HPCwire Interviews Diane Bryant On Eve of HPC Matters Plenary

HPC Matters Plenary Speaker Diane Bryant

Thomas Ayres and Tiffany Trader for HPCwire

Back in September, the news broke that Intel’s Senior Vice President Diane Bryant was named the HPC Matters plenary speaker for the SC15 conference taking place in Austin, Texas.

The theme for this year’s HPC Matters program is “Fueling the Transformation” and Bryant, along with multiple industry luminaries, will be taking the stage before the SC15 opening gala on November 16 to discuss the myriad of ways that HPC is transforming lives.

Bryant leads Intel’s datacenter business unit, one of the chipmaker’s strongest segments. This year, FORTUNE magazine named Bryant to its Most Powerful Women in Business list. Criteria for selection to this prominent listing includes the importance of the woman’s business in the global economy, health and direction of the business, career arc, and cultural influence.

This dovetails well with Bryant’s role as speaker for this year’s HPC Matters plenary. The HPC Matters program, launched by the SC program committee two years ago, rests on four pillars: influencing daily lives, science and engineering, economic impact, and education.

Bryant speaks frequently on all of these issues and has been especially prominent in promoting the benefits of diversity in the workplace. For the upcoming HPC Matters plenary, Bryant will draw on her experience running Intel’s datacenter group, which includes the HPC business segment and products ranging from high-end coprocessors for supercomputers, to big data analytics solutions, to high-density systems for the cloud. In the exclusive interview to follow, she shares her thoughts on where she sees HPC heading in the upcoming years, why it’s an important topic in our world, and how her career at Intel has shaped her views on HPC. Following is the interview:

HPCwire: What key points are you going to touch on in your presentation?
Diane Bryant: We are in the midst of an unprecedented change in High Performance Computing. Everything about how HPC systems are used and built is going to change over the next decade. HPC must support more complex models with more and more data, and enable new usages as industries realize the benefits of very powerful real-time analytics.  To meet these needs, HPC must achieve exascale performance and beyond, while expanding access to more users.  This will require a transformation of not only the systems, but the entire solution stack.

How does HPC matter to you?
Diane Bryant: As an engineer, what excites me is seeing how information technology is used to solve real world problems.  HPC is a transformational capability helping solve society’s most pressing challenges.  Look at the improvements in life science and precision medicine that have really been enabled by researchers and physicians gaining access to more powerful supercomputers.  Seeing industry after industry take these tools with Intel technology as their foundation and use them to improve lives and drive economic growth is tremendously gratifying and exciting to all of us who work to push IT forward.

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