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Hype is hype. It’s blows that they over promised and got bit by it. And others being bit by it also blows. But betting your academic and professional career in

by helf 4y ago

Hype is hype. It’s blows that they over promised and got bit by it. And others being bit by it also blows. But betting your academic and professional career in the promises of a third party company, /especially a semiconductor one/, is naive at best and stupid at worst. Claiming “Intel failed science” is the worst kind of dramatic hyperbole. Also, this whole idea that some people can’t finish their post docs etc because the computer isn’t ready wreaks of poor planning on their part simply because they were never guaranteed that their project would even properly run/work/scale/whatever on the new system without potentially years more of work.

Katydid 4y ago
This is why I wish this thread hadn't gone more mainstream. It's nuanced and specific to how things work for researchers at labs. I do not expect non-HPC folks to get why it is a big deal and why the strong language was needed. Intel failed the science community in the U.S. that relies on the limited systems large enough to handle the very few applications that consume massive numbers of cores/parallelism. That's not the whole of science, but this system was central to some of the grandest-scale problem solving that exists (think planet-scale climate simulations in high resolution). I respect your opinion but my opinion wasn't for you. It was for the HPC comm.
- dekhn 4y ago
  You know that many of us here are HPC folks who know the nuances... and simply disagree? I mean, sure, I don't think Intel should have taken the contract or gotten any positive PR for this, but at the fundamental level, many people on this site did supercomputing and HPC at national labs or universities, and now work on machine learning HPC on the cloud. My experience spanning both makes me think that chasing time on the fastest supercomputers is not the best way for scientists to be productive.

by helf 4y ago

Katydid 4y ago

This is why I wish this thread hadn't gone more mainstream. It's nuanced and specific to how things work for researchers at labs. I do not expect non-HPC folks to get why it is a big deal and why the strong language was needed. Intel failed the science community in the U.S. that relies on the limited systems large enough to handle the very few applications that consume massive numbers of cores/parallelism. That's not the whole of science, but this system was central to some of the grandest-scale problem solving that exists (think planet-scale climate simulations in high resolution). I respect your opinion but my opinion wasn't for you. It was for the HPC comm.

dekhn 4y ago
You know that many of us here are HPC folks who know the nuances... and simply disagree? I mean, sure, I don't think Intel should have taken the contract or gotten any positive PR for this, but at the fundamental level, many people on this site did supercomputing and HPC at national labs or universities, and now work on machine learning HPC on the cloud. My experience spanning both makes me think that chasing time on the fastest supercomputers is not the best way for scientists to be productive.