RadioFreeHPC

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team goes over the results of the SC17 Student Cluster Competition. This year, Nanyang Technological University from Singapore took the Top Prize. After that, we do our Catch of the Week. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team describes the highlights of SC17 in Denver. Highlights includes the debut of ARM hardware for HPC, a Rasberry Pie Cluster, and pervasive liquid cooling. Other highlights include: Posit Research was there at the Innovation Showcase with an all-new company working to proliferate Unum based computing invented by John Gustafson from A*STAR in Singapore.New high performance interconnects are proliferating with PCIe technologies, Gen-Z, etc.The Student Cluster LINPACK record was smashed this year with 51.8 Teraflops. Nanyang University achieved this record number with the new NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs.After that, we do our catch of the week.Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews the latest TOP500 list in front of a live audience in Denver at SC17. The fiftieth TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world has China overtaking the US in the total number of ranked systems by a margin of 202 to 144. It is the largest number of supercomputers China has ever claimed on the TOP500 ranking, with the US presence shrinking to its lowest level since the list’s inception 25 years ago. Just six months ago, the US led with 169 systems, with China coming in at 160. Despite the reversal of fortunes, the 144 systems claimed by the US gives them a solid second place finish, with Japan in third place with 35, followed by Germany with 20, France with 18, and the UK with 15. China has also overtaken the US in aggregate performance as well. The Asian superpower now claims 35.3 percent of the TOP500 flops, with the US in second place with 29.8 percent. The top 10 systems remain largely unchanged since the June 2017 list, with a couple of notable exceptions. Sunway TaihuLight, a system developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC), and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, maintains its number one ranking for the fourth time, with a High Performance Linpack (HPL) mark of 93.01 petaflops. See our complete coverage of SC17 Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team previews the SC17 Student Cluster Competition. "In this real-time, non-stop, 48-hour challenge, teams of undergraduate and/or high school students assemble a small cluster on the exhibit floor and race to complete a real-world workload across a series of applications and impress HPC industry judges."  Dan's got the inside scoop on all the new wrinkles of the competition this year, where 16 international student teams will go head-to-head. There's an all high school squad from Indiana, returning champs from China, and an all-new cloud computing component utilizing Cycle Computing on Azure. After that, we do our Catch of the Week. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC teams discusses performance optimization with Carolyn Pasti and Don Avart from Red Line Performance Solutions. RedLine Performance Solutions is a world-class provider of high-performance computing solutions. Our promise: to ensure objectively engineered top quality solutions at every phase of the HPC life cycle, minimizing labor, time, and costs. Our proprietary RedLine Performance Methodology (RPM) – developed over two decades of working with HPC systems and applications and updated regularly with lessons from each new engagement – delivers unique benefits that consistently maximize customer success.RedLine is partnering with Radio Free HPC on Project Cyclops, an effort to build the world's fastest single node on the HPCG benchmark. Listen in as Don and Carolyn share their methodology for workload performance optimization and what it takes to make clusters really perform up their potential in the real world. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team previews the ancillary events leading up to SC17, which takes place Nov. 12-17 in Denver. After that, we do our Catch of the Week. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team asks the question: Is the Cloud Killing the Tape Market? The issue came up this week that Spectra Logic is laying off 9 percent of its workforce. "There may be a silver lining for Spectra Logic, with a legacy of tape storage. The technology has had its ups and downs over the years, and things look positive for it once again as cloud providers have adopted it as a cost-effective way to handle the growing amount of data being generated, TechTarget, a marketing firm, reported." After that, we do our Catch of the Week. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, Dan Olds from OrionX describes Project Cyclops - a benchmarking quest to build the world's fastest single node. Codenamed “Cyclops”, the single-node supercomputer demonstrates the computational power that individual scientists, engineers, artificial intelligence practitioners, and data scientists can deploy in their offices. Cyclops has achieved results of (score) for the HPCC benchmark, a mark of (score) for the HPCG benchmark, and a score of (score) for the Graph500 benchmark. These results set new single node high water marks for the (list benchmark we achieved records on). We’ve done more than 150 podcasts talking about topics in high performance computing,” said Dan Olds, partner at OrionX.net Research. “It was time we actually put something together and take a run at some of these benchmarks.” Rich Brueckner commented, “We couldn’t have done this without our sponsors, who include Intel, Kingston, Seagate, and Ebullient Cooling Solutions. They’ve been incredibly helpful.”Project Cyclops is building a system based on a chassis provided by Supermicro and is fueled by a pair of Intel Xeon E5 v4 processors, 128 GB of Kingston DDR4 memory, and M2 SSD drives from Seagate. An innovative liquid cooling system from CoolIT Systems will chill the processors and GPU accelerators. RedLine Performance Solutions will provide system testing and will help optimize the system for benchmarking and workload runs. After that, we do our Catch of the Week. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at Henry Newman's recent proposal to use Blockchain as a way to combat Fake News. Henry shares that this rant result from what he saw as an egregious story that was going around that could have been easily quashed. "What if every audio or video app on your phone, TV news camera or your video camera automatically came set up to create blockchains that included information such as geolocation, date and time? Editing programs would also be required to use blockchain. And what if every frame that was edited had a blockchain describing what changes were made?" After that, we do our Catch of the Week. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at Smart Cities. As the featured topic this year at the SC17 Plenary, the Smart Cities initiative looks to improve the quality of life for residents using urban informatics and other technologies to improve the efficiency of services. With the accelerating volume of data about cities, HPC is helping cities to optimize their services, from making food safety inspections more effective to identifying children most at risk for lead poisoning. HPC is supporting the creation of computational models of urban sectors such as transportation, energy demand, or economics. And increasingly there is opportunity—and need—to develop multi-scale, coupled modeling systems that harness new data sources and measurement techniques and that capture the interdependencies between these sectors to provide a more holistic modeling capability for urban designers, planners, and developers. This plenary panel will discuss emerging needs and opportunities suggesting an increasing role for HPC in cities, with perspectives from city government, planning and design, and embedded urban HPC systems.The SC17 Plenary on Smart Cities takes place 5:30pm - 6:30pm on Nov. 13 at the Denver convention center. After that, we do our Catch of the Week Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed