James Cuff

The sign of a mature technology is not just how pervasive it is, but in how invisible and easy to use it is. No one thinks about wall sockets any more – unless you happen to need one to charge your phone and can’t find one – and that is but one example of a slew of technologies that are part of every day life.

By its very nature, HPC isn’t exactly cheap to do. Even moderate sized systems ring in at many hundreds of thousands of dollars. Get serious about HPC, and it quickly becomes a multiple hundred million dollar – and therefore cost prohibitive – affair. Since the very first computing machines were constructed, we have sought out ever more intricate ways to slice them up and share them out, including modern advanced job schedulers and containerized systems.

The relationship between the HPC and AI communities is not unlike sibling rivalry; both come from the same stock computationally speaking but are fundamentally different individuals. They pull from similar elements but to entirely separate ends and are not always sure which one is most prized–mostly because that changes depending on the task being judged.