Want to stay up to date on high-performance computing? The best way to stay current is to connect with technologists who know what they’re talking about.

Twitter has become noisier in the past few years, making it difficult to discover which accounts are really worth your time. So it’s useful to consult a list of people whose technical knowledge, erudition, kick-ass attitude, and information density can help you do your job better—or at least do it with a smile on your face.

If you care about high-performance computing (HPC) or the technologies it touches and influences—such as data science, big data, and informatics—I recommend you follow these Twitter accounts, several of which were recommended to me by HPC experts. (And if I left out someone wonderful, tell @enterprisenxt about it. We’ll add it to the HPC leader Twitter list, which you can easily subscribe to.)

Start with news and technical authorities

Let’s begin with the easy ones. You undoubtedly know, or at least know of, the news outlets catering to HPC topics that have an emphasis on industry trends and news. Pick your favorites: @HPCwire, @insideHPC, @scwmagazine, and @TheNextPlatform.

Similarly, it’s a good idea to keep up with the events of the HPC community, several of which are referenced in "The 16 AI and machine learning conferences you should attend in 2019." If nothing else, during those events, you can follow along with announcements and presentations with the conference hashtag.

For more science-focused announcements, look to the big supercomputing centers, such as @NCSAatIllinois, @TACC, @NERSC, and @EPCCed. And there are many more.

It’s also likely that you rely on hardware and software vendors to make your HPC projects work. For example, at @hpe_hpc, Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s HPC experts regularly share their goings-on and research in topics including AI, deep learning, and supercomputing.

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But, as useful as those can be, the real joy of Twitter comes from conversations with real live people. So here, in no particular order, are several well-regarded humans ready to share their expertise in HPC and related topics (and on other subjects as the mood strikes them).

@HPC_Guru

If you’re going to add only one new Twitter account to your feed, @HPC_Guru probably should be it. In some ways, it’s not much more than an HPC community RSS feed with lots of retweets, but everyone seems to recommend this account. With more than 13,000 followers, as one commenter points out, "If it has not been mentioned by @HPC_Guru, then it's not real HPC news!"

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May not help high end #HPC where #LiquidCooling is becoming the norm.https://t.co/HmRq2moqqD via @Chuck_Petras @IEEESpectrum — HPC Guru (@HPC_Guru) Jan. 25, 2019

Single Event Upsets: Protecting #supercomputers from bit flips and more #HPC via @LosAlamosNatLab https://t.co/oLfZjv0jBR — HPC Guru (@HPC_Guru) Jan. 24, 2019

Andreas (@adolofsson) @DARPA ERI Panel:



It's time for a 2nd silicon revolution.



- We need to enable Moore's Law for everyone - not just those who can spend $$$

- #OpenSource Ecosystem for Hardware

- Apply #MachineLearning to Circuit Design #HPC pic.twitter.com/2lFMzhnvzp — HPC Guru (@HPC_Guru) Jan. 22, 2019

Andrew Jones (@hpcnotes)

Andrew Jones is vice president for strategic HPC consulting and services at the Numerical Algorithms Group, which provides HPC consulting, software engineering, and training and support. In other words, he knows his stuff, and well over 5,000 followers appreciate it. @hpcnotes posts about high-level trends, engages with the community, and retweets things that often make people smile.

Nice discussion of the 2019 #F1 technical regulations changes by @redbullracing https://t.co/wz4q74cqCs (via @andrewbensonf1)

F1 interest as a fan & professionally: Best use of #HPC helps best impact from #CFD & other modelling types to help get best race results — Andrew Jones (@hpcnotes) Jan. 22, 2019

What do you think will have biggest impact on #HPC in 2019? #cloud #ai #ml #gpu #supercomputer Jan. 8, 2019

I think someone is running a test program on the #weather system – so far this morning out of my home office window I have seen:

- snow

- sleet

- hail

- rain

- dark clouds

- white clouds

- clear blue sky



If so, can you please give a try out to the summer temperature module? 😄 — Andrew Jones (@hpcnotes) Jan. 22, 2019

Lorena Barba (@LorenaABarba)

Anyone with a penchant for deep computer science research will enjoy following @LorenaABarba. Barba, an associate professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at George Washington University, specializes in computational fluid dynamics and high-performance computing. Most of her tweets are techie and business-like—and then every so often she steps out from behind the curtain and lets her personality show. It’s delightful.

The Journal of Open Source Education is an educator-friendly journal for publishing computational learning modules and educational software—see our 12 published papers, and 5 more in review #JOSE_theOJ https://t.co/D7ugE4F557 — Lorena Barba (@LorenaABarba) Jan. 27, 2019

Here's hoping that #womeninscience will be front and center as my native country of Chile finally establishes a Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation https://t.co/sZo113eQcT — Lorena Barba (@LorenaABarba) Dec. 26, 2018

Email from prospective student: "I found your research […] and the GitHub profile of your group very much aligns with my interests." —another reason to publish your research software! #openscience — Lorena Barba (@LorenaABarba) Dec. 6, 2018

Deepak Singh (@mndoci)

Deepak Singh has a clear specialty: containers, Linux, and HPC at Amazon Web Services. If your technology needs combine any two of these topics, this is an easy follow. And that's particularly so if you are involved in the hard sciences, as Singh also has served on the scientific advisory boards of Ensembl and GenomeSpace. He retweets regularly but rarely the same stuff you’ve seen elsewhere. I also appreciate his sense of humor; perhaps you will, too.

Working on the public data set launch all those years ago remains a highlight of my time at AWS. Great to see it keep growing. https://t.co/bYYi4pWUAT — Deepak Singh (@mndoci) Jan. 23, 2019

Ooh this is nice. Deployment code for Raster vision on AWS Batch https://t.co/ydXn61H4p5 — Deepak Singh (@mndoci) Jan. 10, 2019

Does not look like a promising Saturday evening pic.twitter.com/jsDltmLOW8 — Deepak Singh (@mndoci) Jan. 13, 2019

Glenn Lockwood (@glennklockwood)

Glenn Lockwood focuses on I/O performance analysis, extreme-scale storage architectures, and emerging I/O technologies and interfaces. He’s a computational scientist and specialist in high-performance computing systems at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Lockwood doesn’t post often, but it’s always worth reading.

Few things embody my distaste of Python more than the fact that re.match exists and is semantically indistinguishable from re.search in English. — Glenn K. Lockwood (@glennklockwood) Jan. 12, 2019

Nice to see a third party CPU architecture put a stake in the ground wrt CCIX. Let’s see if anyone does the same for OpenCAPI/GenZ, or if this marks the victory of CCIX https://t.co/7xUTTi3ZEg — Glenn K. Lockwood (@glennklockwood) Jan. 7, 2019

Suhaib Khan (@suhaibkhan)

Some people are relatively quiet about their professional biographies online. Suhaib Khan's says a mere, “Interested in HPC and large storage systems,” but there is no question that his Twitter feed shares a broad range of current technology articles and other links that make you say, “How ‘bout that!”

How Algorithms Are Taking Over Big Oil: BP says its algorithm-assisted oilfields are now getting 10% more work from 43% fewer workers. https://t.co/vlvpHnjOLP #ai #oilandggas pic.twitter.com/XTEyVG1g2L — Suhaib Khan (@suhaibkhan) Jan. 20, 2019

Going beyond

These accounts are just a start. To find more HPC-related tweets, begin by searching for tweets including #HPC. Anyone who takes the time to add the hashtag wants to highlight its relevance; that’s a good thing. Note, though, that the people most likely to do so are vendors and HPC-related publications. That’s not a disadvantage, but it does limit the playing field.

To find others, use a simple method I outlined years ago in "The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Twitter Marketing": Start with a Twitter account that you enjoy and look at who that person is following and explore those accounts. Obviously, who the individual chooses to follow probably represents a wider range of interests (such as quilting, cat videos, or hometown news), but it’s a useful way to look beyond the usual suspects.