SC19 Student Cluster Round Up

The show starts in the usual way, with Henry complaining about snow and us laughing at him. Our special guest, student clusterer extraordinaire Jessi Lanum, complains about recording again with Henry in a definite shot across his bow, to everyone’s amusement.

The group discusses their annual SC19 dinner and the new Henry/Dan bet about the future of RISC-V – check out our last show for the specifics.

We talk about our experiences at SC19, including Henry having to give 19 different presentations in a two-day span, which was a very solid performance. Shahin touches on his annual Dead Architecture Society meeting and the great attendance. We also discuss how many active listeners of Radio Free HPC came up to us – and none of them were armed or threatening at all!

The meat of the show is our discussion of the SC19 Student Cluster Competition. We talk about the student configurations, kicked around the pros and cons of the “small is beautiful” movement in the student cluster competition world. "Does the trend towards fewer-bigger nodes mean a re-emergence and eventual re-victory of SMP over MPP?" wonders Shahin! No records in HPL or HPCG, but some good scores regardless. (It's not proven that the high altitude in Denver was not a factor!)

You’ll have to listen to the show or read Dan’s articles in HPCwire or on www.studentclustercomp.com to get the details – it’s probably a good idea to do both just to make sure you’re fully up to speed.

Why No One Should Ever be Online. Ever.

Henry talks with real anger and sadness about a horrific story of a chain of nursing homes that was attacked by ransomware. These nursing homes now don’t know what medication should go to which patient along with a lot of other problems. Everyone agrees that these malicious criminal idiots are getting worse and that something needs to be done about it pronto.

New Feature Alert!

Things That People Think They Know, But Maybe Don’t

Jessi Lanum’s “Things that people think they know, but maybe don’t” is a new feature on the big broadcast. In this inaugural edition, Jessi asks “What is Exascale and why is it important?” The guys all respond and cover her question like ants on a dead possum.

Catch of the Week

Henry:  Notes that the new Star Wars script was almost sold on Ebay after being filched from a careless actor. Sheesh, is nothing private anymore?

Jessi:  Found a company that is using HPC, AI and WRF to help fight forest fires, which is great, given the wildfire season we’ve seen this year. Shahin also highlights the work at UC San Diego.

Shahin:  The newest Crypto500 ranking is out! Bitcoin has taken over the crypto currency world by latest count, see the white paper here, the slides here, and the Medium article here.

Dan:  Dan’s Catch of the Week is dedicated to you, our faithful set of 16 listeners. He lets you know we’d love it if you reach out to us via Twitter or email to let us know what you like, what you don’t like and what we should cover in the future.

Along those lines, right now, before listening to the episode, open up a new tab on your browser and follow us on Twitter. We’re @RadioFreeHPC and as you know, our email address really should be ears@radiofreehpc.com, because we're all ears you see, but for now it is podcast@radio... We'd love to hear from you. Oh, and you can now find us on Spotify and Google Play in addition to iTunes! See below for all the links.

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