Breaking The Supercomputing Monopoly with Parallel Works | Episode #103

Great Things with Great Tech Podcast

Anthony Spiteri

Tech News, News

5 • 4 Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

High Performance Computing is here for the masses!

Enterprises are bleeding budget in the public cloud, shackled to legacy on-prem systems, and wrestling with HPC workflows so complex they require armies of admins just to keep them running. In this episode, I talk to Matthew Shaxted, Founder & CEO of Parallel Works, about how their ACTIVATE platform is breaking that lock-in, unifying HPC, AI, and hybrid cloud computing into one seamless control plane.

Think democratized supercomputing — where scientists, researchers, engineers, and AI teams get instant, intuitive access to powerful compute resources without becoming system admins. ACTIVATE abstracts away the messy plumbing of schedulers, chipsets, and hybrid environments, enabling workloads to run seamlessly across on-prem, multi-cloud, and GPU clusters. From high-security IL5/CUI/ITAR deployments to real-time cost control and AI-driven physics model replacement, Parallel Works is lowering the complexity barrier and unlocking HPC for the AI era.

Parallel Works was founded in 2014 in Chicago, Illinois

Technology & Topics Mentioned:

HPC, AI Orchestration, Hybrid Cloud, OpenStack, Kubernetes, GPU Clusters, Multi-GPU Nodes, IL5 Security, CUI/ITAR Compliance, Workflow Automation, Cost Governance, Scientific Computing, Predictive Modelling, Scheduler Abstraction, HPCwire Top Cloud Platform, Cloud Repatriation, NOAA, Biomedical Research, Space Weather Modelling, ML-based Physics Replacement

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EPISODE LINKS

Parallel Works Website: https://www.parallelworks.com

Parallel Works on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/parallel-works

Matthew Shaxted on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewshaxted

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Transcript

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0:00.0	High performance computing used to be the domain of supercomputer labs and deep pocketed enterprises,
0:05.5	but not anymore.
0:07.2	Matthew Sachs Ted, co-founder and CEO of Parallel Works is tearing down these walls, putting
0:13.0	massive compute power into the hands of scientists, engineers and the AI community without
0:18.7	the headache of being an IT plumber.
0:21.4	In this episode, we dig into how their platform activate is cutting cloud costs,
0:26.6	escaping VMware Locken and redefining HPC for the AI era.
0:31.5	This is episode 103 of Great Things with Great Tech with Parallel Works.
0:35.9	Music of Great Things with Great Tech with Parallel Works.
0:53.3	Hey, Matthew, welcome to episode 103 of Great Things with Great Tech. It's great to have you here.
0:55.0	And before we get into all things parallel,
0:58.3	let's talk about yourself,
1:00.4	background and civil and structural engineering.
1:02.3	So you're a smart guy for sure.
1:04.4	But tell us, you know, how you got started in this world
1:08.8	and how you came to found this company.
1:11.9	Great. Yeah, Anthony, good to be here. Thanks for having me.
1:16.5	Good question. I started actually, as you kind of said, a practitioner in engineering companies.
1:23.8	I was working for large architecture engineering companies that design big buildings
1:30.4	across the globe, Birch-Khalifa, these type of things, Cameroings, Israel is called, and some
1:36.3	other ones in a similar vein. And my job in these companies was to run computing simulations.
1:43.3	My job was to take different designs or iterations of either a building or a campus or city and run them through really physics codes at the end of the day, which is kind of what high performance computing is all about. You're running simulations on physics to try to replicate some type of
	...

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