Perspectives from SC23

Storage and interconnects continue to be important elements of HPC system architecture and are expected to take on even greater significance with increasing demanding and diverse requirements driven by both traditional compute-intensive HPC mod/sim workloads and data-intensive AI workloads. The significance is reflected in recent market data and near-term forecasts, technology adoption and utilization trends, industry announcements in the second half of 2021, and future storage and related technology research direction of Hyperion Research.

With a theme of Reinventing HPC, ISC24 provided a venue for the global HPC community to come together and share knowledge and experiences relative to the latest market developments and technology innovations for the evolution of advanced technical computing. That said, it was clear that this was the year that AI took over the conference and was the key topic of discussion. Issues at the forefront centered on new hardware and software to support the rapidly expanding demand for AI training and inference, the promise and concerns with AI 's abilities to accelerate scientific and engineering workloads, apprehensions with the relative slowdown in performance progress made in the traditional HPC space, the growing presence and influence of cloud-based capabilities and their associated providers, especially in the areas of AI, and the issues, if not angst, of new AI processor availability, performance, and cost. Indeed, the approximately 3,200 attendees reflected a wide array of sentiment towards the convergence and adoption of AI within the worldwide scientific and research community, ranging from examples of compelling use cases and success stories to lessons learned from associated challenges, to "… AI will soon be inflicted upon us … ."