#supercomputer

[dinosaurspen]

CDC 6600 Supercomputer

[steampoweredwerehog]

Lil’ peek behind the curtain.

Das right babey they share a universe

[mindblowingfactz]

All of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world run on Linux.

source source

[humanoidhistory]

Cyber 70 mainframe computer system by Control Data Corporation, circa 1974.

[carp3tpasta]

Rising Waters

[bozemane]

[river-taxbird]

What does AI actually look like?

There has been a lot of talk about the negative externalities of AI, how much power it uses, how much water it uses, but I feel like people often discuss these things like they are abstract concepts, or people discuss AI like it is this intangible thing that exists off in "The cloud" somewhere, but I feel like a lot of people don't know what the infrastructure of AI actually is, and how it uses all that power and water, so I would like to recommend this video from Linus Tech Tips, where he looks at a supercomputer that is used for research in Canada. To be clear I do not have anything against supercomputers in general and they allow important work to be done, but before the AI bubble, you didn't need one, unless you needed it. The recent AI bubble is trying to get this stuff into the hands of way more people than needed them before, which is causing a lot more datacenter build up, which is causing their companies to abandon climate goals. So what does AI actually look like?

First of all, it uses a lot of hardware. It is basically normal computer hardware, there is just a lot of it networked together.

Hundreds of hard drives all spinning constantly

Each one of the blocks in this image is essentially a powerful PC, that you would still be happy to have as your daily driver today even though the video is seven years old. There are 576 of them, and other more powerful compute nodes for bigger datasets.

The GPU section, each one of these drawers contains like four datacenter level graphics cards. People are fitting a lot more of them into servers now than they were then.

Now for the cooling and the water. Each cabinet has a thick door, with a water cooled radiator in it. In summer, they even spray water onto the radiator directly so it can be cooled inside and out.

They are all fed from the pump room, which is the floor above. A bunch of pumps and pipes moving the water around, and it even has cooling towers outside that the water is pumped out into on hot days.

So is this cool? Yes. Is it useful? Also yes. Anyone doing biology, chemistry, physics, simulations, even stuff like social sciences, and even legitimate uses of analytical ai is glad stuff like this exists. It is very useful for analysing huge datasets, but how many people actually do that? Do you? The same kind of stuff is also used for big websites with youtube. But the question is, is it worth building hundreds more datacenters just like this one, so people can automatically generate their emails, have an automatic source of personal attention from a computer, and generate incoherent images for social media clicks? Didn't tech companies have climate targets, once?

[ams-puppy]

AM's Processing Power ☆

a silly conversation we had that I wanted to draw....

WOOF!!!!!

[blinkees]

Could you make a standard size one with text reading "Supercomputer"? I would like a blue colour scheme (preferably a gradient, dark blue on top fading into a lighter shade of blue) and some wires on the sides, if possible. Thank you in advance! Big fan of your work, it's incredible

[digitalhorrorsx]

why is no one talking about the CM.

[dinosaurspen]

Snapshots of the Soviet BESM-6 computer, from its heyday in the 70s to the end of its operational life in the early 90s.

[semiconductorwave]

[commodorez]

Do you have a favourite supercomputer?

Sure do!

CDC 6600

Here's a console and about a quarter of the rest of the machine at the Computer History Museum. Released in 1964, and designed by Seymour Cray, Control Data Corporation had a beast of a machine capable of 2 MIPS, with a 60-bit processor operating at 10MHz

The two-screen, round CRT console is just so awesome. I wish I could sit down at a console like this and give one of these machines a try for myself.

[humanoidhistory]

Cray X-MP/48 supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 1988. It had four CPUs with a theoretical peak performance of over 800 megaFLOPS (floating point operations per second) and 8 million words of memory.

[sethmacfarlanedeathpose]

Let me tell you, man, I've had this idea for robot SciFi mpreg. Like I'm a slut for post apocalypse SciFi stuff and I love characters like AM and such. So now I'm imaging a giant supercomputer created with a giant artificial womb that produces biomechanic soldiers for war. After the apocalypse and the end of all humanity there is just this lonely AI supercomputer with nobody around, until a lone android scavenger comes upon it and they form a deep bond and the android finds a way to allow they supercomputer to produce biomechanic beings again. Whilst they grow in the artificial womb the android cares for an treats the supercomputer as if it were their pregnant partner.

I'm thinking the supercomputer being male, like a male voice and refers to himself with he/him pronouns and the android being non/binary they/it pronouns

[moonsidesong]

week one of the object show daily art ive been posting on @brifdi-daily !! im pleased i kept the motivation to at least get this far LOL its been fun :] i hope i can do lots more