@HPCpodcast: David Barkai on His New Book ‘Unmatched: 50 Years of Supercomputing’

Long-time HPC veteran and author David Barkai has seen it all in supercomputing over the last 50 years. He embarked on his HPC career shortly after receiving a PhD in theoretical physics and has focused on relationships between applications and architectures while serving several companies during their heydays, including Control Data, Floating Point Systems, Cray Research, SGI and Intel, along with a stint at NASA Ames.

Barkai joined us to discuss his new book Unmatched: 50 Years of Supercomputing, chronicling the extraordinary progress of supercomputing over the past half century, and how HPC emerged as a “powerful demonstration of our relentless drive to understand and shape the world around us.”

The book segments HPC history into five, decade-long epochs defined by the system architectural themes of big iron vector processors, multiprocessors, microprocessors, clusters and accelerators, and cloud computing.  The final part of the book examines key issues confronting HPC and where it might all be headed.

We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as Shahin and Doug did.

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