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.