The First Invisible Battlefield (Radio Intelligence)

High-Performance Computing (HPC) tradecraft consists of constraint-based design. Constraints shape solutions. Similar constraints tend to shape similar solutions. You will observe this thesis throughout the book. It is important.

HPC design is never building a computer and then seeking a product/market fit. Design always addresses a known problem. Design always aims to solve a problem that cannot currently be solved.

These tradecraft facts present a difficulty: since around 1995, we began to hide physical constraints behind abstractions, libraries, and infrastructure. That freed normal commercial and scientific computing to rapidly advance. That shunted HPC tradecraft to the shadows, consisting of tacit knowledge passed from person to person and never written down in the open literature.

But down on the bare metal, HPC tradecraft remains constraint-based design. That is why this book remains important to modern HPC tradecraft, particularly AI with Large Language Models. LLMs are in fact designed as HPC systems.

Do you see the barrier? We do not normally reason about constraint-based design because we hid the constraints. The barrier is that simple. And, therefore, easily surmounted, but only if you allow me to show you the way.

Part I contains no computers. Part I shows the constraints. These particular constraints are why we created high-performance computing in the first place.

HPC tradecraft always begins with the constraints. After finding the true bounding constraint, we then measured our actual capabilities, or named what capability must come into existence. Capabilities bounded our solution space.

The next step is simple: accomplish what has never been done before. At Cray Research and our predecessors, we accomplished what nobody else on the planet could, repeatedly.

How did we do that? We spotted or used patterns and made connections that others missed. Once you see it, it seems obvious and you cannot un-see it. But seeing is difficult until you know where to look.

Part I contains a comfortable narrative voice, interrupted by a jarring didactic “notice this.” That second voice is the now-invisible tradecraft: pattern recognition. Spot patterns, use patterns in new ways, connect the dots.

For those within the tradecraft, Part I will seem self evident. For everyone else, it will seem odd. This is the point: preserve and pass on our tradecraft before the practitioners retire and pass away.

Here is a somewhat humorous hypothesis for you to consider: the primary difference between myself and actual for-real AI experts is that I did it on bare metal in octal for 20+ years.

But if that hypothesis happens to be true, it has an implication: 20+ years of close observation, preceded by 40+ prior years of accumulated industry tradecraft, shows how to use AI in revolutionary ways to solve problems not considered solvable today. At Cray Research, “it cannot be done” was never a barrier. It was the necessary starting point. How we did it begins right here, with Part I.