Thomas Ebrahimi

Walls lined with imposing obelisks, thrumming with energy. Spinning disks and whirring tapes, writing and rewriting the results of countless calculations. Tiny green lights, signaling and flickering amid a snarling nest of cables. While they’ve come a long way since, these were the hallmarks of the earliest supercomputers, dating back to the 1960s. Today, supercomputers and similar high-performance computing (HPC) systems are vital pieces of information era infrastructure.

In the blue-black morning, long before tourists swallow the shores whole, you’ll find the early rising surfers: the dawn patrol. They’re searching for the ever-elusive “spot,” the perfect mix of wind, swell, and waves. For these grizzled vets, spotting great waves is easy enough, but predicting where they’ll be is the tricky part. In the past, predictions relied on rudimentary data and intuition, but today there’s a wealth of data available to surfers.

The best photographs remove the barriers between viewer and subject. Composition, aperture, shutter speed, lighting, film stock, editing software—it all melts away, leaving nothing behind but a compelling work of art. Trevor Godinho understands that better than most. “My sessions are 98% talking, and maybe I take a couple of photos. I’m technically sound, yes, but it’s not really about the photographs,” Godinho said.