[LINK] ADF supercomputer brings AI to decision-making

[Scott Howard]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 9:16 AM Tom Worthington <tom.worthington at tomw.net.au>
wrote:

> Do you use supercomputers for AI?
>

Absolutely!

Over the past few years the worlds of HPC (High Performance Computing,
where you would normally use the term "Supercomputer") and AI have somewhat
merged to the point that there's often not a lot of distinction between
them. Even without that, many of the larger AI systems really deserve the
term on their own anyway.

HPC is generally a CPU-based workload, whilst AI is generally a GPU-based
workload, but many of the newer/larger HPC clusters now have a significant
number of GPU resources as well as the two worlds start to merge.

The largest 'public' supercomputer at the moment is El Capitan at LLNL
which has 11,136 nodes, each with 4 CPUs and 4 GPUs. #2 (Frontier) and #3
(Aurora) on that list also have significant numbers of GPUs (3 times GPUs
as CPUs for Aurora!)

xAI's "Colossus" system has over 100,000 GPUs, and is focused 100% on AI.
Is that any less deserving of the name 'supercomputer' than El Capitan?

  Scott