I am being condescending about the effort put into the distributed systems field- very specifically, about classical supercomputers. How close was I to faculty

I am being condescending about the effort put into the distributed systems field- very specifically, about classical supercomputers. How close was I to faculty in AMPLab? Pretty close; I attended a retreat one year, helped steer funding their way, tried to hire Matei into Google Research, and have chatted with Patterson extensively around the time he wrote this (https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/david-patterson-enlist-computer-scientists-in-cancer-fight.html https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/david-patterson-e...) then later when he worked on TPUs at Google. (I'm not a stellar researcher or anything, really more of a functionary, but the one thing I do have is an absolutely realistic understanding of how academic and industrial HPC works)