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Comment by paulluuk | Hacker News Reader

> The BSC, Europe's leading developer of open source computing technologies

> The fact that the [..] architecture [..] of these new processors is open source, and therefore non-proprietary and accessible to all, reduces technological dependence on large multinational corporations

I hadn't heard of either BSC nor Open Source Computing before. I'm curious though, are there a lot of people out there who are not tied to large corporations and who have the knowledge and the means to produce computer hardware? Are there hobbyists out there producing their own custom chips and graphics cards?

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The BSC has been featured a bunch of times around here due to their Marenostrum Supercomputer. A month ago someone posted a virtual visit to their Marenostrum 4 location, that's kinda surprising/interesting because is located inside an old chapel:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38160675
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MareNostrum_4_supercomputer_at_Barcelona_Supercomputing_Center_1_br.jpg

Their Marenostrum 5 is number 8 in the TOP 500 supercomputer list ( https://www.top500.org/system/180238/ ) and I think it recently started working or it's about to do it now ( https://www.eetimes.com/bsc-about-to-dispatch-marenostrum-5-... ) . They had to change its location as it didn't fit in the church anymore, though.

But they will keep the Marenostrum 4 in the chapel this time, instead of replacing the old generation with the new version :).

Nice! The real Computing Church!

If they ever get AGI going it will have come full circle. You can go there to pray to your very visible god. Prompt engineering will be the new praying, you read it on HN first...

Training in the Cloud, fine tuning in old churches, inference in your home shrine.

If anyone likes ambient music, an artist I like produced an album from recordings of marenostrum: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1EGmWY91Vus

I find it oddly relaxing.

I don’t know about hobbyists but there are less known companies doing open source hardware for sure, [1] here is an example of cool stackable parallel computing project. I participated on the campaign and received mine, but not sure how are they doing today, it was a while ago.

Edit: Andreas Olofsson the original founder seems to be still active in the field [2]

- [1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-s...

- [2] https://x.com/zeroasic?s=21&t=xSlFhUGn5i8d8RkXrsgAIg

For anyone who hasn't heard about the BSC, you can check out the website or, if you are more inclined to read code:

- https://earth.bsc.es/gitlab/es/autosubmit/ - project I joined last year to work on, a workflow manager used in MareNostrum to run mainly (but not exclusively) climate experiments - https://earth.bsc.es/gitlab/es/ - other projects from my department - https://gitlab.bsc.es/explore/projects - general projects

There are also lots of interesting projects, like Aina, a project in partnership with Generalitat de Catalunya (like the council? prefecture?) to foster the Catalan language with models and tools using HPC resources: https://projecteaina.cat/

They co-hosted the RISC-V Summit back in 2018: https://riscv.org/proceedings/2018/05/risc-v-workshop-in-bar...

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