Nvidia's Ian Buck on the importance of FP64 to power research, in a world that's hot for inferencing

Interview Scientific computing is about to undergo a period of rapid change as workloads inject AI.

So says Ian Buck, Nvidia's VP and General Manager of Hyperscale and HPC, who told The Register he expects that within a year or two, the application of AI will be pervasive throughout high performance computing and scientific workloads.

"Today we're in the phase where we have luminary workloads. We have amazing examples of where AI is going to make scientific discovery so much faster and more productive," he said.

He therefore predicts that scientific computer designs will change to run those workloads, and cited the gradually-then-suddenly appearance of GPU-powered machines on the Top500 list of earth’s mightiest supercomputers as an example of the change he expects.

"Just like accelerated computing took maybe five years to hit a curve where the Top500 started to flip over and today it's like ...