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 284: HPC Market Growth, Winter Classic Invitational

    By admin | July 25, 2020 |

    HPC Market Projected Growth

    It’s a few weeks since we recorded this episode so maybe things have changed, but as of the recording the HPC market is projected to grow according to Hyperion’s studies. The RadioFreeHPC team delves in, looking for validations and new insights.

    Armed with the halo effect of big systems like Isambard and now Fugaku, the number and value of HPC systems based on the arm CPUs are slated to to grow rapidly albeit from a small base.

    The use of public clouds for HPC is also projected to grow. There is a big jump in recent years in HPC cloud’s market size. Hard to tell how much of that is because of cloud guys started staffing up for HPC and now have vocal advocates who pointed out the growth, and how much of that is actual new growth.

    And AI is expected to grow faster than HPC, though Shahin continues to maintain that the engine behind the growth of AI looks awfully similar to HPC.

    Winter Classic Invitational

    DanO has a big announcement. He is organizing a new edition of everybody’s favorite competition, the Student Cluster Competition, to be held in January 2021 and making it a priority to attract new teams including from historically black colleges.

    With an incredibly awesome advisory board, the Winter Classic Invitational is the newest major Student Cluster Competition, fitting nicely between the SC competition in November and the ASC competition in April. This is a virtual cluster competition, meaning that students will run their benchmarks and HPC applications remotely on systems in their team sponsors’ data center.

    Reach out to DanO if you’d like more info and check out the Student Cluster Competition website with all the latest and historical data.

    Reasons Why No One Should Ever Be Online. Ever.

    Henry has another “bad one”, as if any of them is good.  This one is an urgent “5-alarm” vulnerability in networking gear from F5 which you hopefully patched before too late.

    Catch of the Week

    Shahin: Fuji Films is talking about 400TB tape technology. Henry isn’t buying it. They both agree the website with the article is pretty cool!

    Dan:  No catch this week, sad, very sad.

    Henry: makes up for Dan by having two catches

    catch 1:  Henry is looking to make nearly 50 cents per daylight hour with his fancy new solar set up. Nice job!

    catch 2:  Addison Snell’s podcast about racism.  Go listen to it!

    Join us!

    * Download the MP3 
    * Sign up for the insideHPC Newsletter
    * Follow us on Twitter
    Subscribe on Spotify 
    Subscribe on Google Play 
    Subscribe on iTunes 
    RSS Feed
    * eMail us

     

Recent Episodes

  • Episode 346: SC22 Preview

    November 7, 2022

    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.…

  • Episode 345: Dow Gets Cloudy

    November 7, 2022

    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…

  • Episode 344: Finally back! And with a new co-host!

    August 22, 2022

    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…

  • Episode 343: It’s GTC, Baby

    March 29, 2022

    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

  • Episode 342: Jazz, Melting Diamonds, and Schrödinger’s Cat

    March 28, 2022

    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…

  • Episode 341: Ponte Vecchio

    March 21, 2022

    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…

  • Episode 340: HPC with Trish Damkroger and Brent Gorda

    March 14, 2022

    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.…

  • Episode 339: 12 Cores Per Soul

    February 14, 2022

    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.…

  • Episode 338: NVIDIA Slinks Away, Meta Bulks Up, And We Zap Bugs

    February 1, 2022

    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…