Supercomputing is broken...the fix?
Cloud bills are exploding. On-prem #HPC is stuck in the past. And the “experts only” complexity is killing innovation. In this episode, Parallel Works founder Matthew Shaxted reveals how their ACTIVATE platform is smashing the monopoly and putting HPC in your hands.
We unpack how ACTIVATE unifies HPC, #AI, and hybrid cloud into one seamless control plane — from multi-cloud orchestration and GPU cluster management to OpenStack repatriation and real-time cost governance.
This is HPC built for the AI era, without armies of admins.
In this episode:
• Democratizing HPC and ending #supercomputing gatekeeping
• Bridging HPC and AI workloads in a single platform
• Moving from VMware to OpenStack in hybrid HPC
• Scheduler abstraction & orchestration across platforms/chipsets
• Real-time cloud budgets & project-level billing enforcement
• IL5, CUI & ITAR-compliant deployments at scale
Timestamps:
00:00 – The HPC monopoly is breaking
01:18 – How a 30-node cluster launched a company
03:43 – Argonne Lab origins & commercial pivot
07:51 – Supercomputing for scientists, engineers & AI teams
10:21 – Why HPC complexity kills productivity
13:02 – Abstracting schedulers & killing the plumbing work
15:48 – Hybrid cloud HPC without the lock-in
18:36 – Moving from VMware into OpenStack
21:41 – IL5, CUI, ITAR – HPC in high-security environments
27:25 – Jupyter Lab, ML workflows & GPU scaling
31:39 – Cloud repatriation & cross-cloud orchestration
39:46 – Replacing physics models with machine learning
About Parallel Works:
Founded in 2014 in Chicago, Parallel Works grew out of Argonne National Laboratory to build next-gen HPC orchestration for organizations like NOAA, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and Orion Space Solutions.
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☑️ Technologies & Topics Covered
HPC • AI orchestration • Hybrid cloud • OpenStack • Kubernetes • GPU clusters • Multi-GPU nodes • IL5/CUI/ITAR compliance • Workflow automation • Cost governance • Scientific computing • Predictive modelling • Scheduler abstraction • Cloud repatriation • ML-based physics replacement
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EPISODE LINKS
Parallel Works Website: https://parallelworks.com
Parallel Works on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/parallel-works
Matthew Shaxted on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-shaxted-94b5406
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