Austin Forum | Supercomputing, Cloud Computing, and AI Factories

https://www.austinforum.org/events/december-2-2025

Event Summary

Supercomputers—systems designed to achieve extremely high computational performance—have been designed and used to solve the most challenging problems for six decades, from the earliest Cray supercomputer to today’s “El Capitan” (world’s current top-ranked supercomputer) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Cloud computing has increased the scale of computing and storage accessible around the globe to support massive throughput of applications and workloads for consumer and enterprise needs, and increasingly adopting high performance computing technologies into cloud datacenters to address research and industry needs for large-scale simulation, massive data analytics, and Ai model training. AI factories are bringing these approaches even together even more tightly, enabling the development of foundational and frontier AI models used by hundreds of millions of people globally.

Join us to learn about the differences, commonalities, and convergence of the technologies and approaches, the current and future applications and challenges, and other considerations of ultrafast computing at massive scale. Our expert panel will discuss the recent history, current state and trends, and expected evolution of massive computing scale and performance, how it will influence science and society, and what we need to do to achieve the awesome benefits while addressing the challenges of huge infrastructure requirements and the potential negative uses of the output of these systems. This is sure to be an informative, inspiring, and thought-provoking presentation and conversation with computing technology leaders. It will be of value to anyone whose careers and companies depends—directly or indirectly—on the availability, scale, and performance of massive computing, and of interest to anyone who cares about how the applications we use every day—including AI—are enabled.