Dustin Sell

Dustin Sell is a Principal Architect at Google with over 27 years of IT experience, beginning his career as a software developer. He joined Google in May 2022 in order to help the Department of Energy design, build, and manage complex AI-based solutions. Dustin previously established himself as a leading expert in cloud-based solutions through roles at Amazon Web Services as a Program Manager and Solution Architect, and at Microsoft as a Principal Azure Lead.

 

Presentation Title:

Bridging the Gap: Evolving U.S. Government Supercomputing Strategies in the Hyperscaler Era

Presentation Abstract:

Over the past four decades, government-led supercomputing pioneered innovations from early vector machines through massively parallel processors, the largest SMPs, Beowulf clusters, and onto accelerator-based designs that enabled the largest exa-scale systems ever built. These efforts demonstrated the capability of public institutions to push technological boundaries with their industrial partners.

However, in the last decade, the landscape has shifted dramatically. The commercial hyperscale industry is reshaping high-performance computing and investing at unprecedented scales, vertically integrating designs, and creating cloud-native architectures that dominate AI, machine learning, and large-scale data analytics. This shift has left the government increasingly marginalized and dependent on commercial cloud solutions and ultimately lacking access to some of the most advanced technologies needed to develop and manage similar environments for itself.

This talk examines the evolution of supercomputing as viewed by the speaker when working at NASA alongside the rise of hyperscalers, identifies the structural and strategic differences between these two worlds, and proposes a potential path forward.