The High Performance Computing PodcastTopics 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
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The show starts on a high note, with Henry’s audio being amazingly echo free. Usually we hear a lot of echo as Henry talks, which is due to the rammed earth walls of his new abode, plus the fact that there isn’t any carpeting or anything else to absorb his nasal tones. But somehow Henry has broken the code and is sitting in exactly the right place where the echo either doesn’t happen or they miraculously cancel each other out perfectly. Don’t expect to see it happen again. We’re at 3/4th strength as Jessie is still at Marine Officer Candidate School.
We have big news today. Well, not news about us, we’re not making the news. And it’s not all that new either, but, as we say on the podcast, it’s news to us and that’s enough reason for us to tackle it. What are we talking about? Amazon’s new Graviton2 processor. (Here’s a great article from AnandTech comparing Graviton2 vs. AMD and Intel.) This Graviton2 is based on Arm and sports 64 physical cores, large caches, competitive frequency at 2.5Ghz. In the call, the boys talk about the specs and how they favorably compare – at least on paper – well against Intel and AMD x86 processors. However, we don’t know what applications are available for Graviton2 and how it would compare in a real apples-to-apples showdown with all three processors running real workloads. We also have a discussion of the economics behind the new chip and how Amazon is charging significantly less for instances powered by Graviton2 vs. AMD and Intel. Dan thinks this is a big deal and will roil the CPU market, Henry isn’t convinced, and Shahin says it’s not a watershed moment, but is an important evolution in cloud computing.
Henry Newman’s Reasons Why No One Should Ever be Online. Ever. Henry flips the script this week and points out a piece of clickbait that has really riled him up. This is a CNN Business story that purportedly proves that if someone can monitor your internal residence wireless traffic, they can then tell when no one is home. Um….duh?
Catch of the Week:
Henry: is so upset by the stupid clickbait CNN story that he couldn’t even gather his net. But his ‘deer in the headlight’ comments brought on a tangential conversation about this classic YouTube video where a deer beats the crap out of a hunter. Enjoy
Shahin: Retro phone headsets are making a comeback. It’s the new stylish choice for hipsters or someone looking to return back to an older, simpler, time.
Dan: Announcing a NEW CONTEST! We will give a fabulous prize bundle to the 23rd listener email we receive at podcast@radiofreehpc.com . Why 23? We love the prime numbers here at RF-HPC, they’re incredibly useful. Plus 23 listeners is a stretch goal for us, we barely made it to 18 in our last contest. Send in those emails soon!
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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…