[ncmncm]

This is the first I have noticed them reporting power draw. It seems immoral to run it for anything that doesn't help stop global climate catastrophe. (Presumably global thermonuclear war would suffice. But carbon capture afterward would be hard to arrange for.)

Wondering if they measure while benchmarking, or add up max power ratings of the chips.

Did any old mainframe ever burn like that? E.g. the first big USAF missile tracking system, the one that filled four floors of a custom building?

[sbierwagen]

Using the secret skill of "clicking on the links for the other lists" I discovered that the first TOP500 which had a machine report a power draw was the TOP10 in November 1996: https://top500.org/lists/top500/1996/11/

(498 kW for 229 GFlops. 136,317 times more power draw per flops than the current leader on the Green500.)

[ncmncm]

Yet that tells me exactly nothing about what I asked.

[jeffbee]

Are you kidding? You know a single widebody airliner uses more energy than that, right?

[ncmncm]

Widebody airliners aren't doing much for the climate, either.

[ben_w]

While true, I think the point is more about how minuscule 21 MW is when considered in isolation — 0.001 percent of global electricity usage.

[ncmncm]

Anybody not boggled over the idea of their program burning 21 MW for as long as it runs either can never be impressed with anything, or has no head for numbers. Computation demanding power that could hurl a fully loaded jumbo jet into the sky is not something most of us will ever code.

[jeffbee]

Many who have worked at AWS, Meta, Google, Apple, or Microsoft have had access to resources on that scale. That's hundreds of thousands of engineers by now, if not millions. You may be right that it's not most, but it's not rare either. And I personally think that running a supercluster for atmospheric modeling or whatever they intend to do with this thing is an ethically OK application of energy compared to hosting Cow Clicker or whatever.

[ncmncm]

Since it is at a nuke lab, one guesses that it will mainly be for nukes. Which, technically, could have some effect on climate processes if they were to, say, initiate an end to major CO2 emission (after the cities involved finish burning down; anyway burning steel does not produce CO2, a plus.)

[ncmncm]

In other news, only 100,000 of these would match the whole world's power draw.

[ben_w]

In the same way as it "only" costs 100,000 avocado toasts to buy a nice house.