[epaulson]

The National Science Foundation has been doing this for decades, starting with the supercomputing centers in the 80s. Long before anyone talked about cloud credits, NSF has had a bunch of different programs to allocate time on supercomputers to researchers at no cost, these days mostly run out of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastruture. (The office name is from the early 00s) - https://new.nsf.gov/cise/oac

(To connect universities to the different supercomputing centers, the NSF funded the NSFnet network in the 80s, which was basically the backbone of the Internet in the 80s and early 90s. The supercomputing funding has really, really paid off for the USA)

[JumpCrisscross]

> NSF has had a bunch of different programs to allocate time on supercomputers to researchers at no cost, these days mostly run out of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastruture

This would be the logical place to put such a programme.

[alephnerd]

The DoE has also been a fairly active purchaser of GPUs for almost two decades now thanks to the Exascale Computing Project [0] and other predecessor projects.

The DoE helped subsidize development of Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, etc along with the underlying stack like NVLink, NGC, CUDA, etc either via purchases or allowing grants to be commercialized by Nvidia. They also played matchmaker by helping connect private sector research partners with Nvidia.

The DoE also did the same thing for AMD and Intel.

[0] - https://www.exascaleproject.org/

[jszymborski]

As you've rightly pointed out, we have the mechanism, now let's fund it properly!

I'm in Canada, and our science funding has likewise fallen year after year as a proportion of our GDP. I'm still benefiting from A100 clusters funded by tax payer dollars, but think of the advantage we'd have over industry if we didn't have to fight over resources.

[xena]

Where do you get access to those as a member of the general public?

[cmdrk]

Yeah, the specific AI/ML-focused program is NAIRR.

https://nairrpilot.org/

Terrible name unless they low-key plan to make AI researchers' hair fall out.

[dastbe]

the US already pays for 2+ aws region for cia/dod. why not pay for a region that is only available to researchers?