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A supercomputer might cost $200M and use $6M of electricity per year. Amortizing the supercomputer over 5 years, a 12 hour job on that supercomputer may cost $
by mlyle 3y ago
A supercomputer might cost $200M and use $6M of electricity per year.
Amortizing the supercomputer over 5 years, a 12 hour job on that supercomputer may cost $63k.
If you want it cheaper, your choices are:
A) run on the supercomputer as-is, and get your answer in 12 hours (+ scheduling time based on priority)
B) run on a cheaper computer for longer-- an already-amortized supercomputer, or non-supercomputing resources (pay calendar time to save cost)
C) try to optimize the code (pay human time and calendar time to save cost) -- how much you benefit depends upon labor cost, performance uplift, and how much calendar time matters.
Not all kinds of problems get much uplift from CUDA, anyways.
- jonwachob91 3y ago>> A supercomputer might cost $200M and use $6M of electricity per year. I'm curious, what university has a $200MM super computer? I know governments have numerous Supercomputers that blow past $200MM in build price, but what universities do?
- sophacles 3y agoUniversity of Illinois had Blue Waters ($200+MM, built in ~2012, decomissioned in the last couple years). https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/research/project-highlights/blue-waters/ https://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/research/project-highlights/bl... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Waters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Waters They have always had a lot of big compute around.
- mlyle 3y ago> I know governments have numerous Supercomputers that blow past $200MM in build price, but what universities do? Even when individual universities don't-- governments have supercomputing centers that universities are a primary user of and often charge back value of computing time to the university or it is a separate item that is competitively granted. Here we're talking about Jupiter, which is a ~$300M supercomputer where research universities will be a primary user.