In this interview with Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s SVP/GM of High Performance Computing & Mission Critical Solutions Justin Hotard, he discusses the new world to be enabled by exascale supercomputing. Among the topics he delves into: why exascale is applicable to more market sectors (read: the enterprise) than some may think and how the Cray programming environment is facilitating supercomputing’s rapidly evolving heterogeneous super power: HPC combined with AI.
With HPE as either the prime contractor or system architecture for the first three American exascale systems, Hotard is in the cockpit of the exascale movement. Recorded on October 18, this interview came on a unique Exascale Day: the 2021 celebration marks the year that first exascale system – Frontier, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory – will be installed.
One of Hotard’s messages: avoid the mistaken belief that exascale is suitable only for advanced, otherworldly science.
“I really believe the biggest misconception is that exascale can’t be applied practically by almost any enterprise and any customer to actually drive better insights and better outcomes,” Hotard told us. “From an HPE perspective, this is right at the core of our purpose, which is to advance the way people live and work, and I think our customers who are going to deploy exascale are going to enable that opportunity. Now it’s incumbent on the user base and all of us as enterprises and ultimately on researchers and scientists to take adv of the power that we’re bringing to bear and use that to actually change the world. I think that’s what will be exciting as we move ahead.”
