HPC Forecast: Cloudy and Uncertain

COMPUTING PERVADES ALL aspects of society in ways once imagined by only a few. Within science and engineering, computing has often been called the third paradigm, complementing theory and experiment, with big data and artifcial intelligence (AI) often called the fourth paradigm.14Spanning both data analysis and disciplinary and multidisciplinary modeling, scientifc computing systems have grown ever larger and more complex, and today's exascale scientifc computing systems rival global scientifc facilities in cost and complexity. However, all is not well in the land of scientifc computing. In the initial decades of digital computing, government investments and the insights from designing and deploying supercomputers often shaped the next generation of mainstream and consumer computing products.