[epaulson]

The National Science Foundation has been doing this for decades, starting with the supercomputing centers in the 80s. Long before anyone talked about cloud credits, NSF has had a bunch of different programs to allocate time on supercomputers to researchers at no cost, these days mostly run out of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastruture. (The office name is from the early 00s) - https://new.nsf.gov/cise/oac

(To connect universities to the different supercomputing centers, the NSF funded the NSFnet network in the 80s, which was basically the backbone of the Internet in the 80s and early 90s. The supercomputing funding has really, really paid off for the USA)

[JumpCrisscross]

> NSF has had a bunch of different programs to allocate time on supercomputers to researchers at no cost, these days mostly run out of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastruture

This would be the logical place to put such a programme.

[alephnerd]

The DoE has also been a fairly active purchaser of GPUs for almost two decades now thanks to the Exascale Computing Project [0] and other predecessor projects.

The DoE helped subsidize development of Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, etc along with the underlying stack like NVLink, NGC, CUDA, etc either via purchases or allowing grants to be commercialized by Nvidia. They also played matchmaker by helping connect private sector research partners with Nvidia.

The DoE also did the same thing for AMD and Intel.

[0] - https://www.exascaleproject.org/

[PostOnce]

The DoE subsidized the development of GPUs, but so did Bitcoin.

But before that, it was video games, like quake. Nvidia wouldn't be viable if not for games.

But before that, graphics research was subsidized by the DoD, back when visualizing things in 3D cost serious money.

It's funny how technology advances.

[Retric]

It was really Ethereum / Alt coins not Bitcoin that caused the GPU demand in 2021.

Bitcoin moved to FPGAs/ASIC very quickly because dedicated hardware was vastly more efficient they were only viable from Oct 2010. By 2013 when ASIC’s came online GPU’s only made sense if someone else was paying for both the hardware and electricity.

[jszymborski]

As you've rightly pointed out, we have the mechanism, now let's fund it properly!

I'm in Canada, and our science funding has likewise fallen year after year as a proportion of our GDP. I'm still benefiting from A100 clusters funded by tax payer dollars, but think of the advantage we'd have over industry if we didn't have to fight over resources.

[xena]

Where do you get access to those as a member of the general public?

[kiwih]

In Australia at least, anyone who is enrolled at or works at a university can use the taxpayer-subsidised "Gadi" HPC which is part of the National Computing Infrastructure (https://nci.org.au/our-systems/hpc-systems). I also do mean anyone, I have an undergraduate student using it right now (for free) to fine-tune several LLMs.

It also says commercial orgs can get access via negotiation, I expect a random member of the public would be able to go that route as well. I expect that there would be some hurdles to cross, it isn't really common for random members of the public to be doing the kinds of research Gadi was created to benefit. I expect it is the same way in this case in Canada. I suppose the argument is if there weren't any gatekeeping at all, you might end up with all kinds of unsuitable stuff on the cluster, e.g. crypto miners and such.

Possibly another way for a true random person to get access would be to get some kind of 0-hour academic affiliation via someone willing to back you up, or one could enrol in a random AI course or something and then talk to the lecturer in charge.

In reality, the (also taxpayer-subsidised) university pays some fee for access, but it doesn't come from any of our budgets.

[jph00]

Australia's peak HPC has a total of: "2 nodes of the NVIDIA DGX A100 system, with 8 A100 GPUs per node".

It's pretty meagre pickings!

[FireBeyond]

Well, one, it has:

> 160 nodes each containing four Nvidia V100 GPUs

and two, well, it's a CPU-based supercomputer.

[jszymborski]

I get my resources through a combination of servers my lab bought with using a government grant and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (nee Compute Canada)'s cluster.

These resources aren't available to the public, but if I were king for a day we'd increase science funding such that we'd have compute resources available to high-school students and the general public (possibly following training on how to use it).

Making sure folks didn't use it to mine bitcoin would be important, though ;)

[mmastrac]

I'm going to guess it's Compute Canada, which I don't think we non-academics have access to.

[jszymborski]

That's correct (they go by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada now... how boring).

I wish that wasn't the case though!

[cmdrk]

Yeah, the specific AI/ML-focused program is NAIRR.

https://nairrpilot.org/

Terrible name unless they low-key plan to make AI researchers' hair fall out.

[dastbe]

the US already pays for 2+ aws region for cia/dod. why not pay for a region that is only available to researchers?