[c0pium]

Why would you expect there to be one? It’s all the same stuff and has been for decades.

[codezero]

I expect nation state actors to have immensely more access to computing power than the commercial sector, is that controversial?

[ghaff]

Because the big ones spend more money. I expect Google etc. has access to more computing power than most nation states do.

[ianburrell]

If you look at the top supercomputers, US national labs occupy most of the top 10. But they aren’t enormously larger than the others. They are also built of out of standard parts. I’m surprised that they are recent, I expected the government to be slow and behind.

What do you expect US government to do with lots of computing power? I wouldn’t expect military to need supercomputers. Maybe the NSA would have a lot for cracking something or surveillance. But the big tech companies have more.

[xcv123]

> They are also built of out of standard parts. I’m surprised that they are recent, I expected the government to be slow and behind.

Because the government isn't building them. They are Cray supercomputers, supplied by HPE. Not entirely built with standard parts. Proprietary interconnect and cooling system.

[c0pium]

Infiniband is not a proprietary interconnect. Water is not a proprietary cooling system.

High scale is about using commodity components (hundreds of) thousands of times.

[xcv123]

HPE Slingshot is not Infiniband and it is proprietary to HPE.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.08886.pdf

The cooling system is also proprietary to HPE. Not saying that other vendors don't offer their own liquid cooling systems.