There is a national lab twenty-two miles from Chicago

There is a national laboratory twenty-two miles outside Chicago doing some of the most interesting computing in the world, and most Chicagoans haven’t heard of it. This is the part I keep coming back to. Argonne sits a short drive from the Loop, the work happening there is paid for by the public, and the public mostly doesn’t know it’s there. That gap is on us, not on them.

The default way to talk about a system like Aurora is to talk about it in the trade press. HPCwire, Inside HPC, the conference circuit. Those venues matter, but the audience is already in the room. They know what an exascale machine is. They know which lab is which. Writing for them is necessary, but it isn’t outreach, it’s part of the job.

Which is why a piece like the one Chicago Magazine ran was worth the time. A long-form profile in a city magazine reaches a different audience. People who live here, ride past the lab on I-55 without thinking about it, and have no particular reason to read the trade press. If even a few of them come away knowing that Aurora exists and that it’s in their backyard, the piece did its job.

The article, The Computer That Will Change Everything, ran as the February 2023 cover feature. I’m fine with the headline. Aurora at the time was the fastest machine in the world for AI, and breathless framing isn’t always wrong. The interview process itself was unlike any I’d had before, with a photo shoot fun as we looked for unusual places to take pictures.

The full feature is at Chicago Magazine.