Research & High Performance Computing - Computerphile

A supersized game of tetris - Dr Jim Wilson on scheduling High Performance Computing jobs and helping people get the best out of Nottingham's HPC.

This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

[JaccovanSchaik]

Nice of Computerphile to blur out the handwritten passwords on those machines. Very thoughtful.

[NocturnalJin]

Well done. You should get into the problem of parallelization a bit more. Non-techies don't come in with already parallel algorithms so getting their research goals to run on 1000 cores can be interesting. And in general, even for the best techies, parallelization can be difficult at times.

[seasinatorsead]

I don't know why but this guy is genuinely the best person I wachted talking on YouTube in 2017 plus the bit for 2018 so far.

[Fiyaaaahh]

I work as a software engineer in the semiconductor industry and the physicist we work together with knows more about (HP)C than our whole team combined (we only write regular software ourselves). It's quite weird to be outclassed like that on your own area of expertise.

[kapa]

7:39 "spraying stuff all over the room, which i have also done" this quote is fun out of context xD

[kamikaze]

I'm a computational physicist and I support this video.

[kyoungb]

Back to the Computerphile we know and love - lots of images of blinking lights and big machines that go bing AND we can hear the interview 👍😎

[metalpachuramon]

It reminds me to that part on the shin Godzilla movie where the japanese found out a way to halt Godzilla's cells but had to figure out the appropriate active molecules to dock with Godzilla's receptors, so they asked Germany (if I recall correctly) unlimited use of their HPCs . I'm glad to see that writers handled these kinds of details

[colin_hart]

This is great content. I would like to see more videos focused on this area.

[X_Baron]

Hire a game theorist to make the sharing of resources feel fair to everyone. :)

[annihilatorg]

Those lovely core 2 and Vista stickers. Bleeding edge tech to be sure.

[monkeyofavon]

I think you should do more videos on parallel programming. It's a very relevant topic at the moment and there's quite a lot to cover, like programming for multiple cores, GPUs, and multiple processors (as in the case of this video). Not to mention processors, threads, scheduling, and all that jazz.

[CGM]

Really interesting stuff.
As a graduation student in System Analysis, I need some more info on this topic to move on and get a good grade, and a lot of other channels don't seem to explain that well as this one.

[kyoungb]

Would love to hear more about any recent algorithmic development in HPC - after a lot of early hype about ways to get around the surface to volume (data to computation) it sounds from this interview that most problems can still only take advantage of HPC if they are “trivially parallelizable”, i.e. a bunch of completely independent processes that don’t share data, and that HPC in this case is just fancy job distribution book keeping.

[dos]

good job on bluring out the labels out on the pc"s next to the professor ive seen amature people bluring out stuff and ending up screwing up for one frame and reveling the info

[MrRyanroberson]

if you get a camera stand, you can get way more stability during low-movement segments like most of this video.

[rageagainstthebath]

I wish to know something. I run some experiments on my Raspberry Pi server 24/7 since it's always on, unlike my main PC. I design them so after a week or two I can read a file and see what it came up with so far without interrupting. Is there a possibility for a researcher to run an HPC task for unspecified period of time and see the results in the meantime? And re-run the task with different parameters if the results went in the wrong direction?

[JonesNoahT]

That doesn’t sound like “high performance” so much as it just sounds like “a lot”. How much does he work with scientists to perfectly optimize their programs to run as quickly as it can on the hardware?

[MrRobot]

Dam this guy is what I dream to be. I'm completing my bachelor's in chemistry right now and just did a summer internship in high performance computing at a national laboratory. Before this, I thought I was somewhat knowledgeable about computer science but now it feels like I just know about 1%. Found his university bio but would be interested in to know that apart from chemistry what did he do in HPC? I assume initial hpc knowledge could be self taught as there's ton of information online about it and then forming your own project with hpc

[klittanrose]

In the biology field for testing receptor sites in molecules and cells, I really hope they do not just test for the intended target site, but also at the same time every other site the same molecule could attach to. That way they can find out possible side effect areas beforehand.

Another problem could be medicine chirality. Test it in a parallell simulation before developing the drug only to find out afterwards it ALSO attached to a not intended target site somewhere else in the body. Or as in the case of "the pill" it ends up in frogs or crocodiles and make them female thereby destroying whole species because of unintended consequences.

Test 1: Will it hit target?
Test 2: What else will it probably hit?
Test 3: Can we hide our cryptomining operations to the tax payer and server park manager?
Result: Retire early will billions of bits in the ba, in the vau, on your harddrive.