Title
Senior Director

Bio

Dr. Stephen Wheat is the Senior Director for the HPC Worldwide Business Operations directorate within Intel’s HPC Business Unit. He is responsible for driving the development of Intel’s HPC strategy and the pursuit of that strategy through platform architecture, eco-system development and collaborations. While in this role, Dr. Wheat has influenced the deployment of several Top10 systems and many more Top500 HPC systems. Dr. Wheat has a wide breadth of experience that gives him a unique perspective in understanding large scale HPC deployments. He was the Advanced Development manager for the Storage Components Division, the manager of the RAID Products Development group, the manager of the Workstation Products Group software and validation groups, and manager of the Supercomputing Systems Division (SSD) operating systems software group. At SSD, he was a Product Line Architect and was the systems software architect for the ASCI Red system. Before joining Intel in 1995, Dr. Wheat worked at Sandia National Laboratories, performing leading research in distributed systems software, where he created and led the SUNMOS and PUMA/Cougar programs. Dr. Wheat is a 1994 Gordon Bell prize winner and has been awarded Intel's prestigious Achievement Award. He has a patent in Dynamic Load Balancing in HPC systems. Dr. Wheat holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and has several publications on the subjects of load balancing, inter-process communication, and parallel I/O in large-scale HPC systems. Outside of Intel, he is a commercial multi-engine pilot and a FAA certified multi-engine, instrument flight instructor.
HPC TAM Expansion: The pie as we know it, and the pie of tomorrow

The High Performance Computing (HPC) market segment has been trending towards a $10B/yr scale with a historical CAGR greater than Enterprise in general.  Nevertheless, it continues to be a space perceived by many/most as a niche.  With analyst data now supporting HPC as having 20% (or more) share of enterprise, more strategic attention is being given to the segment.  Ironically, it is a segment showing signs of post maturity:  in particular, the vibrancy of the ecosystem is on a downward trend, margins are thin for the OEMs, and procurement complexities are described as onerous.  Yet new data derived over the past several years is showing that there is a substantial unserved/underserved component to the market.  This is the space referred to as the "Missing Middle"; it is those that would use HPC if they could.  It is possible that a much necessary revitalization of the HPC segment is at hand.

 

We will first present the definition of and data around the Missing Middle, covering the scope, the barriers, and the "so what".  Then we will describe the activities of the Alliance for High Performance Digital Manufacturing, a multi-party gathering of entities having come together with the expressed intention to resolve the Missing Middle.  Within these discussions, we will also touch on what is happening around the world with respect to national competitiveness, and computational methods for economic growth.  We will finish the talk with a brief review of what we call the Digital Supply Chain as a means to resolving the Missing Middle.