[mlyle]

A supercomputer might cost $200M and use $6M of electricity per year.

Amortizing the supercomputer over 5 years, a 12 hour job on that supercomputer may cost $63k.

If you want it cheaper, your choices are:

A) run on the supercomputer as-is, and get your answer in 12 hours (+ scheduling time based on priority)

B) run on a cheaper computer for longer-- an already-amortized supercomputer, or non-supercomputing resources (pay calendar time to save cost)

C) try to optimize the code (pay human time and calendar time to save cost) -- how much you benefit depends upon labor cost, performance uplift, and how much calendar time matters.

Not all kinds of problems get much uplift from CUDA, anyways.

[jonwachob91]

>> A supercomputer might cost $200M and use $6M of electricity per year.

I'm curious, what university has a $200MM super computer?

I know governments have numerous Supercomputers that blow past $200MM in build price, but what universities do?

[mlyle]

> I know governments have numerous Supercomputers that blow past $200MM in build price, but what universities do?

Even when individual universities don't-- governments have supercomputing centers that universities are a primary user of and often charge back value of computing time to the university or it is a separate item that is competitively granted.

Here we're talking about Jupiter, which is a ~$300M supercomputer where research universities will be a primary user.

[sophacles]

University of Illinois had Blue Waters ($200+MM, built in ~2012, decomissioned in the last couple years).

https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/research/project-highlights/bl...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Waters

They have always had a lot of big compute around.