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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 11h

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

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 13/08/2026

This is the diagram I’m most proud of. Stacking ~700 different LLM training jobs observed from the VAST fleet on a common timescale to figure out whether there is a “feeding the GPU” problem anywhere close to the write intensity of periodic checkpoints. There is not. Only read burst is at job start.

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 29/07/2026

Nobody came 😩 Just kidding. Was mic check. Here’s the actual crowd.

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 15/07/2026

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.

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 14/07/2026

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

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 26/06/2026

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

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 26/06/2026

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

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 25/06/2026

He has a chance to mention the Ozaki scheme but instead cites a 20-year-old algorithm that is the problematic core of HPL-MxP.

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 25/06/2026

This is the worst Jensen keynote ever

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 25/06/2026

I wonder if ground has been broken on this datacenter yet. Because it takes two years to build such a facility without the federal land red tape part. How commercially meaningful will Blackwells be in two years?

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 25/06/2026

Funny that “software adapt to whatever hardware shows up” is exactly how everyone’s favorite AI models are developed. Model architecture iterates much faster than chip design. This only works if your problems stand still.

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 25/06/2026

How many wrong statements can you fit into a single sentence? Holy cow.

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 25/06/2026

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

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 24/06/2026

It’s comforting to know that, at the macro scale, Lustre is pretty consistent at its strengths and weaknesses. I don’t think these are different from when I last used Lustre in 2022. From @adrianjhpc.bsky.social at the Lustre BOF in #ISC26

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 24/06/2026

Supercomputer for agents is a bold bet by SJTU and a great thought exercise (if not more). There’s a lot of crap that we drag along in the #HPC stack simply because it makes humans comfortable.

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 23/06/2026

The jump of LineShine over El Cap in efficiency is staggering. Suggests the benefit of balance and design for FP64-first over wedging FP64 into a socket whose chiplets were AI-first. LineShine’s poor HPL-MxP underscores. #ISC26 #HPC

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 23/06/2026

“Heterogeneity is here to stay.” Also, “the new #1 system is homogeneous all-CPU.” #ISC26 #HPC

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 23/06/2026

20 minutes into the opening keynote at #ISC26 and Martin Schulz has managed to say AI only once; it’s changing everything, but let’s talk about quantum and #HPC instead. Impressive.

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 03/06/2026

Virtual DAOS User Group slides just dropped (daos.io/event/virtua...). Interesting content, and glad DAOS is still trucking along. Surprises: ALCF has only 37% servers in production; LinkedIn trying to run DAOS on 20% of cores on HGX servers; long feature roadmap. #HPC #storage

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 01/06/2026

I got to work with VAST's architects on integrating NVIDIA Vera BlueField-4 STX in-silicon security features with VAST's agent policy enforcement engine. Agent interactions can be inspected and governed at line rate, and policies can adapt in real time. Very slick. www.vastdata.com/blog/vast-ze...

Architecture diagram illustrating how VAST PolicyEngine can offload policy enforcement to NVIDIA Vera BlueField-4 STX for real-time, line-rate inspection and enforcement. Also shows how PolicyEngine policies can be updated by CrowdStrike Falcon based on data streamed from NVIDIA DOCA Argus (memory analysis) and VAST's own traces and observability data.

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 30/05/2026

the text labels were mine; I had to obfuscate what I was actually trying to do (invade Europe). but the chorems are fascinating! looks like something else that Claude recommended I do to reduce the size of my svg of Europe.

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 29/05/2026

Claude offered to create an SVG of Europe for me (I did not ask), and this is what came out. We have a long ways to go before the Terminators take over.

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 24/05/2026

Found my new LinkedIn profile while visiting my mom this weekend

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 20/05/2026

A career in collaborative grant writing, writing papers, and peer review has prepared me for spending days (weeks?) of scrubbing deep technical marketing copy.

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 20/05/2026

I just got confirmation that my login credentials on NERSC supercomputers were revoked at some point and no longer work. With my Microsoft free Azure gravy train also ending late last year, I am officially without a supercomputer. First time in my career 😢

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 18/05/2026

The shiny silver rack door for NERSC's upcoming Doudna is quite different from the Cray racks that NERSC historically had. Wonder how the rack graphics will work. End-of-row, like OLCF Summit's? (also shown: an 11-node VAST cluster in the second rack) #HPC Source: www.linkedin.com/posts/michae...

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 13/04/2026

No wonder there is such vast unmet demand for tokens. Filling out one government form has burned up two-thirds of my $20/mo token budget in fifteen minutes.

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 20/03/2026

My favorite unofficial swag was a little bottle of Yamazaki 12 from one of my Japanese colleagues. I have a big bottle of Yamazaki 12 in my cupboard (and a regular Yamazaki which I turned into a desk lamp, as shown).

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 20/03/2026

Nobody from VAST is on Bluesky, so I'll share with you all that my favorite official swag from #GTC26 this year was this awesome shirt by my friends at Quobyte. I'm going to start wearing this on Zoom calls.

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 18/03/2026

These new NVIDIA STX storage node implementations from Quanta and Supermicro appear identical even down to the LED and USB-C placement. I wonder if the drive carriers are differentiated. #GTC26

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 18/03/2026

DDN also had a bipedal robot, but as far as I could tell, it didn’t do anything except be a physical frontend to a voice assistant. Its legs don’t actually work. Clearly not all AI robots are at the same level.

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 18/03/2026

Weird stuff you see at #GTC26: cops about to rough up a joke-cracking bipedal robot that runs around like a toddler (cops were actually just as curious as anyone else about how real this thing is, and the robot had its human minder always within 20 feet)

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 18/03/2026

Look at all the unique differentiation that NVIDIA enables in their ecosystem. #GTC26

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 18/03/2026

NVIDIA’s Kyber rack combines NVLink switch ASICs into what used to be the cable backplane. It’s physically huge—height of the whole rack. I wonder what the FRU is on this monstrosity. #GTC26

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 25/02/2026

Because VAST is not a hardware company, none of our official collateral really talks about hardware platforms or the cool engineering that goes into them. But I am a sucker for this stuff. Here’s a Bluefield-3 tray that plumbs the Arm SoC through a PCIe switch to single-ported E1.L NVMes

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 25/02/2026

I ran into my pal CT Sun who had a Bluefield-3 self-hosted flash node on display. Same one used for VAST’s Ceres DBox. But there were no SSDs in the display model; they were too valuable to waste on just looking pretty.

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 24/02/2026

I’m in Salt Lake City this week for VAST’s inaugural user conference. Location isn’t as nice as other such conferences (like CUG), but the money saved on location definitely shows in the dress-up around the venue.

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 15/02/2026

Yeah, CPUs with HBM seem to have a long history of being one-hit wonders now. Cavium, Intel, and AMD have all tried it. ThunderX was the first though! I think by this point we have learned that it will never stick.

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 15/02/2026

Was a good year. The Cray XC50 with ThunderX was the hot new thing. Little did we know that Nvidia, not Cavium, would wind up putting Arm CPUs in every datacenter. #HPC #SC17

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 15/02/2026

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

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 12/02/2026

There’s lots of 1OU fans in the rack; it’s not 100% liquid. Also a MASSIVE water cooler rear door heat exchanger to ensure it is room neutral.

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 12/02/2026

Also got to see the VAST EBox cluster that was installed with the Doudna early access system. Just eleven plain ol’ Dell nodes on the outside, but the magic is on the inside. #HPC

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 12/02/2026

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

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.com · 05/02/2026

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

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