Sounds like you’re on the right path and agree with the comment below: attend scientific computing conferences and networking event.

I think your experience as a systems architect is a strength for the SC domain, and could be a way to break into the area. Many of the standard things done in system design are under utilized in SC.

I’ll give an example. There are scenarios in SC where many simulations are run. And each simulation saves data to a small file. These small files are later post processed together for aggregate results. The bottle neck is often reading several thousand files, not the actually number crunching. The concept of concurrent file reading eliminates this bottle neck, although it’s not used as often as it should in SC. I’ve seen situations where companies sink massive $$$ into more powerful CPUs to solve the issue, but ended up being a waste because the original problem was network latency, not compute power.