Supercomputing 2025
More power! And more cooling! If you wandered around the conference floor at the Supercomputing 25 conference (SC25), recently held in St Louis, you would not be wrong to think that a dominant theme is how to manage the environmentals for the supercomputers that increasingly support AI. There were manifolds, valves, and chillers galore. There is an unease in our community about the unstoppable force that is generative AI and how huge is the related carbon footprint. This theme was picked up in the Sustainable Supercomputing workshop.
If you attended the technical presentations, you may have noticed the recuring theme of Quantum Computing. So QC is either a few years still from practical application or advancing faster than you think. Take your pick. There was also regular mention of Digital Twins in particular, and LLMs more widely.
Visualization was also scattered throughout the workshops. I have a particular interest in that and enjoyed the monitors set up in the concourse with artistic renderings of scientific results.
And of course, there were more esoteric acronyms than you could pour alphabet soup over.
My favorite activity though was chatting with folks I haven’t seen in a while, or ever in person, or are doing something interesting that I wanted to talk about. I should also admit that I am an inveterate swag collector and am comfy in my Matlab socks today. Chris Reidy