 Welcome to another edition of RCE. This is Brock Palin, and I actually have sitting next to me the one time a year Jeff Squire from Cisco Systems my wonderful co-host Jeff. Thanks for donating your hotel room. That's right This is the second annual Show where we're both together in the same location or a court. It's a it's a very special event So though this event of course is super computing super computing SC 10 and it's a little different and Just just chat about the show. I mean the first obvious thing is I have run into Slightly less than seven billion of our prior guests on the show floor So here's the names of I've run into so Dan Teppelton So I was recently on the show just recently on the show and some people doubted that Oracle would be here But living proof. Yep. He was there. They were here with a booth. They were there with a booth and he was shilling OGE. Yep, and he was giving out freebies and he was very pleased about it Yep, yeah And then we also ran into Nicole Hemseth. Yep, the author you can follow her on Twitter at HPC in the cloud. HPC in the cloud all one big word there and she is actually quite funny We are our sense of humor is actually matched very well It's it's a little little side story. How much gets left on the cutting room floor whenever we record and in our CE isn't it? Much much does not quite get to air. Yes A lot does not get to air but it was always nice to see Nicole. Actually, it was the first time we had met in person But we had a nice chat and she got a nice RCE shirt Yeah, she didn't and Ashley Pittman was here He was kind of here on his own but also representing data direct networks his sort of representing DDN Yes, he was helping them out Not Pad B PADB. Yes, that's right. Yeah, DB. Actually, he's got that lovely British accent there sounds cooler than all of us Yes, yes to British accent And speaking of accents Dr. Breece gogla. Yeah, you didn't even want to try. Yeah Dr. Breece and some of his colleagues We had Breeze speaking in the Cisco booth and we also had Breeze speaking at the the open MPF forum So he was talking about HW look that we had him on the show for but also talking about KNM Which is another product or another project? Maybe we'll have him on talk about KNM someday Also saw scat Lathrop and Kay Hunt from Deteragrid and Deteragrid campus champions program again I'm the campus champion. I'll have more information on that later. But who else did you run into? So I ran into All the MPH people because MPI is a small world, but we have the MPH guys on MPI CH I'm sorry MPI CH. That's right. If we're gonna do PADB we can do MPI CH So saw the MPI CH people amusingly enough Their bof was directly opposite the hallway that from the open MPI bof. It's actually a real shame because It was it was unfortunate that the MPI CH bof and the open MPI bof were at the same time Because I know there were people that wanted to go to both. I definitely wanted to go to theirs I'll see what they have to say and stuff like that But there's only so many time slots and I'm sure there was compromises made all over the place But it was kind of a bummer that the two Big open-source MPIs were kind of competing because I'm sure we stole some audience from each other and we also saw Hey, Nam and Tiki swears brown. Yeah, I didn't realize that was Tiki at the time. I was Tiki I met and that was for the student cluster competition Yeah, we judged so Brock and I were part of the judging crew for the interview portion of the student cluster competition today Tremendous fun actually had a great time doing that. Yeah, we'll have more about that. We'll have more about that Yeah, we'll have more about that soon. I also ran into rich Graham rich Graham and and Bill Grop did the MPF forum Episode for us a while ago. So well, I see rich Graham all the time But all the new stuff going in and you got to tick him off here as you know, I guess so And you also ran to Jason Stowe. Yeah, Jason Stowe from cycle computing The commercial condor provider and supporter and doing cloudy things too. Yeah They're pretty versatile piece of equipment. They've got there. Yeah So that that that exhaust my list you run anymore that nope. No, never everybody Mentioned it's a pretty good group though. Actually, that's a no, it's good There's a good RCE showing and also I managed to tonight It's Wednesday night by the way when we're recording this if anything good happens on Thursday at the show Yeah, just pretend we put it in the show. Yeah Give away my last RCE t-shirt. Ah, I have two more. I have two more to go. Ah So, well, nobody's gonna hear this before Well, I'll still manage to get them away tomorrow. This is someone who is worthy. Yeah, my goal here though is to win an iPad I've entered every single iPad drawing on the show floor But yet I still have not won. So sad by far the most popular drawing giveaways Everyone's giving away everybody's giving away an iPad But only a few people are getting them. I'm not one of them yet So big things going on that we saw at talks and stuff on open SFS a scalable file system Yep, a lot of questions about that. Yeah, this is the organization that's set up to kind of have an entry point and funding for doing luster development and They are very tightly in With Oracle, okay, so there is no explain that. So yeah, there's a lot of question forking that was very Okay, heavily lean on no forking. Okay, good stuff being done in SFS will be pushed up to Oracle Things that Oracle do will be brought down to SFS. They should stay compatible. Okay, there should there's there's no forking Sounds like there's harmony. Yes. Yes. Good. That's good So luster future is and buster future looks bright. Luster future looks bright. Um, wham cloud Mm-hmm ran into them at the terror grid conference. They they had a single placeholder page for a website. Mm-hmm a bunch of Luster devs. Mm-hmm his whole shakeup. They are fully funded in a major way working on luster with Oracle where Luster is luster is going to be luster is going to give us all luster is very bright That's good. I'm sure a lot of people will be relieved about that As as mentioned I did we had an open MPI boff We talked about, you know, the 1-4 series and the 1-5 series where we're going a couple samples of Up-and-coming projects which aren't in the release series yet But the the buffs were only an hour this year So we actually didn't you didn't get to get into any meaty stuff and we didn't really get to get too much Audience feedback, which was kind of a bummer. We like doing that every year It's you know We develop all this stuff back at our little cloisters and the things that we think are useful to the world But it's always good to get, you know, real-world feedback from actual users Actual admins and things like that. And so we didn't really have enough time to get that Which was a little bit of a bummer this year, but but otherwise the the forum I'm sorry the the MPI open MPI boff was pretty good. We're in a ginormous room though I don't know how we got a ginormous room and it looked it looked like it was empty Even though we had upwards of like 60 people in the room. So it was good at ten minutes people That's good, but it looked like oh, yes, there aren't many people here But but it was so good. We got a couple of nice questions at the end and Some some good feedback, but what would have been nice to be a little bit longer So as we mentioned earlier, we ran to Tiki swears brown and hey a nom after our last recording They asked Jeff and I to help out along with two other people doing the interview portions of the competition had a number of teams Few international teams couple international teams and boy some of those teams were just really impressive But we'll we'll talk about that. We'll have a separate show Yeah, we'll have a separate follow-up with the student cluster competition. Yeah And of course, it's a it's obligatory for my my corporate overloads to say that, you know So let's go ahead a nice booth here and I'll show what a bunch of nice products We're showing 40 gig in our booth 40 gig ethernet because we love all things ethernet doesn't doesn't everybody love all things I think everybody has some ethernet who has a cluster. It's probably true. Most people do have ethernet So yeah, we were showing a bunch of 40 gig stuff, which is actually pretty cool There's 100 gig on the floor as well Lots of 140 gig and and Cisco is powering a bunch of hundred gig and 40 gig stuff in Sinet itself. So that's actually pretty cool. So that stuff I think will be publicly available around the corner I'm not in the marketing arm of Cisco. So don't hold me to any dates or anything like that But I know that stuff is coming soon It's all very exciting Good stuff. Yeah saw some Ten gig e untwisted pair regular RJ 45. Yeah, baby So it's the same way we went from 10 to 100 to 100 to gig pretty soon. There's gonna be 10 gig That's right, baby. You're gonna have 100 gig into your alarm clock Because you're gonna need it for those completely Stored in the cloud. That's right. You could pick one from a million different movies to stream to your alarm clock Simultaneously we had a get-together for the campus champions I'm the campus champion for the University of Michigan Ann Arbor at the campus champion program We have a bunch of new champions really turning to a big crew a really good crew of people helping at Their local universities and institutions used to terror grid national resources And that was it was really great to see all these people and it's really gonna be a group of people that like you Really can approachable Help a lot of cross-pollination of ideas of how things would be done locally not even on terror grid Yeah, it's really important because I mean I actually ran into a bunch of students and some of them the most common question I get like masters level students So, you know entry-level grad students were saying how do I get started in this? You know, they ended up coming here They're on a grant or they're on a student thing or they took one class and parallel computing and things like that and The common question I always hear is how do I move forward? How do I do more than that? You know like like even some of the student cluster people we talked to today. They're like, oh, yeah You know, I I took an MPI programming class, but then I learned when I was doing the competition I learned all about shell script programming and how to apply that and make it a real world Skill and and do something with it. And so, you know having people that can help you along the way I it's just so tremendously important. Yeah Actually another thing we saw with the student clusters thing is some interesting hardware, but we'll cover it We'll talk about I know it's so it was so tempting to want to talk about it. We'll come back. We'll come back Stay tuned All right, so let's let's talk about we talked about a bunch of specific things Let's talk about general reaction. There's a show this year. What's what's your gut feel here? What do you think after being around the show for a couple of days? Not a lot of new risk-taking from the vendors no big different like I'd roll the dice whether you're gonna be in business next year. Yeah, there's no yeah. Yeah, I would have to serve it in place Yeah, it's probably a good reflection on the economy and God knows neither Brock Roy or analyst or anything like that So this is guts feel of just two guys walking around the floor But it seemed very much like an evolutionary conference not a revolutionary conferevolution revolutionary conference That you know, there's new stuff It's the next gen of all kinds of things and there are even some somewhat impressive things and so on But I agree. I mean there seems to be kind of less equipment and less demos and because there's less There's not the the new big thing You know except for 40 and gig a hundred and a hundred gig ethernet, of course, which you know We've been kind of needing 40 and 100 gig ethernet for a while So I have to put in the mandatory plug for that but you know, I agree that there wasn't so much equipment and flashy lights and things like that because You know, even last year we were talking about GPUs and now we're seeing bigger and better GPUs and so on but not some of the same old problems for GPUs remain and things like that and We're seeing more accelerators of different types and so on But they're just the next gen and so on and better servers with the halims and Westmere's Can't really talk much about Sandy Bridge yet other than what's out on say tech crunch and things like that That's all coming but it's all all been evolutionary Kinds of things, which is not bad It's just a lot of times. They'll be pent up R&D demand yeah next year the year after that there may be a massive amount of new stuff Yeah, new companies you never even heard of and doing cool new stuff. Yeah, don't don't think this industry is dead No, not at all. You look at this thing. There's people everywhere great show And you know half of the show is going around and talking to people in the the million little sidebar conversations that you have And even the vendors who don't necessarily have a strong play this year all come because they still need to talk to everybody Right, you need to talk with the customers and talk with the developers and talk with the you know The users and all these kinds of things and all that happens tenfold I mean this year somehow the dice rolled and I didn't have any booth duty at all It's just I gave a couple talks here and there and I was like wow I'm gonna I have so much time to go around the floor and everything Not so much at all You get you get embroiled and embroiled is the rung where you get you get involved in all these conversations And a million things come up because that that's what happens. It's super competing because everybody's here I've only been doing high performance computing for about seven years and two of those. I was an undergrad So I've only been doing this full-time five years and the relationships people around the floor Knowing faces even in this huge thousands of people at this thing 12,000 12,000. That's what somebody quoted to me I don't know if it's why don't we bump it up. We'll say 30,000 people No, somebody told me they thought it was somewhere around 12,000. I don't know if that's accurate or not, but Faces, you know ideas Flowing both ways. It's really good Basically if you're admin and you listen to this or even a user You should come to this show. You really should because it you know The number of meetings that I now have set up in December as a result of this show Is staggering But that happens every year and it's great because it's kind of like a Reboot point for the year right where you you start off on that next big project because of that meeting you had at Supercomputer Anyway, we're turning into an advertising for super community. Yeah, it's a good show. It is a good show It's a good show even even if the hardware And software showings weren't strong this year. Everything else is still strong So but there was one good thing compared to last year last year We were kind of still in the big slump a lot of the commercial providers were Actually laying off staff. Yeah, helpments staff admin staff And there was people last year who came to SC on their own and were networking and kind of passing the resume around. Yeah, this year. I Haven't met anybody. I've met a small number Not nearly as many as last year Most everybody I know who got hosed by last year has landed successfully elsewhere Yeah, in the same bit so they're all in HPC of some flavor Maybe you know not necessarily doing exactly the same thing But quite definitely a lot fewer people saying hey, can you help me out? and that's that's a great sign for The industry and the economy and all this kind of stuff. So I was very very pleased to see that That's that's a good observation but Overall, it's a good show overall good show. Yeah What one other thing let's talk about the GPU thing because GPU is now everywhere last year It was mostly everywhere now. It's everywhere and then now it's literally now. It's literally everywhere Still got to say I'm I'm not a convert Right. I think they're they're good things. I think they're great for certain applications And I hope I you know I have friends who work at a video and I hope they don't hate me for saying this I Think they're doing a fabulous job over there at Nvidia And I think there's there's a whole pile of applications that they work for but I don't see them as the general panacea For that makes everything better in HPC. It's not gonna be what the cluster was to the old kind of custom generic Distributed memory. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I custom equipment. Not everything is embarrassingly parallel, right? Somebody I actually read that in a tweet earlier this week I don't know exactly who said it but GPUs are great and embarrassingly parallel stuff Well, you can just shovel a whole bunch of stuff down there and they do it fabulously But not every HPC Problem is that way that said I've got a couple of users who's problem maps perfectly on the GPUs and I've handed over many a large PO with lots of zeros on the ends for GPU gear. Excellent There's more on our horizon. So the right the right hammer for the right nail. Yeah, excellent That's good. And and there are there have been a couple other accelerators around the show Not necessarily GPU accelerators. There's a couple vendors shelling that kind of stuff. There's some FPGA guys here And so on some have good software solutions and don't have good software solutions Some are just like hey, here's the hardware go go figure it out I think that's interesting too. It doesn't get nearly as much press And it definitely takes more expertise. Well, I mean GPU takes expertise to yeah, but you have your laptop It's easy to kind of get started. Yeah, that's true. That's true So I don't know the role of accelerators is gonna be interesting and what's gonna happen with Sandy Bridge I don't know. It's gonna change this market dynamic quite a bit right because The public information out there on on Intel Sandy Bridge is you know, there's an accelerator right there What are you gonna do? Yeah, I don't know that that's gonna be interesting to see what happens over the next year or two What happens to the GPU market the general accelerator market for HPC? and the whole Intel Revolutionary stuff with you know, Sandy Bridge and accelerators built in we're back into the days of you know 486 plus numerical co-processors That's right, and it was it was right there But that'll that'll be interesting to see what kind of software solutions come out because I mean that You can build the greatest hardware in the world and if you don't have a good solution that everybody can use Then that that hardware will sit there gathering dust So I think it's gonna be really exciting to see what software solutions come out of the stuff as a software biased guy myself So by the wise good show good show norlings good food. Good food. I had some bad food, too Accidentally went into a tourist trap place. You didn't realize it till it was too late And it was fried fried fried and a little more fried and I was like, hmm, okay good stuff Has a hot sauce every place a different hot sauce to different hot sauce. Yeah But earn it anything else. No, I think we're good. Okay. Well, see you see 2011. Yeah, we'll probably talk before then though. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, well But this is a once-annual show. Yeah Okay, you can find us online at rce-cast.com There's a nomination form look at up what upcoming shows possibly that is what you want to hear and download old shows Only shows like the last 10 doesn't really yeah, so if you want all of them are on the website They're all there and we look at the web stats So it'd be kind of fun if like, you know pick pick an old show and we have like 10,000 people just download that one again just because Pump up those web stats. Okay. Oh Till the next show till next time