While at IBM’s Smarter Computing Summit last week at the tony Pinehurst golf resort, I had the great pleasure of hearing IBM’s Bernie Meyerson talk about limits to today’s tech, and the associated implications. Bernie is IBM’s VP of Innovation and one of the rare technologist/scientist types who can clearly and directly explain highly technical concepts in a way that they can be understood by a reasonably intelligent grey squirrel (and me too).

Even better, he’s highly entertaining and doesn’t hedge when it comes to stating what’s what in the world. Back in 2003 he predicted that Intel would never deliver on their fast CPU (4-5 Ghz) promises and would, in fact, be forced to shift to multi-core processors.

Meyerson backed up his brash prediction (it was plenty brash back then) by sharing electron microscope images of individual atoms that showed they’re kind of lumpy. The problem with lumpy atoms is that when you use only a handful of them to build gates, they leak current like a sieve. When asked about this, Intel denied, denied, denied, that there was a problem – right up to the point when they announced they were scrapping their entire product strategy in favor of a multi-core approach.

So when Meyerson talks, I pay attention. And Meyerson is talking again.

In this episode, our hosts agree that “software is not magic” and consumers don’t want to be tracked. Will there be a backlash? Will this be the new marketing point for competing browsers? Dan admits to being creeped out by…

At OSCON, or the Open Source Convention, a presentation on the “Clothesline Paradox” aptly illustrated the way developers create value. Many large companies such as Comcast make a living on open-source software. Dan digresses into a string of complaints about…

This episode is devoted to Allan Snavely, CTO of Lawrence Livermore National Lab, who passed away unexpectedly in July 2012.  He was widely known as a brilliant scientist and innovator, and for his work at SDSC on the Gordon supercomputer….

Power is a major challenge standing in the way of the Exascale wave. Our hosts discuss: where are these systems going to be hosted? And how about building some infrastructure, anyway? Tune in to hear scary “power” music and figure…

Is that parrot completely dead, or is it just resting?Is tape now a legacy technology, or is it alive and well? Archive is a critical aspect of both Big Data and supercomputing, and tape is the most efficient, cost-effective, and…

This episode focuses on the Exascalar benchmark, a combination of the Top500 and Green500. Is this something the industry needs? How about getting the Top500 and Green500 accurate first? Dan defends both his “pimped-out” laptop and his theory of “More…

Today, the topic is Big Data and analytics. The guys talk about a couple of examples of over-reliance on analytics leading to bad outcomes. The first deals with some high school kids who were accused of cheating because of a…

ISC’12 in Hamburg inspires talk of Intel’s new Phi multi-core processor… and bakeries in Hamburg inspire a new all-pastry diet for Dan. Rich throws his co-hosts a curveball; Henry says something profound; Dan finds a way to use the word…

Our buddy Rich Brueckner over at insideHPC broke some news this week when he published a story about new conference and travel spending restrictions that might radically scale back U.S. government agency participation in HPC industry events like the upcoming SC12 conference in Salt Lake City this November. The new strictures are almost certainly due to adverse publicity and bureaucratic fallout from the 2010 Las Vegas junket enjoyed by employees of the GSA (U.S. General Services Administration).

The $822,000 spent on that Las Vegas convention has been dubbed ‘lavish’, ‘outrageous’, and ‘completely over the top’ by news reports, politicians, and pundits. (But was called ‘about right’ by Elton John, according to rumors.)

Of course, when you’re talking about 300 career bureaucrats looking to celebrate the joys of bureaucracy on someone else’s dime, what’s too much?