Big Compute

We’ve all been there – Sitting inside a movie theater, fully engrossed in the film, when suddenly something happens on screen that is so far-fetched that we suddenly remember we’re sitting in a theater seat. This is the experience Rescale’s Edward Hsu had back in 2012 when he was watching the movie, The Avengers . As an aviation enthusiast, everything was well and good until he saw the epic sea st...

With high performance cloud computing usage expanding quickly in research & development, there are still some organizations who hesitate to dip a toe. In this episode, Ernest and Jolie talk through common fears of moving workloads from on premises to the cloud, and what those fears mean in 2023. They also speak to a trailblazer in this space: Anand Kumar – Global Director of IT for UD Trucks –...

At the beginning of 2020, while a pandemic of epic proportions shut down most of the world, the life sciences industry was kicked into high gear, pushing to do what had never been done before – create a vaccine in less than four years.  Thankfully, modern day computational science lended a hand, making the previously impossible, possible.  In this episode, we speak to someone on the front lines of...

More than a decade ago, a young Joris Poort stepped into a small Silicon Valley apartment for the first time, ready to make an impact on the world.  What would follow was months of rejection from investors to his big idea of how to accelerate innovation in an up-and-coming new normal of cloud high performance computing.  In this second part of a 2-part series about how Rescale began, we hear how J...

Amazon started as a bookseller.  BloomNation was founded with money won in a Poker tournament.  The creator of Paul Mitchell hair products was homeless before starting the company with a friend for $700.  Each product or service we use on a daily basis has a unique startup story behind it.  In this episode, we hear from Joris Poort, founder and CEO of cloud high performance computing company, Resc...

For those working with high performance computing in any capacity, sometimes talking about it with your family can be a little… confusing.  And with the holiday season upon us, many of us will undoubtedly be asked by well-meaning family members, “What’s going on with work?”  So today, we figured – Rather than bore the non-technical with technical jargon, why not just talk about some of the awesome...

It hasn’t even been two decades since the discovery was made -- Small repetitive hits to the head over time accumulated in football games and practices can build up into something significant and scary:  chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.  But with no sign that American football is going away anytime soon, the question remains of what can be done to better protect players against life-alter...

In the last episode, we were introduced to Tom -- a man who was flung into a medical twilight zone of heart issues and the procedures to fix them.  In this continuation of the story, meet Steve Kreuzer -- an engineer from Exponent who specializes in assisting in the development of the very kind of technology that saved Tom’s life.  Steve walks us through just what kind of technology it takes to cr...

Tom was a healthy, athletic man in his 50s when he was suddenly struck with an unexpected heart issue -- One that hundreds of thousands of people experience each year.  And that one incident spiraled into a series of events that would dramatically alter the course of Tom’s life -- but at least he still had a life to live.  Had it been only a couple decades earlier, Tom's story may not have continu...

For decades, mankind has been enamored with the idea of flying cars -- we’ve seen them in movies, read about them in books, and longed to see them in the skies.  The Back to the Future movies even showed highways in the skies in the year 2015, giving society three decades to make that a reality.  Welp, 2015 came and went, and cars were all still very much on the ground.  BUT we can finally say tha...

Is the singularity really around the corner? And when it hits, will we be surrounded by task-fulfilling artificial intelligence beings like in the 2004 movie, iRobot, or will we be shipped across space in hibernation pods reminiscent of 2016’s Passengers? Or… something else? In this second half of our discussion around artificial intelligence, Jolie and Ernest explore common themes in AI movies fr...

Beginning nearly a century ago, Hollywood movies have portrayed artificial intelligence on the big screen… er… at least what they thought of artificial intelligence.  But just how much has cinema gotten right?  We hear from AI expert Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, as he walks through his thoughts on where AI is really going, and what we need to do to prepare for it.  Meanwhile, Ernest and Jolie explor...

From reports of UFO (or UAP) sightings across the globe to scientists scouring the universe for signs of extraterrestrial life, humankind has been searching for proof that we are not alone in this universe.  In this episode, we talk to “Mars meteorologist” Dr. Michael A. Mischna of JPL about new research that not only supports evidence that life-essential water flourished on Mars over history, but...

Imagine you had a digital twin -- a computational model of yourself with not only all of your physical and physiological characteristics uploaded into it in real time, but also your thought patterns, personality traits, and opinions.  Suddenly, doctors would know exactly what treatments would be best customized for you if you got sick or experienced emotional trauma, or even what medical abnormali...

We’ve seen it on the news multiple times -- Engines exploding mid-flight on commercial aircraft, raining metal debris on anything and anyone below.  The cause is often the same -- fatigued fan blades hitting their last leg, snapping off and destroying the engine and its casing, while terrifying passengers on board.  Some flights like United 328 out of Denver managed to land safely without passenge...

What if hackers were able to instantly cripple grocery stores, businesses, banks, hospitals, public transit, power plants, and government offices?  While you may not have heard about it, this terrifying worst case scenario has actually happened before, costing more than $10 billion in damages and spreading across global enterprise.  In this third and concluding chapter of our SolarWinds cybersecur...

Never before has a hack of this sophistication and scale been seen.  But now that 18,000 organizations are considered breached, what can the hacked information be used for?  We walk through the worst case scenario possibilities of what the cyberattackers could do with the SolarWinds hack data -- from espionage to overwhelming electric grids -- and what that could mean for all of us, including thos...

It was a dark day in cybersecurity when the world realized that the largest and widest reaching data breach in history had hit over 18,000 companies and organizations, including the U.S. Department of Defense, Microsoft, and just about everything in-between.  In this episode, we take a look at what in the world happened in the SolarWinds hack.  How did it puncture cybersecurity barricades guarding...

It’s been about two decades since the Concorde flew passengers across the Atlantic at supersonic speeds, and if it were still in operation today, a ticket would cost you around $20,000.  Some saw the retirement of the Concorde as the end of supersonic commercial air travel, but undercover superhero Blake Scholl of Boom Supersonic plans to break the sound barrier with passenger travel once again by...

From the case on your phone to rovers on Mars to vaccines -- supercomputers have played a role in just about everything around us.  And many of those projects have rolled through one of the biggest supercomputing centers in the world -- the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).  In this episode, we talk to undercover superhero Dan Stanzione, executive director of TACC, about the many discoveries...

In 1908, the largest earthquake ever recorded in Europe hit Southern Italy, wiping out the entire coastal town of Messina. Once the shaking had stopped, survivors thought they were safe until a massive tsunami followed minutes later. Even today, the exact cause of the tsunami is debated in the scientific community. In this episode, we talk to Dr. Lauren Schambach from the University of Rhode Islan...

What if that plant on your desk could hold the key to stopping your stuffy nose?  From morphine to chemotherapy drugs, plants have played a vital role in developing pharmaceuticals to treat all kinds of ailments.  We talk to undercover superhero, Jerome Baudry of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, about his computational search through hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds from plants...

It’s been months since the infamous coronavirus has crept across the globe, closing schools and workplaces and changing the way we live our lives.  But why is COVID-19 seemingly so good at infecting people?  What makes this virus different than others?  We talk to undercover superhero, Rommie Amaro of the University of California San Diego, about her discoveries through computational simulation of...

Welcome to Series #2 of the Big Compute Podcast!  Ever wondered how COVID-19 can spread through the air indoors?  Is 6 feet apart enough distance?  Do plexiglass barriers protect us?  We talk to undercover superhero, Jiarong Hong of the University of Minnesota, about his discoveries from simulating the movement of aerosol particles in different indoor spaces and how it can affect our everyday live...

Kevin Kelly hosts Christopher Chang,  Computational Scientist and Acting HPC User Program Lead at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. They discuss the incredible capability of scalable high performance computing (HPC), now available securely through FedRAMP.