Glenn K. Lockwood has left Microsoft.

He spent the last three years at the company, initially as the HPC/AI workload lead in Azure Storage's product group, before working more broadly on the design of Microsoft's largest AI supercomputers.

Lockwood, who spent nearly seven years at the DOE's NERSC supercomputing team, is also known for his popular eponymous blog on the high-performance computing industry.

"Everything I did at Microsoft touched supercomputers in one way or another, and my day job was exclusively supporting Microsoft's largest AI training supercomputers," Lockwood said in a blog post explaining his departure.

He explained that the increasing focus on lucrative AI contracts over HPC ones was a "hurdle that I was never able to overcome."

Lockwood added: "HPC-AI is ultimately a zero-sum game, and every hour spent working with an HPC customer is usually an hour that isn't being spent working with a much more profitable AI customer. I constantly ran into this problem working in hyperscale AI; my full-time job was to deal with AI customers, but I enjoyed interacting with HPC customers too. As a result, I had to do a lot of the HPC-specific work (preparing conference presentations, for example) on nights, weekends, and vacations.

"It was just hard to tell people that I couldn't help improve job uptime on a massive training run because I was preparing a talk for a workshop that, frankly, might be openly hostile to my message."

He also wrote about the challenges of working at a big company and the difficulties of maintaining a culture when people are shifted from project to project after they are canceled.

"If a 'survivor' can just as easily program for HoloLens as they can for GPU telemetry, they also likely don't really care about either HoloLens or GPUs. This isn't a bad thing, and I am certainly not passing judgment on people who don't care about GPUs," he said. "But it does mean that it's harder for someone who really cares about GPUs to connect with a teammate who really doesn't. And this has many knock-on effects in day-to-day work."

Lockwood has yet to disclose where he is moving to, but told DCD he starts working there this Monday.

"In the end, I gave up hundreds of thousands in unvested stock, and I am taking a six-figure pay cut in annual base pay when I start my next job," he wrote. "For me, though, this was a fair price to pay."

Lockwood told DCD his departure was on his terms, and that he was not among the multiple rounds of mass layoffs at Microsoft, with 9,000 employees the latest to go.

However, he told us, "the reasons that motivated the layoffs are not unrelated to why I felt it was time for me to move on."