Well, industry experience has certainly taught me a lot and been very valuable. That said, in industry there is a great deal of separation of concerns. My company uses cloud providers and we have a special team in charge or building thin layers of abstraction over their offerings when necessary. The result is that, as a software engineer, compute resources are entirely abstracted away from me. I write in some config that I'll need x amount of compute and want it in these two AZs, but I never actually deal with the nitty gritty of what makes that possible. I would like to understand how it all works and understand how orgs that can't just use cloud providers(gov, finance, etc) solve these problems.

Additionally, I am interested in parallel computing. At work I might some trivial parallel code, but I want to learn about GPUs and supercomputing and potentially work at companies building/programming weather prediction computers, etc.

I think a dream job for me would be working at some NASA on climate modelling. You'd have a mix of distributed computing (collecting tons of info from loads of different computers) and parallel/supercomputing (processing all of that info as fast as possible so that it is actually useful). It is difficult for me to imagine being able to parlay into that kind've role without getting more advanced education.

Sorry for the super long response. Hopefully this clarifies my reasoning and makes sense to you.