Big Compute

Celebrating innovation in a world of virtually unlimited compute power, one story at a time.

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20 episodes
Updated Sep 26, 2023

Episodes20

Newest first

Sep 26, 2023 · 1 hr 11 min
The Helicarrier: When Movies Ignore Natural Law
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 incredib
Jul 6, 2023 · 1 hr 13 min
A Better Life: The Case for Cloud
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
Nov 15, 2022 · 1 hr 10 min
The Computational Science of Drug Development
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 powe
Apr 12, 2022 · 58 min
A Cloud Startup Story (Part 2)
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 chec
Mar 29, 2022 · 58 min
A Cloud Startup Story (Part 1)
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 Ne
Dec 21, 2021 · 55 min
How to Tell Your Family About HPC
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 Co
Nov 30, 2021 · 1 hr 8 min
Protecting Football Players’ Brains
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 Univ
Nov 16, 2021 · 46 min
At the Heart of Simulation (Part 2)
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 th
Nov 2, 2021 · 51 min
At the Heart of Simulation (Part 1)
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 p
Oct 19, 2021 · 58 min
Flying Cars: From Cloud to Cloud
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
Oct 5, 2021 · 59 min
AI: Hollywood vs Reality (Part 2)
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
Sep 21, 2021 · 59 min
AI: Hollywood vs Reality (Part 1)
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 le
Jun 29, 2021 · 59 min
Weathering Water on Mars
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 physi
Jun 8, 2021 · 46 min
Digital Twins Will Change the World
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 sc
May 18, 2021 · 43 min
Preventing Airplane Engine Explosions
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 wrea
Apr 22, 2021 · 45 min
The Hack that Stopped a Country
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 coul
Mar 23, 2021 · 51 min
The SolarWinds Hack: Worst Case Scenarios
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
Mar 2, 2021 · 38 min
The SolarWinds Hack: What Happened?
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
Feb 11, 2021 · 45 min
From Supercomputing to Supersonic
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
Dec 22, 2020 · 47 min
How Supercomputing Touches the World(s)
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. Wheth