Food for thought: B200 GPUs appear to have lost 73% of their value in the last nine months.[1] At this rate, the Solstice system at Argonne (100K B200) will have no commercial value when it comes online. Maybe that’s what makes it affordable. [1]: julsimon.substack.com/p/two-market... #HPC #maybe

I’m at an NSF/CRA-I workshop today, brainstorming how industry and philanthropy can play a role in developing an AI-ready workforce. Not my day job, but a nice break from the grind; interesting to hear how huge philanthropic orgs interact with government around education.

List of accepted workshops at #ISC26 came out today. Lots of good topics. Now to figure out which one to submit to… isc-hpc.com/submissions/... #HPC

Flash is sold out. Hard drives are sold out. Great time to invest in pencil and paper I guess. wccftech.com/western-digi... #storage

Going through old photos this morning and found this one from an SC17 presentation. Wish I had more context! #HPC

I got to visit the early access system for NERSC’s upcoming Doudna supercomputer. A TALL order of GB200s. Surprisingly noisy. #HPC

@obsidian.md I noticed that multiple example sites (mostly English-language ones) on the Obsidian Publish page (obsidian.md/publish) link to sites that no longer use Obsidian Publish.

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Zooming right in, you can see that I am part of a cluster called 'HPC and Supercomputing professionals'. Zooming out, it's fun to see what communities are clustered near us such as 'Ceramic artists and potters'

Dan Reed published an essay on what #HPC needs to do to remain competitive in the age of #AI yesterday (hpcdan.org/2026/02/06/h...). It was so engaging that I jotted notes as I read and figured I might as well publish them: blog.glennklockwood.com/2026/02/hpc-...

I asked Gemini to create a visual guide that describes multi-agent workflows. Grim.

$1200/lb is the lowest cost to put anything in orbit. A GB200/300 NVL72 rack weighs 3000 pounds. It will cost $3.6M to put 72 GPUs in orbit. It will cost $5B to put 100K GPUs in orbit. That does not include any supporting infrastructure. This is not hard math.

To be fair, this is how all the biggest AI infrastructure providers are bankrolling their growth: Google/Meta fund capex through their ads, Microsoft through Windows licenses. Now xAI has that sweet Starlink revenue. But I don't think Starlink has the margins that software/ads do.

Intel CEO says they'll make GPUs for datacenters. Are they just pretending that they didn't try this five years ago??? www.reuters.com/business/int...

Why would any AI practitioner rely on a storage company to tell them what a KV cache is? And why do storage companies keep insisting that they’ve got all the answers to inferencing at scale?? 😤

I am glad to see the leading minds of traditional scientific computing have moved on to the "acceptance" stage of grief and are advocating that others do the same. But existing in this new upside-down pyramid world will require unwinding a decades-long superiority complex. #HPC

I read things like this and feel like Big KV Cache has pulled the wool over the eyes of the public. Inference is more complex than this article makes it out to be, but that complexity also offers better ways to deal with long contexts than simply buying a massive KV cache.

I've used (paid) versions of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot, and they all kinda felt the same. I kept going back to ChatGPT because it did the best job of doing what I expected, but for various reasons, I am switching over to Claude, and I am surprised by how different the experience is.

I am glad to see states push back against hyperscalers hiding their involvement in massive datacenter projects. MSFT began being more transparent (in cases where they bought, not leased) when I was there, but I always wondered: why do they obfuscate? Is the PR that bad? www.wpr.org/news/4-wisco...

TLDR: every software company who relies on #storage media to generate licensing/support revenue for their sales targets has sage advice for buyers. Unsurprisingly, each company concludes that the thing they're good at is everyone's answer to the SSD shortage.

The timing here is unfortunate. Backing up cold data to flash at a time of unprecedented scarcity doesn’t seem very attractive. #storage

An interesting concept for post-oil economies: establishing #AI factories as sovereign entities akin to embassies so that nations can do their sovereign AI in foreign countries. Seems conceptually similar to how Saudi casts places like KAUST as royal palaces www.computerweekly.com/news/3666374...

My employer created an AI version of me to crank out blogs a couple weeks ago (it's pretty good), and today I learned they also made a solid AI-generated image of me. This is better than anything I could get Nano Banana to do. Unsure if I should be concerned. www.vastdata.com/vast-forward...

I applaud the cost transparency around media, but this goes sideways once they start talking about competitors. You can't compare all-flash to hybrid SSD+HDD on the basis of a hero IOR bandwidth number that never touches 99.99% of the deployed capacity. That's not a real workload. #HPC #storage

I was impressed by Quobyte's architecture and the engineers they let me talk to. But as the article says, they have virtually no marketing. I'm glad to see they're booking deals; you just know they are winning on technical merit, not shininess of their conference swag. #HPC #storage

The pybind11-stubgen project seeks support in #maintaining it! We #pybind11 maintainers would move it to the pybind mainline org, but we need a community to help support the .pyi stub generator <3 Chime in here: github.com/sizmailov/py... #opensource #sustainability #CallForMaintainers

Analyzed exabytes of deployed capacity to figure out how good VAST's data reduction really is and found the median capacity-weighted reduction ratio is 1.87. So a typical EB (physical) stores 1.5 PB of data. Not rocket science, but happy with the analysis www.vastdata.com/resources/wh... #storage

It’s good that Cerebras now has a second customer beyond G42. But isn’t G42 also providing compute to OpenAI? It’s not clear to me whether this is net-new Cerebras demand, or if this compute overlaps with G42’s existing, contracted capacity. #AI

“In constrained markets, architecture matters. But who you trust to stand behind it matters even more.” I disagree. As Satya often said, “there is no franchise value in tech.” Maintaining the status quo is not how innovation happens, especially in the world of #AI.

NERSC just got their first rack of the Doudna early access system from Dell--36 nodes of GB200 NVL4 in a 50OU rack. It's TALL! #HPC Source: www.linkedin.com/posts/nation...

This feels like the same thing when cosmetics companies all started saying they don't test on animals. Sounds good, but the reality is that the market is saturated. Rural municipalities don't need tax breaks or other incentives to attract datacenter buildout anymore.

Finding that there's no intuitive way to understand how key/value vectors can/can't be cached during inference w/o also knowing the basics of autoregressive decode. It's proving to be a great filter for thought leader types who don't actually know what they're talking about. #schadenfreude

The idea is that VAST will qualify its software on whatever hardware is already in someone's datacenter, providing more usable capacity on the same SSDs than whatever software was originally installed on it. Relies on VAST's lower EC overhead (146+4) and fancy global data reduction algorithms.

TACC is proud to congratulate Stacyann Nelson on receiving the 2025 Joseph A. Johnson Award of Excellence. 🎉 Stacyann was an inaugural participant in the Advanced Computing Student Collaborative in 2016. ACSC is presented by the NSF LCCF at TACC. Learn more: bit.ly/3NiNZab

Last year, DOE issued an RFP to build commercial AI datacenters on DOE-owned land. That resulted in announcements including Argonne's 100K-GPU Solstice system and the Genesis Mission. Looks like DOD is following the same pattern; let's see what massive #AI systems arise from this request. #HPC

The CFP for CUG 2026, to be held in Nice, France, is now open! Wish I could go. CUG was one of my favorite annual #HPC conferences. cug.org/cug-2026/

I don't get the chance to talk about Arkouda—a Python library for doing exploratory data analytics interactively on supercomputers—nearly as often as I do Chapel, so this talk at the University of Washington eScience Institute (uwescience.bsky.social) that wrapped up 2025 was a fun one for me.

The problem with saying "just tier to HDD if flash prices are too high" is HDDs are scarce too. HDD manufacturers opted not to invest in expanding fab capacity b/c they'd never recover the capex given declining HDD sales. HDDs are a myopic investment right now. blocksandfiles.com/2026/01/09/s...

Yeah, so this doesn’t feel good. Seems like it’s preying on people’s ignorance. Maybe that’s what a lot of marketing winds up being in any case.

When these companies pledge $XX billion investment, doesn’t that include the XX-1 billion that winds up going to NVIDIA? Unclear how these represent investments in the region

Is there anyone smarter than me who can explain what NVIDIA's new Inference Context Management Storage actually is? I collated everything I could find across all the press releases (glennklockwood.com/garden/ICMS), and it just looks like parallel storage attached over nonblocking frontend Ethernet.

Back at GTC'25, NVIDIA said they would change the NVL## nomenclature to reflect die count, and that Vera Rubin would be NVL144 despite having 72 GPUs. But all the CES-related announcements still refer to NVL72. Did they reverse course on the name change? Or is this a junior version? So confusing.

I somehow learned both a great deal and nothing at all after reading this.

It's 2026, and Google Docs still lacks very basic features that are essential to editing documents in a grown-up work environment. Exhibit A: you cannot hide suggested deletions, making an doc with suggestions completely unreadable. support.google.com/docs/thread/...

Little bit of good news - Congress is quietly pushing for NSF/NASA/DOE budgets that ignore the dramatic cuts proposed by the earlier budget blueprint: www.science.org/content/arti...

I use this read-it-later app that continually resurfaces old things I’ve read and found interesting. Headed into 2026 in a job that is all #AI all the time, I feel like this quote is more meaningful than ever. Everyone is an expert, yet so few actually understand. Source: fs.blog/two-types-of...

Interested in features, design, history or migration to #FluxFramework? We've updated our admin guide for you! flux-framework.readthedocs.io/projects/flu... Have questions? Let us know! We are aiming to better engage with all of you, our community, in 2026 🎉 starting with joining @hpsf.bsky.social!

What dingdong decided that the first week of the new year is a good time to host what has become a major annual technology conference? Also, what dingdong decided that datacenter products should be announced at something originally called the “Consumer Electronics Show?” #grumble #happynewyear

I pitch in and so should you. Plus there are stickers.

Sync training across geos isn’t new, tho doing it b/c of training data governance is. But training across AMD+NVIDIA is new; leave it to DOE to demonstrate such odd methods! Unclear what separates “federated learning” from multicluster training tho. www.sandia.gov/labnews/2025... #AI