Welcome to the Shared Everything podcast with new episodes airing every Friday.
Below are our episodes to date. Be sure to subscribe using your favorite podcast provider or listen using the player.
Episode 1
What Comes After Compute? An OS for AI
For the inaugural episode of Shared Everything, Nicole Hemsoth Prickett sits down with Renen Hallak, CEO and founder of VAST Data, to discuss what comes after compute. If we erased all technical debt and legacy architecture and started building AI infrastructure from scratch in 2025, what would it look like? Hallak isn’t talking about cloud-native apps or hypervisors—he’s talking about power plants, 500kW racks, and a habitat for autonomous agents that don’t just execute tasks but persist, learn, and communicate over time.
Episode 2
AI is Challenging the Old Efficiency Rules
In this episode, IT energy efficiency expert Jonathan Koomey joins to unpack AI’s growing power demands, the limits of infrastructure, and the future of computing efficiency. From the origins of Koomey’s Law to today’s data center crunch, we explore whether technology can keep doing more with less—or if AI is rewriting the rules.
Episode 3
The Vector Crisis Is Coming: Jeff Denworth on AI’s New Metadata Madness
In this episode Jeff Denworth, co-founder at VAST Data, talks to Nicole about why the Hadoop-driven Big Data hype feels ancient and why metadata has quietly become AI’s new frontier. From how vectors and embeddings have made metadata complex and mission-critical, to infrastructure challenges at exabyte scale, we unpack the implications of retrieval-augmented generative AI (RAG). It’s a sharp, insightful conversation about building infrastructure for an increasingly agent-driven future—and who (or what) might soon control the enterprise workforce.
Episode 4
Pipelines, Power, and Parallel Worlds: Inside the Digital Twin Stack
Experts Wes Brewer (Oak Ridge National Lab) and Adrian Jackson (EPCC) discuss the evolving landscape of digital twins, particularly in the context of supercomputing and AI. They explore the distinctions between digital twins and traditional simulations, the real-world applications of digital twins, and the infrastructure challenges faced in their implementation. The discussion also delves into the potential of distributed digital twins and the role of AI in enhancing digital twin workflows, concluding with insights on future workloads and applications.
Episode 5
TACC's Dan Stanzione on AI, Power, and the Future of Supercomputing
Nicole, TACC Executive Director Dan Stanzione, and VAST Data's Don Schulte discuss the evolution of the Texas Advanced Computing Center and its role in high-performance computing (HPC). Dan highlights TACC's history, including the transition from Stampede to Stampede 2 and the impact of AI on power consumption and cost. They discuss the upcoming Horizon system, which will replace Frontera, featuring 4,000 Nvidia GPUs, 900,000 CPU cores, and half an exabyte of solid state storage. The conversation also touches on the importance of data management, the shift from batch-oriented workflows to real-time data assimilation, and the potential of emerging technologies like photonics and quantum computing.
Episode 6
Europe Gets Real About AI Sovereignty and Neoclouds at GTC Paris
In this episode from GTC Paris, Nicole chats Andy Pernsteiner, Global Field CTO at VAST Data, for an insider's view of Europe's quickly evolving AI landscape. Andy shares candid insights on the shift from heavy-lifting AI infrastructure builds toward practical, profitable services built on those investments. Sovereign clouds take center stage, as Andy unpacks Europe's increasing emphasis on secure, traceable, and auditable data architectures designed around tight regulatory frameworks and national boundaries.
Episode 7
The New Shape of Life Sciences Systems
Nicole and Dr. Subramanian Kartik traces the tectonic shifts in computational infrastructure driven by the rise of life sciences as a data-intensive domain. From the advent of long-read nanopore sequencing to the seismic influence of AlphaFold and cryo-EM, Kartik outlines a field no longer tethered to traditional HPC assumptions. As genomic data explodes and microscopes spill out petabytes, he argues, the industry must abandon legacy parallel file systems in favor of architectures purpose-built for random I/O, GPU-rich workflows, and relentless uptime.