RadioFreeHPC Line-up...

DAN OLDS

CO-HOST & Founder

Dan Olds is launching his new firm Olds Research, which is founded on the premise that the push to AI will require data centers to adopt HPC tech and practices. The goal is to use his 25+ years of high tech experience to help DCs understand and justify the changes to executive management.

Olds was formerly Chief Research Officer at industry analyst firm Intersect360 Research. Previously, he held significant positions at Cray Inc., Sun Microsystems and IBM before starting his first tech research company, Gabriel Consulting Group.

He is also the chief historian of Student Cluster Competitions and frequently writes about them in various publications. He earned an MBA from The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business with concentrations in Finance and Marketing.

You can find Dan at:       Twitter       (opens in new tab)Linkedin(opens in new tab)

 

 

HENRY NEWMAN

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CO-HOST & Founder

Henry is currently 'retired' and living in Los Crucis, New Mexico. Most recently, he was CTO at Seagate Government Solutions. Previously, Newman was CEO of data and storage experts Instrumental, Inc. and spent 11 years at Cray Research, Inc. designing complex, HPC systems. He is an internationally recognized HPC expert and a sought-after author and speaker.

He has designed, analyzed and optimized over 400 of the most complex high-performance computing systems in the world. Mr. Newman has been involved in numerous projects working on behalf of the US Government, defense integrators and vendors in solving the most challenging HPC problems. He is a graduate of The American University in, shockingly enough Diplomacy.

Henry is on:     Linkedin
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SHAHIN KHAN

CO-HOST 2016 - present

Shahin Khan has over 30 years of experience as a technology executive and an industry analyst focused on Digital Transformation, tracking High Performance Computing (HPC), AI, Quantum technologies, IoT, and Cryptocurrencies. He is a member of the board and acting chief marketing officer at SourceCode (intelligent infrastructure) and serves on the board of directors of Wizmo (SaaS) and Massively Parallel (code modernization).

Shahin’s past roles have included serving government, academic, and enterprise markets as VP/GM for the HPC and Graphics unit at Sun Microsystems with revenues of $2B and VP of marketing and corporate development at Silicon Graphics with revenues of $500M.

Shahin founded OrionX, a multifaceted industry analysis and marketing consulting firm. In this role, he has been CMO at Afero (IoT), Avni (multi-cloud), DriveScale (composable infrastructure), 3Leaf Systems (memory fabric), ScaleArc (database infrastructure), EFI (print technologies), and Azul (Java systems) and several others.   He started his career as a “post-doc” and software engineer at Enrico Clementi’s quantum chemistry lab at IBM/National Foundation for Cancer Research.

Shahin is a graduate of The Hun School of Princeton and Cornell University with Bachelor of Science and Master’s degrees in chemical engineering with heavy concentration in computer science. He is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

 

Previous Hosts...

JESSI LANUM

CO-HOST 2018-2021 or so

Dan spotted Jessi at SC18 when she was a member of the Purdue student cluster competition team.

She was smart, outgoing, curious, and very funny too. In other words, perfect for RFHPC. Dan started plotting how to make it happen.

This is from the original bio Jessi wrote for this site:

"Jessi Lanum is an undergraduate at Purdue University, passionate about High Performance Computing. She was part of Purdue’s cluster competition team, and worked for the Purdue Homeland Security Institute, conducting research into the modeling and simulation of armed engagements. She currently works for The MITRE Corporation in their HPC division."

While with us, Jessi was a breath of fresh air, bringing in new topics and features, plus a style that meshed perfectly with the rest of us.

After graduation, she intended to commission to the United States Marine Corps. She did all the training, both in school and also completed the brutally demanding Marine Officer training course. Unfortunately, injuries didn't allow her to follow through on her Marine Corps dream. But lucky for the industry, her passion for HPC hadn't dimmed.

After a stint at BAE, she rejoined MITRE and is doing great - a force of nature. We'd take her back as a co-host in a second, but what company wants one of their people to be doing this kind of thing?

Jessi is on:     Twitter        (opens in new tab)Linkedin        I(opens in )nstagram
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Co-Founder & Co-Host Emeritus...

RICH BRUEKNER

Dan Olds and Rich Brueckner conceived of RadioFreeHPC podcast and
convinced Henry Newman to join, with the first show starting in 2012.
Rich left the show in early 2019 but continued to highlight it in InsideHPC.com and appear as an occasional guest until his passing.

President of InsideHPC and named as one of the Top 20 Big Data Influencers by Forbes Magazine, Rich was an avid writer, publisher, and technology pundit focused on high performance computing. He acquired InsideHPC.com in 2010, expanding his online publications to include InsideBigData, InsideCloud, and InsideStartups. With over 25 years of HPC experience at Cray Research, SGI, and Sun Microsystems, Rich was known to many in the industry as “the guy in the Red Hat.”

The HPC community lost one of its greatest champions on May 20th, 2020. However, we at RadioFree (and we’re certain quite beyond) will never forget his wit, kindness, and laughter. Those who knew you will never forget you – you left us wanting more.

 

Insider's Guide to Radio Free HPC

  • We did a lot of episodes in our first 10 years, over 300. We originally intended to do one a week, but it was just to difficult to coordinate schedules and then do the production and posting chores, so when we took our break, we ended up well short of the 500 episode mark.

But....there's a lot of good stuff in those older episodes. Here's a bit of a field guide to the RFHPC back catalog.

  • Check out the episodes that deal with breaking industry news. In those, we were dealing with incomplete information and discussing our thoughts about what was behind the event and the consequences - often predicting the outcomes.
  • We started doing holiday episodes during our first year in 2012. I don't think we missed a year, but could be wrong on that. Those were particularly fun.

 

  • Any episode where the summary mentions "arguing", "disagree" or other contentious terms that signal, sometimes, a knock down, drag out fight.

 

  • There were also some interviews with industry movers and shakers or authorities on (then) cutting edge tech. It's interesting to go back and see what they were saying then and with hindsight, see how it turned out.

 

  • Same thing as above with new technology announcements. Most of them were highly touted but often seen through a cynical lens by someone on at the RFPHC commentary deck. Fun to listen to them and see how it shook out.

 

You can find all of our old stuff on the Archives page. Let us know what you think via X or an email.