Aurora dawns late: Half-baked entry secures second in supercomputer stakes

After years of delays, Argonne National Laboratory's all-Intel "Aurora" supercomputer has finally graced the Top500 ranking of the world's most powerful publicly known supercomputers — just not where many had hoped to see it. The system, which features Intel's high-bandwidth memory (HBM)-equipped Xeon Max processors and GPU …

[Code For Broke]

Aside from being a dick-measuring contest, what is the point of these computers? How many new drugs or distant galaxies or whatever have they actually discovered and what is the value of that output?

And 24 megawatts!?! That's a lot of friggin Christmas lights. And at least actual lights look pretty for the public unlike the blinking of an acre or two of racks in some super-secure HPC data center.

I don't get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

@Code For Broke

Just for the record, as I've only just seen this article and your comment.

This might be a good place to start if you don't get it:

https://excalibur.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/UKRI-Supercomputing-Science-Case.pdf

It's a few years old and very much a UK perspective, albeit with world-leadership in much of the science.

The demand for these supercomputing facilities is enormous and the results themselves often form the basis of research studies for hundreds of thousands of PhD-level scientists and engineers, complementing laboratory experiments and observational studies. The scope of applications is vast and the scientific returns may take decades, but never have any doubt about the long-term value. It's worth remembering Michael Faraday quoting Benjamin Franklin: "What use is a new born baby?" (Of course, some babies may turn-out to be more useful than some others).

[luis river]

Atmosphere -poison

That supercomputers HPC (features by Intel, Cray, Evident, Lenovo etc..) all machine hungry MEGA WATTS, they are in TODAY energy era complete "DISPARATE", that dont is progress, that it is a poisoned atmosphere (CO2).