Is Artificial Intelligence Just Another High Performance Computing Workload?

Artificial intelligence (AI) comes to our minds whenever organizations are seeking new, innovative approaches to enhance and expand their businesses. Typical attributes for such workloads are "use case centric", "data scientist specific", and "innovative". Some examples include autonomous farming, self-driving cars, or interactive voice dialog systems. On the other hand, high performance computing (HPC) is often seen as highly specialized and expansive, serving a wide range of custom-written applications by research engineers, or some of the major industry HPC software stacks like fluid dynamics modelling or crash simulations. For many years now, both disciplines have been treated separately, developing their own ecosystem of specialized hardware, software stacks, and operational models.