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Glenn K. Lockwood

@glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy

66 followers 0 following 353 posts

I am a supercomputing enthusiast, but I usually don't know what I'm talking about. I post about large-scale infrastructure for #HPC and #AI. 🌉 bridged from mast.hpc.social/@glennklockwood on the fediverse by fed.brid.gy

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/10/2026

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. There's also a ton of churn in the […] [Original post on mast.hpc.social]

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

I spent the last few months preparing the technical docs for DataEnclave, VAST's new confidential computing runtime. I had to learn tons about how attestation, TEEs, and related technologies REALLY work. VAST's R&D wizards made it possible for me to learn it to the point where I could describe […]

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

I wrote this doc to explain KV caches and KV cache offloading many months ago. I found salespeople couldn't confidently tell when their customers might have a problem, because all the content online is straight marketing or way too in the weeds […]

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 17/09/2026

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 […]

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/09/2026

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/production My notes on ParaStor […]

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/09/2026

I recently had the opportunity talk to my pal Nicole about a topic I presented at PEARC'26 this year: failure. We chatted about a few failures in #HPC and #AI infrastructure that I was a part of but were hidden behind headlines of success across my time at SDSC, NERSC, and Microsoft. I spoke of […]

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/09/2026

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 […]

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/08/2026

I recently wrote up an argument about why batch schedulers like Slurm are architecturally insufficient for the needs of autonomous scientific laboratories and agent-driven experiments. Its serial scheduling algo is great for maximizing utilization, but it collapses when hundreds or thousands of […]

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

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/…

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

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.

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

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?

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/08/2026

I am attending the ModSim conference for the first time next week, and I'm presenting analysis and design modeling of I/O performance requirements for frontier model training based on a year's worth of production data across the VAST hyperscale fleet (>900 training jobs, >140K GPU-years of compute)

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2026

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.

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 01/08/2026

RE: mstdn.ca/@dbattistella/117004005387… Where is the evidence that rare books were destroyed? This is a fun trope to hate on, but it doesn’t make sense; these books were purchased in bulk (source […]

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026

I am ready! Almost #PEARC26

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2026

If you hate reading HPC marketing material, imagine having to write it

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 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.

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 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

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/07/2026

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

blog.glennklockwood.com

Last month was the 2026 ISC High Performance Conference in the beautiful (and sweltering) Hamburg, Germany. It was my fifth time att...

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/07/2026

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/a42265… #HPC

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 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

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 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

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 25/06/2026

I can’t wait to hear what Jack Dongarra thinks about the future of #HPC at #ISC26’s closing keynote.

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 24/06/2026

lol James Lin at #ISC26 #HPC

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/06/2026

Hot #ISC26 tip: VAST is running free taxi service from the taxi stand in front of CCH to the SIDE hotel downtown and back. If you don’t feel like getting sweaty before/after an offsite meeting, I think anyone can hop in. Look for the city cabs with the VAST logo on the side.

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 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

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/06/2026

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

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 23/06/2026

China’s back at the top of Top500. I guess the threat of not being allowed to buy US-designed chips is no longer a compelling reason not to submit top systems. Happy 250th, USA. #HPC #ISC26

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 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.

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/06/2026

The sense of entitlement from the highly paid employees at these big tech companies is flooring. If these companies treat you so badly, why don’t you just work at a better company? It’s what I did. There’s no free lunch in life […]

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 11/06/2026

"DDN is seeking to attract investors that can help the company better reflect the value it creates" One of the weirder statements I've seen recently. Implies that current investors do not value their investment as highly as the investment values itself. Maybe par for the course for #AI […]

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 10/06/2026

Was reminded that PEARC26 regular registration closes this Friday! It's a great, practitioner-focused #HPC, #RCD, and #RSE conference, and I will be there this year. pearc.acm.org/pearc26/registration

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/06/2026

RE: mast.hpc.social/@AlanSill/116718896… "FP8 is all you need" vs "A naive Ozaki II implementation with r=10 residue planes per warp can spill, raising β above 1 and erasing the projected speedup." Which one wins? #HPC

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/06/2026

I am convinced there is a growing lexicon of AI terms that are used exclusively by people who don't understand AI to talk to other people who don't understand AI. For example, has any real AI practitioner ever referred to "keeping GPUs fed?" #AI

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/06/2026

Microsoft AI's report on MAI-1 training is full of interesting infrastructure anecdotes, especially around storage: - Async checkpoint from DRAM to object (no node-local SSD used) - Restart is read once from object, then broadcast over InfiniBand to avoid incast - Anyscale Ray for fast restart […]

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 03/06/2026

Virtual DAOS User Group slides just dropped (daos.io/event/virtual-dug26). 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

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 02/06/2026

Fugaku-NEXT design report dropped. Amazing details of a bold vision in here. Job scheduling by both k8/s (for #AI) and Slurm/PBS/Flux (for #HPC), >100 TB/s two-tier file system. VAST, WEKA, and Scality(!) named as interesting technologies for all-flash tier […]

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 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 based […] [Original post on mast.hpc.social]

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.

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 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.

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/05/2026

I am living in the future, and the future is being a human who finds all the problems in AI-generated technical slop. Even as models/agents get better, the humans using them aren't. So they still produce nonsense, albeit shinier nonsense, and I remain employed. #AI

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 22/05/2026

Today's revelation: there is a ton of overlap between writing aspirational grant proposals and writing marketing copy for aspirational technology partnerships. Academics who look down their noses at marketing and sales are lying to themselves about what skills they are using to get funding.

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 21/05/2026

New PNAS paper finds that GPT-4.5 was more human than humans when prompted correctly, passing the Turing test. Alternate headline: Turing test is proven to be not very useful. Pop news: www.the-independent.com/tech/ai-tur… PNAS paper […]

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 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

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 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 credit gravy train also ending last year, I am officially without a supercomputer. First time in my career 😢

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 19/05/2026

The virtual DAOS User Group meeting is this Thursday (May 21) starting at 7am Pacific. Check out the speaker lineup and agenda here: daos.io/event/virtual-dug26 #storage #AI #notsosureaboutHPC

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 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 […] [Original post on mast.hpc.social]

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 14/05/2026

Great example of codesign for storage. 40x246 TB SSDs can only be reliable with storage software that does content-aware erasure codes and supports fail-in-place. You’d never run Lustre (or any other system that assumes reliable block) using this. Time to recover from drive failure would be […]

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 13/05/2026

There is no bubble, there is no bubble... Image from the author of this article over on bsky. www.cnbc.com/2026/05/13/cerebras-pr…

Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 09/05/2026

At the Salishan HPC conference last week, I gave a talk called "AI doesn't need massive supercomputers after all!" A couple people asked me for the slides (as crappy as they were), so here they are in hastily written blog format […]

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Glenn K. Lockwood @glennklockwood.mast.hpc.social.ap.brid.gy · 08/05/2026

Hey remember HMC and MCDRAM from Intel? I sure do. www.hpcwire.com/2026/05/04/new-deta…