I knew I ran a risk of coming off like a sanctimonious nitwit in the original post, but was felt that I was too constrained by word count to include the standard disclaimers and admissions of hypocrisy. I fully understand the point of most of the responses: that ethics are relative, that some defense work saves lives, that some medical research saves human lives, and that, in general, compromises need to be made in order to survive.
I'm not ethically opposed to all industries that could conceivably be linked to suffering, only those industries that seem outrageously indifferent to it. Military and Big Pharma qualify: corpses are generated daily, you can literally see them. It does seem like a valuable effort to work to minimize the number of corpses generated, but I would be uncomfortable being paid by the generators themselves to do so.
Finance, at least the kind of finance that has a need for HPC, is a weirder case. It's hard to see the corpses (though they exist), but it's not hard to see that the entire "industry" is a simply a compulsory casino. I have no ethical problems with Atlantic City, because I can choose not to give them my money, but no "working man" can opt out of the economy, at the top of which-- even above governmental taxation-- sits a money-siphoning mechanism that serves no visible purpose. Sure, they pay taxes on the money they siphon, but we'd have paid more if they hadn't siphoned it to begin with. The people that work for this mechanism may not have explicitly evil intent, but many of them have illusions that they're doing something more purposeful than "getting it while the getting's good." And in my mind, that's worse.
Although I am, in fact, a vegan, I'm not a hippy, or a preachy gadfly. I've found, through years of iteration, some ethical guidelines that work for me, and I'm comfortable enough in my career that I don't need to make any further compromises. I'm very grateful for that. I don't need to change careers to survive, I'd just enjoy developing more complex software than what I currently get paid to, so I can afford (and hopefully be excused for exercising) some obnoxious ethical discrimination.
Some good suggestions have been made: environmental modeling, NASA, film effects work, energy exploration. What I'm unclear about is how one would go about finding this kind of work without prior experience in the fields. That is, I'm in my mid-thirties, and with only hobbyist/for-fun projects using HPC under my belt, am I qualified to apply for a job at NASA? Film effects sound both fun and harmless. Is that work plentiful? Does it require an extensive reel to get a foot in the door? Searches for "CUDA" and "HPC" on standard job sites haven't turned up much.
Also, I certainly didn't meant to malign academia or imply that academics don't get paid, only to point out that most of the interesting work is done by PhD candidates in pursuit of their thesis projects and by post-doctoral researchers hoping for a professorship. I only have an MS, don't feel like going back to school at this point in my life, and get the sense that non-PhDs in academia are mostly second-class citizens.
