3 ms·
In the Netherlands, for instance, there is "the national supercomputer" Snellius: https://www.surf.nl/en/services/snellius-the-national-supercomputer https://ww
by carschno 2y ago
In the Netherlands, for instance, there is "the national supercomputer" Snellius: https://www.surf.nl/en/services/snellius-the-national-supercomputer https://www.surf.nl/en/services/snellius-the-national-superc...
I am not sure about its budget, but my impression as a user is that its resources are never fully used. At least, none of my jobs ever had to queue.
I doubt that it can compete with the scale of resources that FAANG companies have available, but then again, I also doubt how research would benefit.
Sure, academia could build LLMs, and there is at least one large-scale project for that: https://gpt-nl.com/ https://gpt-nl.com/
On the other hand, this kind of models still need to demonstrate specific scientific value that goes beyond using a chatbot for generating ideas and summarizing documents.
So I fully agree that the research budget cuts in the past decades have been catastrophic, and probably have contributed to all the disasters the world is currently facing. But I think that funding prestigious super-projects is not the best way to spend funds.
- teekert 2y agoSnellius is a nice resource. A powerful Slurm based HTC cluster with different cues for different workloads (cpu/genomics, gpu/deep learning). To access the resource I had to go through EuroCC [0], which is a network facilitating access to and exploitation of HPC/HTC infra. It is (or can be) a great competing model to US cloud providers. As a small business I got 8 hrs of consultancy and 10k compute hours for free. I’m still learning the details but my understanding is is that after that the prices are very competitive. [0] https://www.eurocc-access.eu/ https://www.eurocc-access.eu/
- matteocontrini 2y agoItaly built the Leonardo HPC cluster, it's one of the largest in EU and was created by a consortium of universities. After just over a year it's already at full capacity and expansion plans have been anticipated because of this.