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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
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In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews the results from SC16 Student Cluster Competition.
This year, the advent of clusters with the new Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs made a huge impact, nearly tripling the Linpack record for the competition.
The Student Cluster Competition returned for its 10th year at SC16, The competition which debuted at SC07 in Reno and has since been replicated in Europe, Asia and Africa, is a real-time, non-stop, 48-hour challenge in which teams of six undergraduates assemble a small cluster at SC16 and race to complete a real-world workload across a series of scientific applications, demonstrate knowledge of system architecture and application performance, and impress HPC industry judges. The students partner with vendors to design and build a cutting-edge cluster from commercially available components, not to exceed a 3120-watt power limit and work with application experts to tune and run the competition codes.
For the first-time ever, the team that won top honors also won the award for achieving highest performance for the Linpack benchmark application. The team “SwanGeese” is from the University of Science and Technology of China. In traditional Chinese culture, the rare Swan Goose stands for teamwork, perseverance and bravery. This is the university’s third appearance in the competition.
Also, an ACM SIGHPC Certificate of Appreciation is presented to the authors of a recent SC paper to be used for the SC16 Student Cluster Competition Reproducibility Initiative. The selected paper was “A Parallel Connectivity Algorithm for de Bruijn Graphs in Metagenomic Applications” by Patrick Flick, Chirag Jain, Tony Pan and Srinivas Aluru from Georgia Institute of Technology.
After that, we go round-robin for our Catch of the Week:- Henry is worked up about a set of stories of self-driving cars getting hacked. What happens when your autocar gets hacked and gets into an accident?
- Shahin informs us that Carnegie Mellon has started a Center to study the Ethical Issues of Artificial Intelligence. OrionX has just published a paper on this topic entitled “Evolution: Is AI the Future of HPC?“
- Dan points us to a story that Oracle may be shelving Solaris. As of this writing, this is still just a widely-reported rumor.
- Rich was impressed by the proposed 130 Petaflop (half-precision) AI supercomputer coming to AIST in Japan in late 2017. He also notes the passing of The Machine from HPE, which was successfully prototyped before being scrapped. Instead, technologies from The Machine will be integrated into mainline HPE products.
Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed
See our complete coverage of SC16, which takes place Nov. 13-18 in Salt Lake City.
Recent Episodes
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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.…
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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



