastest supercomputer, Sunway TaihuLight.  

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Friday, May 5, 2017

Bull eXascale Interconnect (BXI)

In this podcast, Jean-Pierre Panziera from Atos presents: BXI - Bull eXascale Interconnect.
"Exascale entails an explosion of performance, of the number of nodes/cores, of data volume and data movement. At such a scale, optimizing the network that is the backbone of the system becomes a major contributor to global performance. The interconnect is going to be a key enabling technology for exascale systems. This is why one of the cornerstones of Bull’s exascale program is the development of our own new-generation interconnect. The Bull eXascale Interconnect or BXI introduces a paradigm shift in terms of performance, scalability, efficiency, reliability and quality of service for extreme workloads."