Topics including (but not limited to)....
Radio Free HPC (RFHPC) started in 2012 and, after a short break of 193 months, has returned to the airwaves (cyber waves?) with co-hosts Dan Olds, Henry Newman, and Shahin Khan.
The podcast covers a wide range of topics but is particularly focused on data center technology and challenges. These include high performance computing, power and cooling, new technology, and, really, whatever the hell they want to talk about.
Quick FAQ
"Why are you just covering HPC? There's this new thing called AI, have you heard of it?"
Yeah, we've heard of it and we do cover it. To us, HPC is a broad term used to refer to a very broad group of apps/workloads that have common characteristics.
- They are computationally intense
- Time to solution and quality of solution are critical
- The output is important enough to justify investment in high-end clusters and associated hardware/software
AI meets all of the criteria above just like bioscience, aerospace, weather prediction, and several other domains. In fact, AI is or will soon be folded into the workflows of nearly every 'traditional' HPC and enterprise application over time. This is going to put a lot of pressure on data centers and we'll be talking about how to deal with it.
"Was the old version of Radio Free HPC popular? I've never heard of it..."
Yes, it rose from obscurity to being mildly popular and, at times, entertaining. At our peak, we had as many as 16 sustained listeners and as many as 19 theoretical max listeners.
"I listened to the old show a couple of times and liked the arguing. Will there be more of that in this reboot?"
Yes, in fact we expect as much as 29% more arguing and a significant increase in the number of personal insults per episode.
"How often will this thing come out and how do I find out about it?"
We used to try to do weekly shows but failed due to other commitments, travel, etc. And there were just weeks when nothing important happened. But to answer your question, could be every couple of weeks, could be once a month, or we could record a marathon 8-10 hour single episode. Depends on what's happening and our mood.
We're getting together our RSS feeds and such but in the short term we'll be publicizing the episodes through the RFHPC X account and our individual social media accounts.
Ok, enough questions. If you want to learn more about the show and hosts, check out the "About" page.
Here are our most recent episodes along with the 345 or so previous editions, enjoy!
Latest Episode
-
Here’s this week’s synopsis.
Black Holes Visualized
The news of the cool visualization of an actual black hole leads to interesting issues in HPC land. Shahin is at pains to give credit where it is due while considering it as an achievement in data visualization not unlike many others before it. Yes, it’s about a fascinating topic, but that’s also not unlike many others in the past.But the team moves on to the real point: the size of the radio data that had to be collected and managed and processed to visualize it. 1.75 PB of raw data from each telescope meant a lot of physical drives that had to be flown to the data center. Henry leads a discussion about the race between bandwidth and data size, various companies’ plans to launch thousands of satellites to help get away from sneakernet, and the imminent arrival of 5G. We’ve discussed large scale data movement in previous episodes and think it’s an important issue for HPC, AI, and Cloud.Catch of the Week


Henry:
That sneakernet discussion above is it for Henry this week.
Shahin:Mapping Space Debris (video)
LeoLabs is a company that maps objects in the low Earth orbit (LEO). The visdeo shows actual trajectories of 12,401 low Earth objects in space being tracked on August 24, 2017 by LeoLabs’ phased array radars. Video loop shows approx 2 hours of data.
Dan:
Scientists put human gene into monkeys to make them smarter, human-like
Making monkeys more smart and human-like, scientists have used gene-editing to insert human brain gene in a monkey.
For the first time, a team of Chinese scientists made use of gene-editing techniques to make monkey brains more human-like. By the end, the monkeys, rhesus macaques, got smarter and had superior memories as compared to the unaltered monkeys.The team doubts this is a true story and that leads Shahin to his first rant on the show when he complains about previously reputable publications succumbing to clickbait.
We’re More Likely Than Not Living In A Computer Simulation, MIT Professor Suggests
An MIT professor has said he believes it’s “more likely than not” that we are living in some kind of simulated universe, given that we ourselves are not far away from being capable of creating hyper-realistic simulations ourselves.
Yet another story that raises eyebrows. This one leads the RFHPC team to create a new award on the spot!
Listen in to hear the full conversation.
Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed
Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter
Recent Episodes
-
Episode 346: SC22 Preview
We’ve got the whole crew here as we look at the upcoming SC22 event. How many will be there? What will be happening? We answer only some of these questions.…
-
Episode 345: Dow Gets Cloudy
Dan rides alone on this one as he interviews the HPC folks from Dow who are behind their move to cloud bursting. Interesting and informative. *Download the MP3 * Follow…
-
Episode 344: Finally back! And with a new co-host!
We introduce new co-host Ben Carr and talk some NIST and Intel trevails. RadioFreeHPC is distributed in partnership with HPCwire. *Download the MP3 * Follow us on Twitter * Subscribe on Spotify * Subscribe…
-
Episode 343: It’s GTC, Baby
In this episode of RadioFreeHPC, Dan and Jessi talk GTC along with special guest Todd Weiss. RadioFreeHPC is distributed in partnership with HPCwire. *Download the MP3
-
Episode 342: Jazz, Melting Diamonds, and Schrödinger’s Cat
In this episode of RadioFreeHPC, the crew round up the most intriguing batch of recent HPC topics including Graphcore, HPC efforts to better understand melting diamonds and Jazz, as well…
-
Episode 341: Ponte Vecchio
In this episode of RadioFreeHPC, the crew talk Intel’s Ponte Vecchio. RadioFreeHPC is distributed in partnership with HPCwire. *Download the MP3 * Follow us on Twitter * Subscribe on Spotify * Subscribe on…
-
Episode 340: HPC with Trish Damkroger and Brent Gorda
In this episode of RadioFreeHPC, Dan and Jessi are joined by Trish Damkroger and Brent Gorda to talk HPC topics, thoughts, and intriguing trends. RadioFreeHPC is distributed in partnership with HPCwire.…
-
Episode 339: 12 Cores Per Soul
In this episode of RadioFreeHPC, the crew discusses Intel’s investment into RISC-V, the 2022 Winter Classic student cluster competition, and quantum computing in Canada. RadioFreeHPC is distributed in partnership with HPCwire.…
-
Episode 338: NVIDIA Slinks Away, Meta Bulks Up, And We Zap Bugs
In this episode of RadioFreeHPC, the crew talks Meta’s new AI supercomputer, NVIDIA abandoning ARM, and our latest competition winners. RadioFreeHPC is brought to you by the Surfs Up Hippie and…
The High Performance Computing Podcast



