I stumbled upon a transcript from a very recent Science magazine interview with HPC luminaries Jack Dongarra (University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge, Top500 list) and Horst Simon (Deputy Director, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.) The topic? Nothing less than the future of supercomputers. These are pretty good guys to ask, since they’re both intimately involved with designing, building, and using some of the largest supercomputers to ever walk the earth.

The conversation, transcribed into a chat format, focused on the biggest challenge to supercomputing: power consumption. We can’t simply scale today’s petascale systems up into exascale territory – the electrical demands are just too much. The current top super, ORNL’s Titan, needs a little more than 8 megawatts to deliver almost 18 petaflops. If we scaled Titan’s tech to exascale (which means growing it by 18x), we’d see power consumption at a whopping 444 megawatts – which, if you could even get it into the building, would cost something like $450 million per year at current rates.

Stanford’s Engineering Center for Turbulence Research (you know, the SECTR) has claimed a new record in computer science by running a fluid dynamics problem that spans more than one million cores. According to the story in R&D Magazine, it’s the…

The topic of Exascale is under the hosts’ scrutiny once again as they discuss some interesting stories released by The Exascale Report featuring opinion by Bill Gropp of NCSA and Bill Harrod of DOE. Rule #1: You do not talk…

Podcast special feature: a book report from Rich! The Human Face of Big Data by Rick Smolan details the ways in which Big Data affects our daily lives and predicts the ways it will transform our future. The big-picture overview…

If it sounds too good to be true… well, you know. Rich, Dan, and Henry discuss recent reports of Intel’s plans to bust up the cable TV industry by offering a service or set-top box that would allow customers to…

The gang reconvenes after the holidays to discuss a pretty broad topic: success and failure in the technology industry. The focus is Rich’s recent interview with Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, on what it takes to succeed. His company…

I’ve procrastinated a truly astounding amount of work from 2012 (and even 2011) into 2013. As my mind reels with the myriad of tasks I have to do right away, I’m looking for simple first steps to help me ease back into doing real work.

One of these is the “look back/look forward” story, a task that becomes even simpler if you let other, more knowledgeable people do the heavy rhetorical lifting and simply comment on their year-end summaries. With your expectations now set to an appropriately low level, let’s take a look at a couple of 2012 wrap-ups.

What do you give the geek who has everything? In this special Holiday Edition of Radio Free HPC, Rich, Dan, and Henry ponder one another’s gifts. The Gift of the Magi it’s not – and anyway, no one has enough hair to cut.

Part 1: Dan and Henry discuss the perfect Christmas gift for Rich, who is a bit of an Apple enthusiast.

In the last of their four-part review of SC12, Rich, Dan, and Henry talk about the Student Cluster Competition: the teams, the results, and the way the competition has evolved over the years. Salt Lake City featured some firsts: an…

The guys’ discussion of the recently concluded SC12 Conference in Salt Lake City moves on to Intel’s formal introduction of their Phi coprocessor, including some performance and price information. Rich and Henry think that Intel has a strong hand with…