[kaycebasques]

n00b questions from someone just beginning to get interested in HPC

I see mention of using this supercomputer for training models. Is that the only purpose? What other types of things do orgs usually do with these supercomputers?

Are there any good boots-on-the-ground technical blogs that provide interesting detail on day-to-day experiences with these things?

[abatilo]

As opposed to keeping all of your servers independent of each other, super computers are used any time you want to pretend the entire computer is one computer.

In other words, they're used when you want to share some kind of state across all of the computers, without the potential overhead of communicating to some other system like a database.

Physics simulations and like, molecular modeling come to mind as common examples.

In the case of ML training, model parameters and broadcasting the deltas that get calculated during training are that shared state.