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 first time this many cores have been devoted to a fluid simulation. In this case, they were modeling jet engine exhaust in an attempt to reduce the noise during takeoffs and landings.

If you need a million-core system to run your code, there aren’t a lot of choices today. In fact, there are only two million-core plus supercomputers that we know of: 1) Oak Ridge’s AMD/NVIDIA-based Titan; and 2) Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s Bluegene/Q-based Sequoia. The Stanford guys used the 1,572,000-core Sequoia system, probably because it’s an easy drive from Palo Alto to Livermore, CA. (Head over the Dunbarton Bridge, then take the 880 to the 580. That’s how I’d go.)

The article alluded to the difficulty inherent in pushing applications to this scale. I was surprised to read that the combined Stanford/LLNL team was able to pull this off with only “a few weeks” of planning and tuning. That’s definitely a resume-worthy achievement.

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 about Exascale. (Kind of like rule #1 of Fight Club, except the guys keep breaking it.) Why not? Because too many of the people talking about Exascale are having the wrong conversation about it.

What should the conversation be? Should it be about the systems themselves, or about the work that can be done only with those systems – the science that we can’t yet do? Spoiler alert: Dan and Henry disagree on this. But a peaceful vibe reigns once again as they discuss what The Exascale Report calls “The Three Noble Truths” of Exascale, which sounds kind of Zen and cool – as if coined by Exascale Samurai.

And finally… is it time to talk about Zetta-scale?

Check the Radio Free HPC website for new episodes and more great content from Rich Brueckner of insideHPC, Henry Newman of Instrumental, Inc., and GCG's Dan Olds.

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 the author presents is that of our planet becoming a giant nervous system in which we, its inhabitants, are the nerve endings. Or as his ten-year-old son put it, “Isn’t this like growing another eye?” Indeed it is: with all of this sensory input, we are beginning to see a third dimension.

It’s also one of those we-don’t-know-what-we-don’t-know propositions. Just as we could never have imagined how transformative the Internet would be, we can’t predict where Big Data will take us. We don’t even know, really, how to maximize the data we’re collecting right now.

The Human Face of Big Data is available – well, probably lots of places – but here’s the Amazon link, because they have so much data on us already.

Check the Radio Free HPC website for new episodes and more great content from Rich Brueckner of insideHPC, Henry Newman of Instrumental, Inc., and GCG's Dan Olds.

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 buy channels and individual shows a la carte, and – AND – access a cloud-based DVR service. The stuff of dreams, right?

But not so fast. Acquiring licenses for each bit of content, and dealing with Hollywood in general, is not for the faint of heart.

What’s in this uphill climb for Intel? Chips in every household; entry into a massive market; and another way to offset declining PC sales.

What’s in it for consumers seems pretty clear, but there’s at least one major caveat: What’s to stop, say, Comcast from raising rates for its Internet cable in order to cover lost revenue? Then we’re all paying Intel and our local cable provider. Is this just “Meet the new boss… same as the old boss?”

This episode also gives us a peek into the guys’ viewing preferences and current entertainment setups. (Henry: The Food Network instead of ESPN? Really?)

Check the Radio Free HPC website for new episodes and more great content from Rich Brueckner of insideHPC, Henry Newman of Instrumental, Inc., and GCG's Dan Olds.

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 foresaw the prevalence of interconnected devices and shared data, and developed some of the technology that the Internet is based upon, and yet – after a stunning rise – experienced an even more stunning fall.

The consensus is that Sun lost its vision. It tried to be everything to everyone – “good enough” on multiple fronts but no longer great in any one. Its leaders quit pursuing the markets on which they made their name, and went off on tangents in terms of acquisitions and new projects.

So what have we learned? A lesson so blindingly obvious that it concludes the podcast… and leaves us to think of all the companies along the side of the road who failed to heed it.

Check the Radio Free HPC website for new episodes and more great content from Rich Brueckner of insideHPC, Henry Newman of Instrumental, Inc., and GCG's Dan Olds.