Why Community Matters as Much as Technology
Edinburgh. Durham. Hamburg.
Over the past month, the Alces Flight team has been on the road and in the air, attending community events in the UK and EU focused on High-Performance Computing. Each event had its own flavour, but all shared the same core mission: bringing people together to spark new ideas and opportunities.
It’s easy to get swept up in the technical details. Our field is known for its passionate debates on benchmarking, memory hierarchies, storage strategies—and now, the emerging frontiers of AI and quantum computing. But at the end of the day, it’s not the technology that’ll say good night. It’s the people you stood beside, the ones you debated with, collaborated with, and learned from.
Like machines, people are complex. But unlike machines, we can imagine. We bridge the gap between ideas and reality. Across generations, sectors, and geographies, we find common ground in the shared pursuit of progress.
This June, we had the privilege of presenting to students, connecting with top-tier engineers, and engaging with attendees from commercial, governmental, and academic institutions across the globe, all working towards a common goal: building more efficient and sustainable supercomputing solutions.
In this four-part series, we’ll be exploring the balance our community strives to maintain—the fulcrum—between human insight and technological innovation. Between needs and ambitions. Between hard skills and soft ones. It’s this balance that propels our field forward, especially as we welcome new voices, fresh perspectives, and emerging technologies.
And speaking of community—this autumn, we’re thrilled to bring back Sustainable Reality for its third year. This time, we’re headed to London on October 7th, with the theme: Catalysts for Change. We’ll be spotlighting breakthroughs in HPC, AI, and energy consumption, and the people and ideas driving them. The event is free, but space is limited… So mark your calendars.
It’s a privilege to be part of this growing community, to attend incredible events, and to give back in return. Stay tuned for more in our event recap series—and we hope to see you in London this October.