this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
28 points (91.2% liked)

World News

39067 readers
3377 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News !news@lemmy.world

Politics !politics@lemmy.world

World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Summary

The UK’s national supercomputer, Archer2, has fallen to 62nd place globally, leading to concerns about the country’s supercomputing investment.

The new Labour government has shelved plans for a new exascale supercomputer, potentially hindering scientific and technological advancements.

top 5 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] wewbull 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

What is the use of a singular machine like this? Isn't it far better to have 50 less capable machines at different institutions. At $20 million each they'd still be impressive.

(I know it's not really a singular machine, but the question stands).

[–] KingRandomGuy@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago

The main benefit I think is massive scalability. For instance, DOE scientists at Argonne National Laboratory are working on training a language model for scientific uses. This isn't something you can do on even 10s of GPUs for a few hours, like is common for jobs run in university clusters and similar. They're doing this by scaling up to use a large portion of ALCF Aurora, which is an Exascale supercomputer.

Basically, for certain problems you either need both the ability to run jobs on lots of hardware and the ability to run them for long (but not too long to limit other labs' work) periods of time. Big clusters like Aurora are helpful for that.

[–] non_burglar@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Current modern supercomputers are actually a mesh of relatively lower spec machines, not a single "computer", per se. The cost of these isn't the hardware, it's the low-latency interconnects and writing the software that can carry out jobs in a massively parallel way.

[–] wewbull 1 points 4 hours ago

Did the brackets at the end of my message make my words invisible? You've told me something I already stated.

My question is "what is the purpose of a single cluster like this?".

[–] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)