Andy Jones looks back at the decade before 2019

In the spirit of end-of-year prognostications, insideHPC’s pal Andy Jones has a feature at HPCwire looking back at the decade 2009-2019

As we turn the decade into the 2020s, we take a nostalgic look back at the last ten years of supercomputing. It’s amazing to think how much has changed in that time. Many of our older readers will recall how things were before the official Planetary Supercomputing Facilities at Shanghai, Oak Ridge and Saclay were established. Strange as it may seem now, each country — in fact, each university or company — had its own supercomputer!

Andy paints a picture of large scale computing in the very very large — planetary scale, in fact — and (rather hopefully) describes the rise of the recognition of software’s primacy

And then the critical step — businesses and researchers finally understood that their competitive asset was the capabilities of their modelling software and user expertise — not the hardware itself. Successful businesses rushed to establish a lead over their competitors by investing in their modelling capability — especially robustness (getting trustable predictions/analysis), scalability (being able to process much larger datasets than before) and performance (driving down time to solutions).

Andy’s piece is a fun read. I hope his Christmas wish comes true.