HPC in an AI world: swimming upstream with more conviction
Dan Reed recently published an essay, HPC In An AI World , that summarizes a longer-form statement piece he co-authored with Jack Dongarra and Dennis Gannon called Ride the Wave, Build the Future: Scientific Computing in an AI World . It's worth a read since, as with much of Dr. Reed's writing, it takes a necessary, hard look at where the HPC community needs to look as the world underneath it shifts as a result of the massive market forces driving AI. This is a topic about which I've written at length in the past on my blog, and as I read Dr. Reed's latest post (and the Riding the Wave paper that motivated it), I found myself agreeing with a many of his positions but disagreeing with some others. My own background is in the world at the center of Dr. Reed's writing: traditional HPC for scientific computing at the national scale. However, my outlook has also been colored by the years I spent at Microsoft supporting massive-scale supercomputing infrastructure for tr...
