On “Retirement,” Gratitude, and the Future

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the King tells Alice, “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end; then stop.”  My beginning was as a poor child of the Arkansas Ozarks, the grandson of a sharecropper, and the son of a sawmill worker with a fifth grade education. (See Just A Taste of Sherbet) Education transformed my life and opened a world of extraordinary opportunities. In the wonderland that is science, reality has far exceeded my childhood dreams.

Along the way, I met the love of my life, Andrea Krupa. Throughout it all, she has been my partner, my sounding board, and my supporter and friend.  The daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who fled oppression, she has lived her own version of the American dream.  She is the best thing that ever happened to me, and words cannot express the debt I owe her.

As the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard  noted, “Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.” What of my middle and future?

Except for my fruitful years at Microsoft, I have spent all of the past sixty-one years in the U.S. educational system, first as a student – primary, secondary, university, graduate, and (briefly) post-doctoral associate – then decades as a professor and university leader. 

As I enter the forty-second year since completing my Ph.D., I am also reminded that 42 was the answer to “Life, the Universe, and Everything” in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, though it is clear the question – the large-language model (LLM) prompt, if you will, – was lost during the long years of computing. 

I often tell students that there are only three enduring questions – matter and the universe, life and nature, and the human condition. Conversely, many of the answers change continually, as we learn more and as our needs and circumstances change.  In a world of both opportunity and uncertainty, I hope we all remember both the questions and the answers.

Meanwhile, dear reader, I have already buried this story’s lede; so, without further ado, here it is.  On August 1, 2024, I will become a Presidential Professor (emeritus) at the University of Utah. This was not a quick decision; it is one I have been contemplating for quite a while, as my two year term as chair of the National Science Board drew closer to an end in May 2024.

First and foremost, this transition does not mean I will stop working – far from it.  I will continue doing many of same things – advising on science and technology policy, conducting high-performance computing research, consulting on strategy and futures, writing about many things, and much more.

For someone “retiring,” I remain extremely busy. I just finished testifying to the U.S. Congress on the future of innovation (See A Call To Action: Congressional Testimony), and several colleagues (you know them all) and I are drafting a paper on the future of high-performance computing in the United States. As I write this, my colleagues and I in the Sage sensor project just submitted major new proposal to bring large language models (LLMs) to networked environmental sensors.

I just returned from Rome and a joint EU-US research meeting on sensors and the computing continuum, as well as being in Washington, DC to address the Department of Energy’s Computational Science Graduate Fellows. I will also be writing on my blog (www.hpcdan.org) more frequently, and I have tentative plans to write multiple books, including one long-delayed novel. Amidst this, I am also involved in a major consulting effort, one I hope to describe someday, NDAs permitting.

In short, the future of my “retirement” looks to be much like my present, but with more flexibility to choose personal and professional activities. Andrea and I also plan to complete some “bucket list” travel, though we have already been so many places as part of our professional travel, and pursue other adventures. In addition to work and recreation, I hope to have more time to indulge my amateur radio (call sign KK7EUJ) and late night digital astrophotography hobbies.

Gratitude

As I look back on my life and career, I am extraordinarily grateful to my teachers and mentors (See Remembering Joel: A Teacher’s Impact, Libraries: Arms Too Short to Feed the Mind, A Feeling for the Code, and One Life to Live), my many collaborators and students, and my friends around the world.  You have made my professional life not just a career, but also an exciting adventure and a wondrous journey.  I will always be in your debt.

Fresh out of graduate school at Purdue, and filled with the crazy idea that one could – and should – build supercomputers using collections of microprocessors, I joined the University of Illinois, a fountainhead of advanced computing, and home to so many amazing high-performance computing experiments (See Stored Program Computing: Ideas and Individuals Do Change the World).

I spent twenty wonderful years as a professor at the University of Illinois, where I was blessed to work with an incredibly talented group of faculty colleagues, as well as wonderful students, post-doctoral associates, and staff  in the Pablo research group.  Later, I was privileged to lead Illinois’ computer science department, one the country’s very best.

During that time, parallel computing using microprocessors became a practical reality, student enrollment exploded during the dot.com boom, and we built the Siebel Center for Computer Science. I also followed Larry Smarr as director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where we built early Linux clusters and deployed the NSF TeraGrid, which became XSEDE and now ACCESS, NSF’s flagship program for advanced computational resources.

In North Carolina, Alan Blatecky and I created the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), dedicated to the application of computing to important societal problems. There, I was privileged to hold faculty appointments at all three Research Triangle universities – UNC Chapel Hill, Duke, and NC State. RENCI’s animating vision drew on lessons from my Illinois friend and colleague, Donna Cox, who both preached and practiced a vision of interdisciplinary, Renaissance teams. (See Renaissance Teams: Reifying the School of Athens)

Not long after I arrived in North Carolina, Craig Mundie and Rick Rashid, along with Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, recruited me to join Microsoft.  Being an academic, I said no – twice – but I ultimately changed my mind. At Microsoft, I was fortunate to be a corporate vice-president during the multicore revolution and the birth of cloud computing, where I created the eXreme Computing Group (XCG) to develop new, low power cloud servers and accelerators. Later, I led the Technology Policy Group, which worked with governments and non-governmental organizations around the world on Internet governance, spectrum policy, digital privacy, and a host of other computing-related issues. In the process, I learned an incredible amount about business processes, risk taking, and innovation, all of which I sought to use on my return to academia.

At Iowa and Utah, in addition to holding professorships, I served, respectively, as Vice President for Research and Economic Development and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs (aka Provost). In both roles, I was immersed in the evolving world of higher education. We built a mobile museum to take science to rural communities (See NASA, the Mobile Museum, and Children's Dreams), optimized intellectual property and technology transfer policies, and revamped undergraduate success processes. (See Higher Education in the 21^st Century)

I once said that I wanted a job filled with new and different tasks each day. Helping lead the University of Utah through the global COVID-19 pandemic more than satisfied that lifetime desire for daily uncertainty, though I am grateful to have been part of it. To protect the health and safety of our faculty, staff, and students, we (and other universities) were forced to make decisions each day that would normally take months or even years in academia. (See On Catastrophes and Rebooting the Planet).

In addition to my professional positions, I have been privileged to serve on a wide variety of government and non-governmental organization (NGO) advisory groups – far too many to mention, but all valuable experiences. Among the more notable, I was fortunate to serve on the U.S. President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) and the U.S. President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), as well as serving on and chairing the U.S. National Science Board.

Enduring Verities

It is a truism that age brings wisdom and good judgment, though I am reminded pundits also say good judgment comes from experience and that experience comes from bad judgment.  I have certainly made my share of mistakes, but in the process, I did learn some things of importance. Here are just a few.

Though we are, as Alexander Pope so eloquently phrased it in his Essay on Man, but “darkly wise, and rudely great,” we are all connected by a chain of discovery and creativity that stretches to before the dawn of history; it is no exaggeration to say that knowledge preservation via writing created history. For the first time, knowledge could accumulate and be passed from generation to generation by more than oral tradition.

The scientific process is arguably one of humanity’s greatest inventions; in the moment of discovery, one can live a lifetime, but a thousand lifetimes would not be enough.  Discovery and innovation are secular but deeply holy, defining us as humans and as scholars, and they represent all that we venerate and cherish. Realizing you might be the first human to know a particular thing is a singular thrill.

In my professional lifetime, we have seen extraordinary discoveries in science and technology, many enabled by computing advances. Reaching earth orbit was once a measure of a nation state’s wealth and power, dependent on a mix of manual and automated calculations using systems less powerful than a simple calculator. Now, such capability – and even landing instruments on the moon – is well within the financial reach of a startup company, and students now build CubeSats for launch as secondary payloads.

We also mapped the human genome via shotgun sequencing, identified the genetic basis of many diseases, and explored the basis of biological life, all enabled by computing. We asked that most basic of questions – why is there anything all, and we created and tested computational models – lattice QCD and cosmological simulations – that have shaped and refined our understanding of the origin of matter and the universe. 

Meanwhile, smartphones now hold the digital equivalent of entire libraries and connect us to the world in ways previously unimaginable, while fitting in the palms of our hands.  From gigaflops to exaflops, computing continues to revolutionize scientific discovery and transform our world.  I have been blessed to be part of that revolution.

The Future Beckons

Discovery is the endless quest, its fruits the ineffable intellectual gold that enriches all of humanity. As J. R. R. Tolkien, the muse for geeks everywhere, wisely noted:

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost.
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

I may be “emeritus,” but I will keep wandering, an ever-curious explorer, seeking to make a difference.  And as long as the midway lights sparkle, the carnival music beckons, and the carousel spins, I will be riding one of the carousel's painted ponies, hand outstretched eagerly to touch the future. I expect to see you along for the ride.

Thank you to everyone who made my professional life and career so special.  The future awaits.

Comments

[James Arendt]

Best wishes as you phase into well-earned emeritus status and hope you get some time to relax!

[e miya]

Staying in SLC for the time?

[Peter Michael Lyster]

Very nice Dan. It was great working with you. Keep it up.

[Sandra Justice]

Thank you for your service to the National Science Board, advancing important issues, unpacking and providing clarity around topics from AI to the STEM workforce. If you were running for U.S. President, I would vote for you!