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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.