[KKKKkkkk1]

We're living in an age in which AWS dwarfs all the machines on the TOP500 taken together. The TOP500 is a vestige of the cold war that needs to be retired. Similarly to how the US and the USSR used to compare their numbers of nuclear warheads, it is comparing a reserve of capacity that is probably going to be retired having brought marginal benefits at best, all in order to goad taxpayers into a futile competition.

[rwmj]

What a complete load of nonsense. Do let us know what your AWS bills are like when you run your 100s of petaflops HPC job there. And what is the interconnect like? A few gigabit switches aren't the same as the interconnects on these supercomputers.

[user5994461]

Google Cloud has a much superior interconnect, easily doing twice the bandwidth of AWS with lower latency.

Ethernet may not be approaching Infiniband in raw speed and latency, but I think it's doing pretty decently with 10 Gbps going to every node.

Ethernet networks are definitely much more competitive today than 10 years ago, when Infiniband already had cheap 20 Gbps network cards but 10 Gbps Ethernet card were expensive and the network switches were a rarity.

[floatboth]

AWS isn't just a couple gigabit switches, they do offer some HPC-oriented things: https://aws.amazon.com/hpc/efa/

[gh02t]

What? The US government and others are still building these computers because they are valuable. Summit for example is nearly constantly in use at full capacity and has enabled a huge variety of research. It's hardly a "reserve" capability. Not to mention that AWS isn't really suited for a lot of the biggest supercomputing workloads...

TOP500 is not very important, but it's not meant to be much more than a simple benchmark that correlates roughly with real performance. Supercomputers aren't designed just to be number 1 on TOP500, it's a byproduct of their actual goal.

[guenthert]

Well there obviously is interest in running simulations and other HPC applications on systems of public commercial cloud providers and there are specialized offerings including high performance interconnects, GPGPUs, large memory VMs and schedulers. Don't expect the largest of the top500 clusters to be replaced anytime soon by such, but for lesser demands people will be maintaining spread sheets and calculating the break-even point of renting vs. owning so to speak.

I'd expect in the long run, there will be only few data center operators.

[6AA4FD]

I don't think more than half a percent of taxpayers know about top500, and I don't think many who know even care how their country ranks.

[fomine3]

Side story: HPC ranking is relatively common topic in Japan because previous K computer was targeted to cut budget by government and well reported by news.