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by dotgov 1277 days ago
When I read articles celebrating “European HPC”, I always wonder about if systems like this are being an effective use of European taxpayer money, since nearly all of the cost goes to US chip manufacturers. What I understand is that Bull basically builds racks around those chips.

I’d imagine the Japanese Fugaku system which is based on ARM and built by Fujitsu a more effective way to directly support a nation’s economy and engineering capabilities.

I could be wrong, of course, nevertheless I find it puzzling.
1 comments
brnt 1277 days ago
Although there are tons of non-EU chips going into these machines, there are tons with EU involvement too (think networking, memory). Also, while chips are a significant share of the expense, it is certainly not most of it. Housing, cooling, infra, racks; those are all things that can be done 'locally'.
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dotgov 1277 days ago
I couldn’t find any information about the interconnect of the new machine in the article, there is a comparison to LUMI, which uses Cray/HPE Slingshot and JEWEL, which is Mellanox/NVIDIA Infiniband. I couldn’t find anything concrete about JUPITER, maybe there is a chance it could use the Bull interconnect, should it be a Bull machine.

Agreed on the physical infrastructure and that those things will be done locally, I do not consider those things as a competitive advantage on the global market, compared to strengthening the local semi industry by doing an “Euro ARM” chip or some such.

No doubt that some of that money will benefit the European economy, with regards to the effectiveness and long term strategic view I do have my doubts, especially compared to what the US/Japan have been able to pull off.

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brnt 1277 days ago
The alternative is having to pay for HPC (Azure offers this) and not developing any competences around the planning, operation and maintenance of such an operation.

Europe has tons of supercomputers, this is just the latest crossing a particular size that sounds cool in outreach and promotion. The research done on these machines (particle physics is a major consumer, see CERN) means there is a very healthy and large community around such tooling, and work is being done to onboard new fields as well. This is a meaningful outcome of such computers, even if they don't contain local free range chips ;)

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