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 structure called the Helicarrier take to the skies, and it was blatantly clear to him that the incredible piece of high budget visual effects would probably – in fact – kill its own jet pilots.  And while it was just a movie, the scene lingered in Edward’s mind for years, until the day Sandeep Urankar – an engineer with a knack for computational investigations – was able to run simulations to prove if Edward’s hypothesis was true, and consequently fueling the question – how accurate should big budget movies really be when it comes to natural law?

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 – who moved his entire company’s full array of computational operations from on prem to the cloud in just a few months, with the help of partners like Microsoft Azure, represented in this episode by Rachel Pruitt.  Hear how UD Trucks sprinted to their fast-approaching cloudy finish line, earning them the label of being true cloud evangelists.

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 vaccine and drug development – Steve Mehrman of Johnson & Johnson, who harnesses computational power on a daily basis to elevate one of the most important aspects of our lives – human health.

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 Joris persevered through challenges, was accepted into Y Combinator, and how he landed his first check, ultimately launching the business – and vision – he had for the world.

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, Rescale, about what led him to quit his job at Boeing to start a tech company.  From his birth in the Netherlands to finding himself surrounded by consultants at Harvard Business School – Joris’s story is proof that it takes a special kind of person with a special kind of vision to create a business that pushes innovation to the next level.

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 ways high performance computing is changing the world?  In this episode, we revisit the 2020 Big Compute conference talk by Barry Bolding of AWS about just that – how HPC makes our lives better.  So when you’re sipping eggnog with the family and the question of work comes up, you can brighten their eyes instead of put them to sleep.

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-altering injuries like this?  In today’s episode, Jolie and Ernest speak to Tate Fonville of Liberty University about a new approach to designing a football helmet that is more likely to protect against damage to the brain -- by using computational simulation.

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 create these life-saving devices, and how much more complex it is when you’re trying to predict how these devices will interact with human tissue. 

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 continued at all.  But thanks to a new medical device born out of computational engineering, thousands of people like Tom are still walking around us every day, and that number is only going to increase over time.

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 that change is right around the corner.  In this episode, Ernest and Jolie speak to Madhu Bhabuta, CIO of Vertical Aerospace -- an innovative company working to put flying cars (or eVTOLs, as they’re called) into the sky by 2024 -- potentially changing the way we travel forever.

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 from the 1990s to today, and compare them to predictions and ideas from OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman. One thing is sure -- AI is going to change the world. The question is, how are we going to prepare for it?

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 explore a timeline of hilarious and fascinating AI-related blockbuster titles.  From AI-gone-evil to AI learning to love, similar themes crop up again and again, demonstrating mankind’s obsession with the “what if.”

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 shows how that was possible on such a dry, sandy planet.  And with Perseverance and Ingenuity physically traversing its sandy craters, NASA could be on the brink of unlocking never-before discovered secrets about our mysterious galactic neighbor, as well as what that might mean for us on Earth.

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 abnormalities could be in your future and how to prevent them in advance.  While it’s the kind of material screenwriters latch on to for TV episodes and movies, the day may be on the horizon where we can drop the “fiction” in this type of “science fiction.”  In fact, this kind of technology is already being used to track machines and systems in fields like aerospace, automotive, energy, utilities, and building design, with enormous advancements around the corner.  In this episode, we speak to Dr. Karen E. Willcox -- an expert on digital twins -- about what digital twins can do for us in the present, and how they could greatly change the world in the future.

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 passenger injuries, while others haven’t been so lucky.  So why are these fan blades breaking apart and wreaking havoc on the skies, and are these incidents realistically preventable?  In this episode, we speak to Reamonn Soto, CEO of Sensatek Propulsion Technology -- an innovative startup creating fan blade sensors that grant an inside view into exactly what’s happening to an engine in real time, forwarding goals of putting these fan blade accidents behind us for good.  

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 cybersecurity episode series, we tell the story of the 2017 NotPetya attack on Ukraine, and what a repeat could mean for the future of our digitally connected world.

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 those in the high performance computing industry.  We also explore the Senate and congressional hearing testimonies given by Kevin Mandia, CEO of FireEye, and Brad Smith, President of Microsoft, about what the hackers went after once they were in the system, and whether the future of cloud poses a greater risk or a stronger solution.  

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 information for some of the world’s most secure organizations?  From SolarWinds to Florida’s recent public water facility hack to a thwarted ransomware attack on one of our own computers, we talk about what appears to be our day’s modern wargrounds -- the internet.

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 2030, with dreams of creating a new normal.  In this episode, we hear parts of Blake’s BC20 speech about how his company is able to make this dream a reality through virtually unlimited high performance computing.  We also touch on the on-premises vs. cloud HPC arenas, and revisit the world before conferences went completely online.

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 and innovations his supercomputers have had a role in, and what it’s like to oversee it all.  Whether it be Rommie Amaro’s recent COVID-19 breakthroughs or assisting emergency responders after a hurricane, Dan and the TACC are making a real difference behind the scenes of society.