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by tryauuum 645 days ago
I feel like the name "supercomputer" is overhyped. It's just many normal x86 machines running Linux and connected with fast network.

Here in Finland I think you can use LUMI supercomputer for free. With a condition that the results should be publically available

4 comments

I think you've used the "just" trap to trivialize something.

I'm surprised that Frontier is free with the same conditions; I expected researchers to need grant money or whatever to fund their time. Neat.

In the beginning they were just “Beowulf clusters” compared to “real” supercomputers. Isn’t it always like this, the romantic and exceptional is absorbed by the sheer scale of the practical and common once someone discovers a way to drive the economy at scale? Cars, aircraft, long-distance communications, now perhaps AI? Yet the words may still capture the early romance.
FYI: LUMI uses a nearly identical architecture as Frontier (AMD CPUs and GPUs), and was also made by HPE.