Why Compute and Data Orchestration Can No Longer Be Solved Separately
About the Webinar
Defense agencies, national labs, and research orgs now run workloads across on-prem HPC, hyperscalers, and GPU neo clouds — but the practitioner experience hasn’t kept up. Research shows the cost: 55.4% of government tech orgs spend 26–50% of their app-dev budget on legacy technical debt, 56% cite missing shared security context across on-prem and cloud as the top barrier to a unified posture, and 48% name compliance documentation as developers’ biggest cognitive load.
In this fireside chat, analyst Paul Nashawaty joins David Flynn of Hammerspace and Matthew Shaxted of Parallel Works to unpack managing compute and data across distributed environments. They’ll share lessons from real deployments — including a defense research project that onboarded 100 users to Kubernetes and Slurm in three days and hit 95% cluster utilization in two weeks — and how to unify heterogeneous infrastructure without giving up security or control.
What you’ll learn:
- Why the shift from building AI to running AI has made unified orchestration a priority
- Why compute and data orchestration must be solved together, and what breaks when they aren’t
- How to build security and compliance guardrails into the platform instead of bolting them on
- What makes defense and government environments uniquely demanding, and how those lessons carry over to commercial and regulated industries
- How to turn neo cloud and HPC investments into fully utilized resources, fast
- Where most organizations really sit on the maturity curve, and a practical first step toward a single plane of orchestration
Register to attend
Presenters:
Paul Nashawaty (Moderator)
Practice Lead | Application Development & Modernization
Paul Nashawaty, Practice Leader and Lead Principal Analyst, specializes in application modernization across build, release, and operations. With extensive expertise in digital transformation initiatives spanning front-end and back-end systems, he also has deep knowledge of the underlying infrastructure ecosystem that supports modernization efforts. With over 25 years of experience, Paul has a proven track record of implementing effective go-to-market strategies, including identifying new market channels, growing and cultivating partner ecosystems, and executing strategic plans that deliver positive business outcomes for his clients.
David Flynn
CEO | Hammerspace
David Flynn, co-founder and CEO of Hammerspace, is a recognized innovator in IT and data architecture with a track record of building disruptive computing platforms. Before Hammerspace, he founded and led Fusion-io, pioneering the use of flash storage for enterprise application acceleration before its acquisition by SanDisk in 2014. Earlier in his career, he served as Chief Architect at Linux Networx, where he helped design some of the world’s largest supercomputers and contributed to the creation of the OpenFabrics stack. He holds more than 100 patents spanning storage, networking, and distributed systems.
Matthew Shaxted
CEO | Parallel Works
Matthew Shaxted is the founder and CEO of Parallel Works, which builds and operates ACTIVATE, a control plane for running HPC and AI workloads across on-premises systems, hyperscale clouds, and GPU cloud providers. He co-founded the company in 2015 as a spinout from Argonne National Laboratory with Argonne computer scientist Michael Wilde. Parallel Works now operates an IL5, FedRAMP High accredited platform for Department of Defense high performance computing programs and managed GPU clusters for Federal science agencies and commercial research organizations. Before Parallel Works, Matthew was a computational designer at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where he ran simulation and analysis for large building projects and first applied Argonne’s parallel workflow tools to that work. He studied civil engineering at Northwestern University.