Stephan Fabel — Efficient Supercomputing with NVIDIA's Base Command Platform

Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI

English - January 06, 2022 12:00 - 52 minutes - 47.8 MB
Technology Homepage Download Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed

Previous Episode: Chris Padwick — Smart Machines for More Sustainable Farming

Next Episode: Ion Stoica — Spark, Ray, and Enterprise Open Source

Stephan Fabel is Senior Director of Infrastructure Systems & Software at NVIDIA, where he works on Base Command, a software platform to coordinate access to NVIDIA's DGX SuperPOD infrastructure.

Lukas and Stephan talk about why having a supercomputer is one thing but using it effectively is another, why a deeper understanding of hardware on the practitioner level is becoming more advantageous, and which areas of the ML tech stack NVIDIA is looking to expand into.

The complete show notes (transcript and links) can be found here: http://wandb.me/gd-stephan-fabel

---

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

1:09 NVIDIA Base Command and DGX SuperPOD

10:33 The challenges of multi-node processing at scale

18:35 Why it's hard to use a supercomputer effectively

25:14 The advantages of de-abstracting hardware

29:09 Understanding Base Command's product-market fit

36:59 Data center infrastructure as a value center

42:13 Base Command's role in tech stacks

47:16 Why crowdsourcing is underrated

49:24 The challenges of scaling beyond a POC

51:39 Outro

---

Subscribe and listen to our podcast today!

👉 Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts

👉 Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts

👉 Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify