Glenn K. Lockwood

Jensen's claim of not being able to give away Hoppers back at GTC25 were incorrect; their value has skyrocketed recently. My guess is that this reflects HBM scarcity. Old GPUs with just as much(ish) memory are just fine for inference's bottlenecks. Source: www.a16z.news/p/charts-of-... #AI

Memory, storage, and GPUs are so expensive in part because hyperscale GPU clusters are only 87% usable. The remaining 13% are kept as powered-on hot spares that sit idle. Could you imagine #HPC doing this? engineering.fb.com/2026/10/19/d...

1. Why does OpenAI keep video surveillance devices behind their conference room displays??? 2. Nice flex, saying these "sophisticated" devices were apparently vibecoded and retroactively analyzed using OpenAI models.

TIL that essentially NONE of the AI cloud providers are exhibiting at #SC26, though many left in 2025. Seems the overlap between the SC #HPC community and hyperscale #AI infra industry is asymptotically approaching zero. Numbers are booth size in sqft each year.

For reference, this is the entirety of the 1,000-year-old Scottish castle in question. I think it's already destroyed.

Spent a few months preparing the tech docs for DataEnclave, VAST's new confidential computing runtime. W/ help from VAST R&D, I learned how attestation etc worked well enough to describe and defend it. Short version: www.vastdata.com/blog/introdu... 15-pager: www.vastdata.com/resources/wh... #AI

Malaysia is allegedly evaluating Huawei's Ascend 910C for their sovereign AI buildout. If Malaysia picks Huawei over NVIDIA, it'd be the first big buy of these chips outside of China. Egypt also name-dropped as a nation being pursued by Huawei. www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/hig...

The IO500 committee just stripped Sugon of its #1 position in the Production list because it appears that their ParaStor F9000 isn't a real product, or it could not be verified as one. Verify here: io500.org/list/isc26/p... My notes on ParaStor: glennklockwood.com/garden/paras... #HPC #notreally

I recently had the opportunity talk to @nicolehemsoth.bsky.social about a few failures in #HPC and #AI infrastructure that taught me some important lessons about designing systems and managing risks. Have a look, have a listen. Hope others find it interesting! www.vastdata.com/blog/failure...

MLPerf Storage results are out and StorageReview pointed out the interesting disconnect between MLPerf leaderboard winners and companies with the largest #storage footprints in the #AI clouds. Suggests this benchmark may not reflect real needs. www.storagereview.com/news/mlperf-...

I recently wrote up an argument about why batch schedulers like Slurm are architecturally insufficient for autonomous scientific laboratories and agentic workflows. Event-driven orchestration is the scalable alternative. www.vastdata.com/blog/autonom... #HPC

Funny, there’s a reason NERSC took its datacenter out of this location. It’s not a great place to put one. www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/form...

I have a theory that every panel about “how AI will affect XYZ” will devolve into nonspecific discussion around “here is where the AI tools I use today fail” and “how do we trust AI?” regardless of what XYZ is.

The lack of shame some people have in copypasting prose straight out of Claude into Powerpoint is shocking. Were these people just recycling their students’ slides before, and now just tap a different source of material?

I recently upgraded to Claude Max and started using Opus 5 for exploratory analysis. If this is what the AI community things approaches "PhD-level capability," I don't know what to say. It's sloppy, inconsistent, and walks back conclusions at the lightest of questioning.

Surprised to see a solution so heavily focused on tiering to HDD for capacity now tier to…more HDD for capacity. Curious what Wasabi does that PanFS doesn’t (and vice versa) to make this pairing complementary.

I gave the invited talk for the Systems track at #PEARC26. If you were not able to attend, you're in luck! 🍀 I walked back to my room and recorded a second time so all would have access in the present and into the future. youtu.be/qiKfTgYoKkE?...

I’m glad someone liked it! Hard needle to thread in crafting a technical plenary that is interesting, accessible, and thematic to “resilient roots.” Also relieved that my SDSC colleagues didn’t mind me spilling the tea on one of Gordon’s failures. #HPC #alittleAI

Another great addition to Utah’s amazing pro-human AI innovation ecosystem built on public-private partnerships.

Surprising to see a software company go into the hardware business, selling an unusual 2U70 dual-controller flash server. It's hard to source flash these days, so there are strong market incentives to ship software on whatever hardware your customers can find.

We are now in the age of AI-generated conferences. Today’s keynote by Gropp prominently features distinctly Claude-generated plots; yesterday had an entire presentation delivered by an AI voiceover of slides. And slides are full of Claude design tells.

First time I’ve seen someone with a PhD actually predict that data centers in space will be a real thing. Granted, it’s a CS PhD, not a physical sciences one. #HPC #notreallythough

With Infinia gaining support for files, is there a reason for anyone to buy EXAScaler anymore? Why would someone choose Lustre over Infinia if Infinia seems to support everything that Lustre does but with enterprisey glitter? Curious to see how DDN positions these two lines. #HPC

Block off your calendar for Wednesday at 10am! I'll be there.

=> Architecting for Frontier AI Labs: How Anthropic scales Claude on TPUs, Google & Anthropic, Google Cloud Next 2026, Apr 22 youtube.com/watch?v=LEPY... content-cdn.sessionboard.com/content/3e8V... Automated fault recovery & intelli scheduling to maintain continuous uptime across massive pod-scale

I wrote up some notes after my week at #ISC26: blog.glennklockwood.com/2026/07/isc2... Interested to hear others' perspectives on highlights and things I may have missed. #HPC

I somehow missed that China has developed its own implementation of InfiniBand, called ScaleFabric 400, to compete/supplant NVIDIA/Mellanox IB. Oddly enough, its manufacturer (Sugon) is not a member of IBTA though. en.eeworld.com.cn/mp/EEWorld/a... #HPC

Interesting that C-DAC, whose indigenous Indian interconnect Trinetra is based around libfabric, opted to implement verbs support to make Lustre work instead of adopting Cray’s kfabric LND. #ISC26

1. General LLMs beat coding-specific models at writing Fortran, likely bc code models are overfitted to Python 2. This conf begins the age of Claude-generated pptx. Clear tells 3. My phone doesn’t like these #ISC26 projectors

Now happening at #ISC26 #HPC

This is the worst Jensen keynote ever

Dumb stuff that results in weird requirements in #HPC RFPs. Ultra dense GPU racks with all liquid requires unusual datacenter construction considerations. #ISC26

Ogawa-san is how I first came to know about China’s new exascale system a while ago, and I assembled a quick spec page a few weeks back (glennklockwood.com/garden/syste...). Notably has a BIG liquid cooled storage system (67 racks, 10 TB/s).

??? I was the lowest-level principal software engineer at microsoft and my parting annual liquid total comp started with a 4 when I quit. It was enough to support two of us on a single income in the Bay Area. Priced out of Redmond??? Sorry, but not very sympathetic.