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 15: Is there a the Chink in TOP500 Armor

    By admin | December 20, 2012 |

    In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team quits griping about the horrible WiFi at SC12 and moves on to a truly big issue: Are LINPACK and HPCC benchmarks useful? Should they be constantly re-evaluated? And shouldn’t you really test machines on the kinds of workloads they’re designed to run?

    The catalyst for this discussion is the Blue Waters system, for which no LINPACK numbers have been submitted. Yes, it’s behind schedule, and sure, they’re busy doing the science… but is it also a shot across the bow? Are they rebelling against industry philosophy? If they are, that’s a good thing, according to Henry – because a system is about what you plan to do with it, not how many flops you can get out of it.

    Rich agrees: if you get a giant LINPACK number on a system that has reliability issues, and you can’t output real science because all your time and money is invested in brute computation, what good is it? And the industry sectors doing meaningful work – where are their systems on the Top500? They’re not playing this game.

    Spoiler alert: Henry agrees with Dan on something. Really. It’s at the 10:00 mark, if you’ve got to see it to believe it. We hardly believed it ourselves.

    Download the MP3           Download the video

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