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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Shahin is a technology analyst and an active CxO, board member, and advisor. He serves on the board of directors of Wizmo (SaaS) and Massively Parallel Technologies (code modernization) and is an advisor to CollabWorks (future of work). He is co-host of the @HPCpodcast, Mktg_Podcast, and OrionX Download podcast.

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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.

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This is part 2 of a special 2-episode discussion of AI in Science with Rick Stevens, Associate Laboratory Director and leader of Exascale Computing Initiative at Argonne National Laboratory and Professor at University of Chicago. In addition to the new ways AI can help advance science, we also discuss ethics, bias, robustness, security,and explainability of AI, and whether AI can replace scientists. We end with a snapshot of Quantum Information Science (QIS), a promising area albeit in its earlier stages of development compared to AI.

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A special 2-episode discussion of AI in Science with Rick Stevens, Associate Laboratory Director and leader of Exascale Computing Initiative at Argonne National Laboratory and Professor at University of Chicago. Rick also led a series of Town Halls during 2019 focused on the relevance and applications of AI in scientific research. Held at Argonne, Oak Ridge, and Berkeley National Laboratories, the events were attended by over 1,000 scientists and engineers. This is part 1 of our conversation. Join us.

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