Glenn Lockwood Departs from Microsoft

Glenn K. Lockwood has left Microsoft after spending the last three years at the company, initially as the HPC/AI workload lead in Azure Storage's product group, before working more broadly on the design of Microsoft's largest AI supercomputers.

"Everything I did at Microsoft touched supercomputers in one way or another, and my day job was exclusively supporting Microsoft's largest AI training supercomputers," Lockwood said in a blog post explaining his departure.

He explained that the increasing focus on lucrative AI contracts over HPC ones was a "hurdle that I was never able to overcome."

Lockwood added: "HPC-AI is ultimately a zero-sum game, and every hour spent working with an HPC customer is usually an hour that isn't being spent working with a much more profitable AI customer. I constantly ran into this problem working in hyperscale AI; my full-time job was to deal with AI customers, but I enjoyed interacting with HPC customers too. As a result, I had to do a lot of the HPC-specific work (preparing conference presentations, for example) on nights, weekends, and vacations.