High performance computing (HPC) has made significant strides over the last half century, transitioning from the megascale era of the 1970s to the current exascale era. Over these decades, this technology has supported an array of increasingly computationally intensive applications in science, engineering, and business.

Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing at an even faster pace than HPC, but it depends on the massive computational power and data throughput capabilities of high performance hardware to build and run its applications.

At the same time, quantum computing is emerging as a new and groundbreaking paradigm. While it differs from classical computing, many quantum applications are closely aligned with existing HPC workloads that could be significantly accelerated under this new paradigm. Likewise, combining quantum computing with AI has the potential to greatly speed up AI model training and data analysis.

The synergy that could result from merging HPC, AI, and quantum computing is an exciting prospect. And given the insatiable demand for performance to accelerate scientific discoveries and commercial applications, integrating these technologies is not just an academic goal, but an economic imperative.

With that in mind, we forward to offering our 40th-anniversary forum to the community of research and commercial users, system developers, and service providers to begin this journey of connecting the dots.