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balia | 1 year ago

Some may not want to hear this, but these “fastest supercomputer” list is now meaningless because all the Chinese labs have started obfuscating their progress.

A while ago there were a few labs in China in top 10 and they all attracted sanctions / bad attention. Now no Chinese lab report any data now

discuss

order

cameron_b|1 year ago

They are in good company, with X, Meta, Microsoft and others not reporting theirs either.

The basis for the ranking was a cumulative tracking of benchmark results that were required as part of commissioning bespoke computers. A contract would be written to buy a computer that could achieve a certain performance in operations per second, and in order to satisfy that the benchmarks were agreed to and codified in the contracts. Government contracts are to a certain extent public information so the goals and clout of successive performance were tracked in this way.

If you don’t need to satisfy a government contract, or don’t need the clout to attract engineers or funding, submitting results draws unwanted attention to what you’re cooking up.

sliken|1 year ago

Microsoft has the #4 cluster on the top 500 list. Sure not everyone reports, still seems like a useful list to watch the trends in computing and in particular HPC.

Keep in mind the average hyperscalers cloud is not a particularly good setup for the top500. HPC tends towards more bandwidth, lower latency, and no virtualization.

pknomad|1 year ago

I wouldn't say meaningless... just incomplete.

leptons|1 year ago

I doubt the US Government is telling everyone about their fastest computer.

buildbot|1 year ago

Unless it's like, air gapped powered by a naval nuclear reactor, I feel like someone would question why a random US gov building is drawing 20-30MW of power, and exhausting most of that as heat...

grapesodaaaaa|1 year ago

The DOE has entered the chat.

(after the nuclear test ban treaty, they run a LOT of simulations)