Power is a major challenge standing in the way of the Exascale computing. While the target is to consume 20 MW or less for an exascale machine, current technology trends will not take us there by 2018. In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discusses why this is such a tough challenge, where such…

This episode is devoted to Allan Snavely, CTO of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, who passed away unexpectedly in July 2012. He was widely known as a brilliant scientist and innovator, and for his work at SDSC on the Gordon supercomputer. Allan will be greatly missed by his many friends and the entire HPC community. Download…

Is that parrot completely dead, or is it just resting? Is tape now legacy technology, or is it alive and well? And can’t our data just all go in the cloud anyway? In more ‘legacy’ talk, Dan posits that Henry whittled the first punch cards by hand, and Rich claims that Henry invented the chad…

In this podcast, the hosts discuss the Exascalar measure/benchmark and what it’s telling us. Exascalar combines Top500 and Green500 data in order to see if the industry is on track to hit the goal of an exascale system that consumes less than 20MW of juice by 2020. Like usual, the conversation takes some interesting turns…

In this podcast, the topic is Big Data and analytics. More specifically, the guys talk about a couple of examples of when over-reliance on analytics leads to bad outcomes. The first deals with some high school kids who were allegedly found to be cheating by a plagiarism software program and the second looks at how…