Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidmr | Hacker News Reader

Just a point of order: Summit isn’t used for weapons work. You have to go down to 6 and 7 on the current list to find one that is.

The DOD stopped reporting many of their computers to the list though, so it’s anyone’s guess where those would land.

Edit: US weapons work that is. I would imagine China uses at least one of theirs for classified work.

View on HN

Google & Amazon also aren't reporting their computer fleet as well. However its likely Google is #1 on that list on raw compute available to R&D efforts.

No, it's not. Google's data centers would probably perform like crap on the kind of workloads run on supercomputers.

I'm not so sure. It's normally about the interconnect with supercomputers, but modern datacenters have really pushed that boundary quite a bit. They still have higher latency in some regards, but they have a lot of reconfigurable hardware on the ethernet adapters that pushes down the latency in interesting ways.

I think he/she is talking about google TPU pods which can do 11.2 petaflops each. That's what they are offering google compute customers. Internally they probably have faster and larger pods by now as they usually publish about this stuff 6-12 months after they have moved on to something better.

It depends what you mean by a supercomputer. Having a lot of computers in data centers doesn't mean it's a supercomputer. Of course you can change the definition and call it # of cpus or compute "capacity" and such.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com