Topics including (but not limited to)....

  • Rising power needs

  •  

    Advanced cooling

  •  

     

     

     

       Latest & Greatest New Tech

  • How compute is used

  • Efficient computing & explaining stuff

  •   We argue about it all!

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.

  1. They are computationally intense
  2. Time to solution and quality of solution are critical
  3. 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

  • Episode 141: Results from the ASC17 Student Cluster Competition

    By admin | May 8, 2017 |


    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews the results from the ASC17 Student Cluster Competition finals in Wuxi, China. In the end, Tsinghua University won the overall competition, beating 20 teams from around the world.
    “As the world’s largest supercomputing competition, ASC17 received applications from 230 universities around the world, 20 of which got through to the final round held this week at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi after the qualifying rounds. During the final round, the university student teams were required to independently design a supercomputing system under the precondition of a limited 3000W power consumption. They also had to operate and optimize standard international benchmark tests and a variety of cutting-edge scientific and engineering applications including AI-based transport prediction, genetic assembly, and material science. Moreover, they were required to complete high-resolution maritime simulation on the world’s fastest supercomputer, Sunway TaihuLight.
    The grand champion, team Tsinghua University, completed deep parallel optimization of the high-resolution maritime data simulation mode MASNUM on TaihuLight, expanding the original program up to 10,000 cores and speeding up the program by 392 times. This helped the Tsinghua University team win the e Prize award. MASNUM was nominated in 2016 for the Gordon Bell Prize, the top international prize in the supercomputing applications field.
    After that, we do our Catch of the Week:

    • Henry points us to the Google Docs security breach. They claim they have fixed the problem, but don’t open those shared docs!
    • Shahin likes a new story about AI-enhanced justice in the court systems where they look at setting bail and the risks associated with the defendant.
    • Dan was having trouble with slow internet and two-factor authentication, which sounds like a vicious circle.
    • Rich notes that Andrew Klein from Backblaze will present at MSST on what they’ve learned about hard drives over the years including failure rates by model, and the ability to predict drive failure before it happens.

    Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

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