Tens of billions seem to fly in all sorts of directions these days in the AI world. A "mere" $1 billion deal would arguably not even register, but the one announced today is arguably far more important than all the data centers for enabling AI chatbot sexting. According to a Reuters report, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) and AMD have announced a partnership for building two supercomputers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) as a foundation for future nuclear fusion and medical research.
The partnership has the DoE and ORNL on the blue corner, and AMD, HPE, and Oracle on the other. The deal is that ORNL will host the datacenters, thus presumably providing the energy to run them, and the private companies will foot the bill for the hardware and software. When built, both sides will share the computing power.
The supercomputers themselves will predictably be an all-AMD affair for the major bits of hardware. The first one is called Lux and is set to be functional within six months, with AMD Instinct MI355X accelerators, to the tune of 1400 W board power each. ORNL director Stephen Streiffer says Lux will be three times as powerful in AI over current supercomputers, while Lisa Su states it was the fastest deployment of this size of supercomputer.
The second supercomputer will be called Discovery and is scheduled for delivery in 2028 and an operational kick-off in 2029. Discovery will use AMD's upcoming Instinct MI430 parts, a design with one Epyc CPU and four MI430X-HPC dies. The 430X and 450X are variations of the same design, with the former focusing on high-precision FP32 and FP64 performance, while the latter goes in the exact opposite direction and bets all its chips on FP8 and FP16.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright says this project will "supercharge" research on multiple fronts and tackle "large scientific problems ranging from nuclear power to cancer treatments to national security". He seems particularly bullish on fusion energy, stating he believes that with the help of these systems, [the U.S.] will have "practical pathways to harness fusion energy in the next two or three years." He also hopes that cancer will become a manageable disease in a timeframe of five to eight years.
Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
Well........ isn't that great that ORNL is inking this deal when the federal government still hasn't figured out how to fund itself.
The current shutdown still isn't the longest one we've had. So, while it's not a good situation, it's hardly unprecedented.
Also, the article mentions something about private companies paying for "hardware and software", which isn't something I recall previously reading about a big US government supercomputer. So, it's likely that ORNL is on the hook for quite a bit less than $1B.
Also, the article mentions something about private companies paying for "hardware and software", which isn't something I recall previously reading about a big US government supercomputer. So, it's likely that ORNL is on the hook for quite a bit less than $1B.
You're correct it's never happened before.
From the Reuters source article:
The Department of Energy will host the computers, the companies will provide the machines and capital spending, and both sides will share the computing power, a DOE official said.
The two supercomputers based on AMD chips are intended to be the first of many of these types of partnerships with private industry and DOE labs across the country, the official said.
The entire point of the government research supercomputers was that access is relatively democratized. I hope someone does some investigation to find out what the details of the deal are because this just sounds like the companies getting taxpayers to foot the operating bill for a certain amount of compute.
DS426 said:
Well........ isn't that great that ORNL is inking this deal when the federal government still hasn't figured out how to fund itself.
The two aren't mutually exclusive and this has certainly been in the works for a while.
