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A less-biased look at tape versus disks
Executive SummaryTape isn't dead despite what object store vendors may tell you, and it still plays an important role in both small- and large-scale storage environments. Â Disk-based object stores...
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Understanding I/O on the mid-2017 iMac
My wife recently bought me a brand new mid-2017 iMac to replace my ailing, nine-year-old HP desktop. Â Back when I got the HP, I was just starting to learn about how computers really worked and really...
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Are FPGAs the answer to HPC's woes?
Executive SummaryNot yet. Â I'll demonstrate why no domain scientist would ever want to program in Verilog, then highlight a few promising directions of development that are addressing this fact.The...
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A week in the life of an SC attendee
Last week was the annual Supercomputing conference, held this year in Dallas, and it was as busy as they always are. Â Every year I take plenty of photos and post plenty of tweets throughout the week,...
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VAST Data's storage system architecture
VAST Data, Inc, an interesting new storage company, unveiled their new all-flash storage system today amidst a good amount of hype and fanfare. Â There's no shortage of marketing material and trade...
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ISC'19 Recap
I was fortunate enough to attend the ISC HPC conference this year, and it was a delightful experience from which I learned quite a lot. Â For the benefit of anyone interested in what they have missed, I...
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SC'19 Recap
Last week was the annual Supercomputing conference, held this year in Denver, and it was its usual whirlwind of big product announcements, research presentations, vendor meetings, and catching up with...
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Understanding random read performance along the RAIDZ data path
Although I've known a lot of the parameters and features surrounding ZFS since its relative early days, I never really understood why ZFS had the quirks that it had. Â ZFS is coming to the forefront of...
View ArticleExascale's long shadow and the HPC being left behind
The delivery of Japan's all-CPU Fugaku machine and the disclosure of the UK's all-CPU ARCHER 2 system amidst the news, solidly "pre-Exascale" machines with pre-exascale budgets, is opening old wounds...
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The joy of buying a standing desk during the pandemic
When my employer announced that we were all going to work remotely back in March, I had no semblance of a home office and had to scramble to figure out how to set up a space in my small urban apartment...
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PDSW'20 Recap
This year was the first all-virtual Parallel Data Systems Workshop, and despite the challenging constraints imposed by the pandemic, it was remarkably engaging. Â The program itself was contracted...
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SC'20 Recap
The HPC industry's biggest conference, SC, was held virtually over the last two weeks. Although the original plan to hold it in Atlanta was supplanted by all-virtual format, it still managed to be a...
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IOPS are dumb
This post is a long-form dump of some thoughts I've had while testing all-flash file systems this past year, and I'll be harping on many of these themes at SC'21 this year. Â Bits of this appear in a...
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Life and leaving NERSC
When word started to spread that I was leaving my job at NERSC for Microsoft, a lot of people either directly or indirectly attributed my decision to being one motivated by money. Rationalizing my...
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SC'22 Recap
The biggest annual conference in HPC, the SC conference, was recently held in Dallas, Texas in its second hybrid incarnation since being all-remote for the pandemic. This year attracted over 11,000...
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SC'23 Recap
The largest high-performance computing industry conference of the year, SC23, was held in Denver last week. This year's conference attracted over 14,000 attendees and 438 exhibitors, finally breaking...
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A closer look at "training" a trillion-parameter model on Frontier
A paper titled "Optimizing Distributed Training on Frontier for Large Language Models" has been making its rounds over the last few weeks with sensational taglines saying the authors trained a...
View ArticleOn the road to Hamburg for ISC'24
I have the great fortune of being able to attend to the 2024 ISC High Performance conference in Hamburg next week where I will be both speaking and listening throughout the contributed program and the...
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ISC’24 recap
I had the great pleasure of attending the ISC High Performance conference this month, marking the fifth time I've attended what has become one of my top must-attend industry conferences of the year....
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How has life after leaving the Labs been going?
June 2024 marked two years since I left my job at one of the world's most prestigious government HPC centers for a job in one of the world's largest technology corporations. In that time, the world of...
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A critique of the call for public AI
As I spend more time in the AI infrastructure business, I've been thinking more and more about the government's role in AI. There's no shortage of opinions and position papers on the topic, and sadly,...
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FASST will be DOE's opportunity to adapt, align, or...
These are some personal thoughts I’ve had in response to Notice of Request for Information (RFI) on Frontiers in AI for Science, Security, and Technology (FASST) Initiative.The premise of the RFI...
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SC'24 recap
The premiere annual conference of the high-performance computing community, SC24, was held in Atlanta last week, and it attracted a record-shattering number of attendees--nearly 18,000 registrants, up...
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LLM training without a parallel file system
The illustrious Jeff Denworth recently posted a hot take across social media, claiming that training large language models (LLMs) doesn't require massive, expensive parallel file systems:As someone...
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GTC 2025 recap
I attended GTC for the first time this year and got to experience what turned out to be one of the strangest, over-the-top conferences I've ever attended. It took many typical conference activities...
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