RIKEN Center for Computational Science Arm-powered Fugaku, in Kobe, Japan, is the the world's fastest supercomputer as of November 2020, according to Top500.org. Machine Learning Is Helping High-Performance Computing Go Mainstream Proliferation of AI, in combination with cloud platforms making it easier to test the waters, have led more IT organizations to turn to HPC-style infrastructure. Once confined to specialized workloads with high compute requirements, such as academic and medical research, financial modeling, and energy exploration, high-performance computing, or HPC, has in recent years been finding its way into IT of all stripes. This has partly been brought about by the mainstreaming of machine learning (a subset of artificial intelligence), which generally operates at a snail's pace on conventional servers and needs the added oomph that HPC brings to the table.