[ux266478]

> the dominant workload for a supercomputer was thought to be physics simulations - and they often benefit from high numerical precision.

It still is. Just like how "mainframe" used to be a very general word, and over time gained a very unintuitive definition referring to a very specific type of computer with a specific purpose, "supercomputer" almost invariably means it's a highly bespoke cluster dealing with FP64 workloads. I don't see anyone referring to these AI clusters as supercomputers, for the same reason they aren't referring to the racks as mainframes.

I wonder if there's a term for this kind of semantic narrowing?

[fancyfredbot]

I think the term in this case is marketing.

NVIDIA used to use the term supercomputer more often five or six years ago. It's now fully committed to the term AI factory. I think this is supposed to make you think of their expensive kit as a productive asset building your business rather than an expensive tool for your boffins. Your average business executive is instinctively going to question whether they need a supercomputer but don't yet have the same preconceptions about AI factories.

I don't think that Nvidia single handedly caused the move away from the term supercomputer. But I think they had a hand helping push firmly in that direction.

[ux266478]

It's definitely older than that. Originally, way back in the mechanical days when super-computing was hyphenated, it was about how many millions of instructions per second could be handled. That changed in the 1960s with a series of CDC mainframes that put all of their focus on floating point pipelines, moving the category to refer to floating-point crunchers used for scientific simulation (which is what the frontier of computing was used for). Eventually parallelism would be added in at some point, and the term has fossilized into a "monolithic cluster with massive FLOPS intended specifically for scientific simulation". Because for the longest time, that's who needed all the compute.

The PIM/m of the FGCS defied this a little, sometimes being called a "symbolic supercomputer", but never without the "symbolic" qualifier. It was the first time in history where the frontier of computational throughput wasn't about scientific simulations. It wasn't even about arithmetic!

Right now is also interesting, because the world's most powerful FLOPS monster monoliths aren't being used for scientific simulation. They fail at being supercomputers for that reason, but a computer scientist from the 60s would probably raise his eyebrow at that.