Two members of NCShare’s leadership team, Uthpala Herath, a computational physicist at Duke University, and Tracy Futhey, vice president and chief information officer at Duke, spoke at the “Sharing AI Compute in the Global South” Workshop held at Duke University on January 30, 2026.
This workshop was an official pre-summit event for the AI Impact Summit 2026. The workshop covered how compute resource sharing works in practice at both an institutional level (the Duke Compute Cluster) and a statewide level (NCShare), including lessons from contribution-based access and reallocating idle capacity to maximize resource utilization while broadening access across communities. It also explored how these models—along with the technology, governance, and policy required to make them work—can inform approaches for scaling shared compute across geographic boundaries.
Futhey joined the event as a panelist speaker and talked about sharing compute resources and governance policies pertaining to it.
Herath spoke about how compute resources sharing works in practice at both an institutional level, the Duke Compute Cluster, as well as a statewide level like NCShare. Herath contributed lessons from contribution-based access and reallocating idle capacity to maximize resource utilization while broadening access across communities.
“We also explored how these models, along with the technology, governance, and policy required to make them work, can inform approaches for scaling shared compute across geographic boundaries,” said Herath.
Learn more about the workshop here.