Re:Intel announces the Aurora supercomputer has broken the e...
by alephnerd on Monday May 13, 2024 @08:23PM
(#40350199)
> my understanding correct
Yes
> why is it important to build supercomputers with more and more compute
A mix of
- research in distributed systems (there are plenty of open questions in Concurrency, Parallelization, Computer Architecture, etc)
- a way to maintain an ecosystem of large vendors (Intel, AMD, Nvidia and plenty of smaller vendors all get a piece of the pie to subsidize R&D)
- some problems are EXTREMELY computationally and financially expensive, so they require large On-Prem compute capabilities (eg. Protein folding, machine learning when I was in undergrad [DGX-100s were subsidized by Aurora], etc)
- some problems are extremely sensitive for national security reasons and it's best to keep all personnel in a single region (eg. Nuclear simulations, turbine simulations, some niche ML work, etc)
In reality you need to do both, and planners know this fact, and have known this fact for decades
Yes
> why is it important to build supercomputers with more and more compute
A mix of
- research in distributed systems (there are plenty of open questions in Concurrency, Parallelization, Computer Architecture, etc)
- a way to maintain an ecosystem of large vendors (Intel, AMD, Nvidia and plenty of smaller vendors all get a piece of the pie to subsidize R&D)
- some problems are EXTREMELY computationally and financially expensive, so they require large On-Prem compute capabilities (eg. Protein folding, machine learning when I was in undergrad [DGX-100s were subsidized by Aurora], etc)
- some problems are extremely sensitive for national security reasons and it's best to keep all personnel in a single region (eg. Nuclear simulations, turbine simulations, some niche ML work, etc)
In reality you need to do both, and planners know this fact, and have known this fact for decades