- April 26, 2023, 4:00 pm US/Central
- Rick Stevens, Argonne
- Chris Stoughton
In this talk I will attempt to outline where I think computational science is going over the next twenty years and how the emergence of new platforms that complement and challenge traditional HPC may impact the types of problems the community works on, the platforms that centers design and deploy and the research that gets funded. As we launch into the post-exascale epoch we face a computing landscape that is quite different from the one that motivated the international push for exascale HPC systems. We see the emergence of powerful AI methods, from generative language models that are transforming research, teaching (and exams!), to AI-HPC hybrid (or surrogate) models that promise orders of magnitude performance gains for some problems and the promise of a potentially transformative future enabled by quantum computers and quantum algorithms. I will focus on trying to weave together how these emerging capabilities will change the landscape of problems researchers pursue and when and how the large-scale scientific computing community is likely to evolve as it both absorbs new approaches and sorts through what is real and works and what is not yet ready for doing science. Future platforms need to be designed so that they are well suited for the problems that the community wants to solve in the near term but also need to help lead the community to new approaches that offer sustained impact across many disciplines.