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I'm a bit baffled. How high are the tuitions at the university of florida? This supercomputer is more powerful than many at the national labs and must cost a
by fluffything 6y ago
I'm a bit baffled.
How high are the tuitions at the university of florida?
This supercomputer is more powerful than many at the national labs and must cost a fortune (multiple 100 millions of dollars).
- adventured 6y ago> How high are the tuitions at the university of florida? In-state tuition at the University of Florida is inexpensive compared to most major US universities and is generally considered one of the better values among universities. ~$6,400 per year in-state. Florida State is also comparable in cost. https://www.sfa.ufl.edu/cost/ https://www.sfa.ufl.edu/cost/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ipsum2 6y agoThe article mentions that the money/hardware was donated by Nvidia co-founders.
- Bootvis 6y agoOne of the founders, Chris Malachowsky, is an alum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Malachowsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Malachowsky
- 01100011 6y ago> The initiatives and HiPerGator enhancements are anchored by a $50 million gift — $25 million from UF alumnus and Nvidia fellow Chris Malachowsky and $25 million in hardware, software, training, and services from Nvidia. UF will also make investments around its new machine “well beyond” $20 million, targeted at upgrading its on-campus datacenter.
- Blammar 6y agoIt's $50 million. That's all. See https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/07/21/university-of-florida-nvidia-ai-supercomputer/ https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/07/21/university-of-flori... for the numbers. It's probable the hardware is being offered at a deep discount. The building and infrastructure will cost an additional $20m, covered by the University.
- mhh__ 6y agohttps://lambdalabs.com/blog/demystifying-gpt-3/ https://lambdalabs.com/blog/demystifying-gpt-3/ According to ^, that's about 11 GPT-3s trainings worth in the cloud.
- nl 6y agoNo one who's training GPT-3 pays those prices.
- autokad 6y agoI'm in favor of getting high powered compute in everyone's hands, so this is great to me.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoWhy? I mean, we already have (my old 2013 desktop would - I guess - compete with a cray 1 from the 1980s). What do you expect will happen if people get more CPU?
- eecc 6y agoBetter simulations? Successfully working on previously intractable problems?
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoBut most people ie. not 'everyone' as the post talked about, is doing that. Most just want web browsing + LibreOffice stuff. Oh, and games I suppose.
- asutekku 6y agoThe calculations we do nowaday are also completely different one did back in the 1980s. There’s still a lot you simply can not do on a home computer.
- tgb 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jhj 6y agoNo, those national lab supercomputers typically quote double-precision flops, whereas this appears to be about float16 tensor ops for inner product (they call it "AI flops"). The A100 is 9.7 general purpose Tflops of float64, versus 624 Tflops of float16 / bfloat16 (perhaps also just tensor cores not general purpose)? So quoting it the same way, this Florida machine would only be a (700 * (9.7 / 624)) = 10.9 Pflop supercomputer, not counting host CPUs. Granted though, the hot new HPC approach is to approximate certain expensive high-precision calculations with ML inference instead, but that only works for certain algorithms.
- boulos 6y agoJinx :). I really am surprised the marketing folks didn’t claim this was an ~3 exa-op supercomputer based on int4 w/ sparsity.
- fluffything 6y agoThe FLOPs quoted by national lab supercomputers are usually measured double-precision FLOPs from HPL (High-performance Linpack - at least on the Top500 reports). IIUC, HPL can use double-precision tensor operations. It might also be able to use mixed-precision for some computations. Are the performance numbers for this HPC system at University of Florida also from HPL ?
- jabl 6y ago> IIUC, HPL can use double-precision tensor operations. Lets put it this way: As of the A100 GPU generation, the tensor cores are able to do double precision calculations too. By using the tensor core the peak FP64 flops double to 19.5 Tflops. And yes, the CUDA BLAS library (that the HPL benchmark uses) uses the tensor cores on the A100. > It might also be able to use mixed-precision for some computations. There is currently a lot of interest in mixed precision algorithms, but I'm not sure that the algorithm used for HPL is amenable to that approach, nor whether it's allowed per the benchmark rules.
- jabl 6y agoThe machine will be 140 nodes, which is half the size of the current #7 on the top500 list which is otherwise identical: https://top500.org/system/179842/ https://top500.org/system/179842/ That #7 machine got 27.6 Pflops on HPL, so I would guess the Florida machine will get roughly half of that. (Please keep in mind the tensor cores on the A100 can do FP64, so the theoretical peak flops per GPU is 19.5)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ponker 6y agoResearch at most US major universities is funded from federal grants, not from tuition. A place like the University of Florida, MIT, Michigan State, whatever, is conducting research with government money in a manner very similar to a national lab.
- jkhdigital 6y agoIndeed, and to paraphrase my PhD adviser, we currently have more research dollars than good students to spend them on.
- auslegung 6y agoIn addition to what everyone else has said, UF has over 50,000 students, making it one of the five largest universities in the USA, iirc.
- wil421 6y agoCorrect. Florida has 3 of the top 10 by enrollment. UCF, UF, FIU, and USF. Georgia made the list, go dawgs.
- gavinray 6y agoI moved to Miami from Boulder, and was working out of an office that was on FIU campus for a good while. The first time I walked on the campus, it blew my mind. I'd never heard about Florida International University as an American, but it's easily the biggest and most beautiful I've seen.
- xvilka 6y agoPrecisely explains why NVIDIA did that - to hook up all these 50k students to CUDA. Much more profitable in the long run.
- fma 6y agoAll 50k Students aren't engineers...
- QuotedForTruth 6y agoAs a UF CS grad, I bet less than 100 students will get hands on this computer each year. Maybe way less than 100. Although I wasn't a graduate student so maybe way more of them have access than I realize.
- easton 6y agoDo you know how the CS program is doing these days? I heard it was on the ropes a few years ago but this looks like they are investing in it again?