HPC and AI – Two Communities Same Future

Gara observes that, "The convergence of AI, data analytics and traditional simulation will result in systems with broader capabilities and configurability as well as cross pollination." Gara sees very aggressive hardware targets being set for this intertwined HPC and AI future, where the hardware will deliver usable performance exceeding one exaflops of double precision performance (and much more for lower and reduced precision arithmetic). He believes a user focus on computation per memory capacity will pay big dividends across architectures and provide systems software and user applications the opportunity to stay on the exponential performance growth curve through exascale and beyond as shown in the performance table below. The vision Gara presented is based on a unification of the "3 Pillars" of HPC: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML); Data Analytics and Big Data; plus High Performance Computing (HPC). What this means is that users of the future will program using models that leverage each other and that interact through memory.