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Forgive my ignorance, but what's the point of a "super computer" in a world where we can have an application access thousands of machines around the world at on
by partiallypro 10y ago
Forgive my ignorance, but what's the point of a "super computer" in a world where we can have an application access thousands of machines around the world at once with a button click to compute something? I could see maybe cost savings, but considering how much it costs to build the machine and that I doubt it's used to 100% capacity at all times. Is it a security thing, or just a pride thing? What's the advantage over just farming it out to a cluster in the cloud?
- aab0 10y agoTraditionally, supercomputers and mainframes have way higher inter-node IO performance like bandwidth than anything you can spin up on EC2. IO is extremely important because it's very rare to have a true shared-nothing algorithm, which means that Amdahl's Law will bite you and make the little bit of IO and coordination a dominant factor. For example, in deep learning, an awful lot of the work is simply moving around and updating data, which has been a bottleneck for attempts to train NNs on multiple GPUs.