Mark and Brian are together this week, hosting our guests Senanu Aggor and Ilias Katsardis as we discuss High Performance Computing with Google. HPC uses powerful computers to solve problems that would otherwise be too large or take too long for standard machines. Innovation and advances in cloud technology have made this resource more accessible, more scalable, and more affordable.

Senanu lists some great use cases for HPC, including vehicle manufacturing and the medical field and describes how these markets benefit from the extra power HPC offers. Ilias talks tech and helps us understand the evolution of the Google HPC offering and the architecture most often used with HPC. He explains the benefits of HPC on the cloud over the old way, emphasizing the flexibility of choosing machines based on your code rather than forcing your code onto small machines. Storage of data is flexible, scalable, and secure as well. Diminishing VM to VM latency has been an important advancement in HPC, and Ilias describes how Google has decreased latency.

Google Cloud customers are using the HPC offering for all kinds of large computing jobs, and Senanu details some of these real world instances. From Covid vaccine research to disaster evacuation planning, HPC on the cloud is changing the way we process data. Later, Ilias tells our listeners how to get started with their HPC project.

Senanu Aggor

Senanu Aggor is the Product Marketing Manager for Google Cloud’s High Performance Computing (HPC) solution.

Ilias Katsardis

Ilias Katsardis is the HPC Solution Lead for the Customer Engineering team (EMEA) at Google. In this role, Ilias brings over 14 years of experience in the cloud computing and high-performance computing industries to promote Google Cloud’s state-of-the-art infrastructure for complex HPC workloads. Previously, he worked as an applications analyst at Cray Inc., where he was a dedicated analyst to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), and, prior to that, was an HPC application specialist at ClusterVision. Ilias also founded two startups Airwire Networks in 2006 and Performance Hive in 2017.

Cool things of the week

What’s happening in BigQuery: Time unit partitioning, Table ACLs and more blog
BigQuery explained: Blog series blog
BigQuery Spotlight videos
Cloud Functions vs. Cloud Run video

Interview

High Performance Computing site
GCP Podcast Episode 237: NVIDIA with Bryan Catanzaro podcasdt
GCP Podcast Episode 167: World Pi Day with Emma Haruka Iwao podcast
Compute Engine site
Compute Engine Machine Types site
Cloud Storage site
Cloud Firestore site
Google Cloud with Intel site
Cloud GPUs site
Best practices for running tightly coupled HPC applications on Compute Engine site
Super Computing Event site

Stackchat at home

This week, Max Saltonstall is talking cyber analytics with Eric Dull from Deloitte.

HPC with Senanu Aggor and Ilias Katsardis + Deloitte Cyber Analytics with Eric Dull

Google Cloud Platform Podcast

HPC with Senanu Aggor and Ilias Katsardis + Deloitte Cyber Analytics with Eric Dull