Ethical Considerations of High Performance Computing Access for Pervasive Computing

Abstract

High performance computing makes many contemporary pervasive computing interactions possible such as increasingly accurate weather forecasts, market-scale financial services on demand, and big data analysis for highly personalized services. However, access to high performance computing resources is not necessarily equitable. Not everyone is uplifted by this computational power. Rather, high performance computing access can be seen as another aspect of the digital divide. We acknowledge the ways in which equitable access to high performance computing resources has improved over time while also identifying potential threats to access of these resources. We provide considerations from the perspective of two popular ethical theories (contractarianism and utilitarianism) for reasoning about how these threats may be overcome or prevented from coming to pass. These perspectives can be extended to inform policy created by high performance computing providers.