What is the point of HPC Club?
I was asked about a club charter. I don’t know how to write one so here’s a stream of consciousness about why we’re doing this instead.
What’s the point of HPC Club? Why are we (HMx Labs) spending our own money just to get a bunch of HPC engineers, salespeople, geeks, nerds and anyone else with a passing interest in a room and feeding them? Why bother?
Not too long ago I was asked if we have a charter for HPC Club. We didn’t, but it felt like the sort of thing that we should have. So, I tried writing one. I failed hard.
No problem, we have Gen AI now right. I’ll get it to help me and I duly asked ChatGPT. I fed it all the previous posts, gave it lots of nice context. And it gave me back a boring corporate template that no one in their right mind will ever actually read. 80% of it didn’t even apply.
So fellow HPC nerd I did what anyone in their right mind would do. I gave up. I still don’t have a club charter. But instead, if you’ll indulge and bear with me, I’ll share with you why we’re doing this.
First, we need a little history lesson. I didn’t set out to start HPC Club. In fact, my very first post about it on LinkedIn was just a joke. I had attended a couple of vendor organised HPC events not long prior and at both people had remarked that it was a shame that the only time we got together was events such as those. That, plus the fact we all hate being advertised and sold to led to a post proposing a simple meetup to talk HPC that isn’t vendor sponsored and no one is selling anything.
I figured it would be three or four people and I sat around a coffee table. If it even happened at all. That post, even now, is one of the most popular things I’ve ever written on LinkedIn. I distinctly remember having to tell my COO and CFO on our monthly call that I guess we’re going to have to run an HPC Club and find some budget for it now. 😆 I don’t think my CFO, Kamran, was too impressed with me.
The first reason then, is pretty simple. It felt like there was a demand for more of an in-person community in the HPC space. Somewhere for people to meet up and have time and space to share experiences and compare battle scars.
It ran a little deeper though. That first LinkedIn post centred around “No Selling” and that seemed to be a key part of the interest. Somewhere to talk HPC but not have to deal with a thinly disguised sales pitch as a presentation. Being able to speak your mind and ask the questions that are really going through your head without thinking “if I say that there’s no way I’m getting invited back”.
Starting HPC Club was a bit of a happy accident and quite frankly I’m not qualified to be running a community organisation like this! Since then, I’ve had a numerous conversations with people on this topic. People far more knowledgeable than I. Trying to better define what HPC Club is. What the aims are. How to make sure its inclusive. I’ll tell you what, the HPC engineering is easy compared to that stuff.
I’d like to see HPC Club evolve into something that not only fosters conversation and shared experiences but helps drive the HPC industry forward. Gives engineers a space to share ideas (we certainly shared a lot in the first one!) and build upon them.
So much of what HPC is used for is behind closed doors (for good reason). We can’t share so much of what we do. But there are common problems, problems that aren’t part of the secret sauce. Problems that really should have better shared (commercial or open source) solutions. But they don’t. I started out believing HMx Labs would solve that. In hindsight, that was rather naïve. Maybe though, we can solve them together?
With the meteoric rise of AI over the last two years and so much of it needing what is effectively HPC but now gets called AI Infrastructure this problem just felt even more compelling. Couple that with much of HPC being reinvited in the AI space again rather than improving and building upon what already exists…sigh… Am I the only one that gets frustrated having to solve the same problem again and again?
So, I’m sorry. I still don’t have a charter, but if you’d like to help write one feel free to give me a shout. Or just come eat some burgers 🍔 and talk or @£$%# about whatever problem you’re stuck on that day. Your call.
