Dr. Bill Nitzberg, CTO, PBS Works at Altair, provides his perspective on the Future of HPC. HPC improves people’s lives – it’s the engine that accelerates solving complex science and engineering problems – making products more sustainable, making cars safer, making dangerous weather more predictable, even making medicines more effective. High Performance Computing has always been about leveraging lots of computing power to solve big problems...quickly. “Big” and “fast” define HPC, with the latest milestone, Exascale computers, capable of a billion billion calculations per second, expected to arrive next year. What is changing is what’s inside these engines of computing, how HPC is being consumed, and who is using HPC. HPC is becoming more and more heterogenous, with the addition of GPUs, vector engines, and high-performance versions of the Arm processors that run on today’s mobile phones, and, eventually, quantum processors. HPC is moving from “owning big, expensive iron” to a combination of buying and renting (via the Cloud). And, HPC is expanding beyond an “engineering experts only” discipline to a more mass-market audience, and also to a broader set of disciplines, especially those leveraging AI, machine learning, and data analytics.
The recording is about 11 minutes long, and was presented at the 2020 Global Altair Technology conference.