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by ianburrell 912 days ago
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.
1 comments
xcv123 912 days ago
> 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.

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c0pium 911 days ago
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.

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xcv123 911 days ago
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.

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