Although I work for VAST Data, these notes are my own personal notes and are not authoritative. They may be wrong.
VAST Forward is VAST’s annual customer conference. The inaugural version of it was held February 24-26, 2026 in Salt Lake City.
What’d I learn:
European HPC procurements
European procurement is very different from US - they are very tied to specific requirements, so shaping the requirements before the tender is issued seems much more critical in Europe than in the US. US approach (at least within DOE is to be descriptive and maintain wide optionality.
What it takes to try a new file system at scale
Taking the leap from Lustre to VAST comes in a couple forms, but it’s often either desperation or willingness to take a big risk on a fringe project. CINECA seeded VAST in their operations as part of a special cloud system. Once it was deployed, they realized that it solved problems for them elsewhere, and its integration was flexible enough (via CNode pooling) that they could use it to connect their cloud, AI, and HPC systems without significant additional buildout as would’ve been required with LNet routers. It was still a risk though, and took an individual with strong conviction to modernize to take accountability and push for change.
Long tail of implementation in AI
ServiceNow said they were going to begin exploring disaggregated inferencing in 2026. Given that NVIDIA launched it in Dynamo at GTC25 (a year ago) and Microsoft published it in 2023/2024,1 it appears there is a flow of innovation around these advanced inferencing techniques:
- Initially: Leading model builders develop and deploy a technique
- After 1.0 - 1.5 years: NVIDIA announces support for such a technique and releases an open-source package that implements it.
- After 1.5 - 3.0 years: Mid-range research outfits begin deploying those techniques. This is the point at which commercial demand emerges.
Event behind-the-scenes
Event staff were largely people who have day jobs that have nothing to do with registering attendees or running microphones. We had people whose day jobs are managing web assets doing all manner of on-site work.