I believe this is were we came in.
From the New York Times, May 29:
The new supercomputer shows the increasing desire of government labs to adopt more technologies from commercial artificial intelligence systems.
Scientific computing and artificial intelligence were once separate worlds, using different kinds of calculations on distinctly different hardware. But the two fields are steadily merging, as shown by a massive new machine coming to Berkeley, Calif.
On Thursday, the Department of Energy’s laboratory near the University of California, Berkeley, said it had selected Dell Technologies to deliver its next flagship supercomputer in 2026. The system will use Nvidia chips tailored for A.I. calculations and the simulations common to energy research and other scientific fields.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory expects the new machine — to be named for Jennifer Doudna, a Berkeley biochemist who shared the 2020 Nobel Prize for chemistry — to offer more than a tenfold speed boost over the lab’s most powerful current system. If fully outfitted, the machine could be the Energy Department’s biggest resource for tasks like training A.I. models, said Jonathan Carter, associate laboratory director for computing sciences at the Berkeley center.
The supercomputer stands out for its technology choices, which indicate the growing desire for government labs to adopt more technologies from commercial A.I. systems. Nvidia chips, though widely used by big cloud companies as well as in supercomputers, were passed over by the Energy Department for three previous record-setting machines that were assembled by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Dell has hardly been a player in the highest end of the supercomputer market, but it has had success in large commercial A.I. installations.
At the March 2024 GTC Jensen Huang literally turned the spotlight on Michael Dell who was in the audience for Huang's keynote speech.
Here's our first NVIDIA post, Sunday May 17, 2015:
Nvidia Wants to Be the Brains Of Your Autonomous Car (NVDA)
We've mentioned, usually in the context of the Top 500* fastest supercomputers, that:
Long time readers know we have a serious interest in screaming fast computers and try to get to the Top500 list a couple times a year. Here is a computer that was at the top of that list, the fastest computer in the world just four years ago. And it's being shut down.
Technology changes pretty fast.That was from a 2013 post.Among the fastest processors in the business are the one's originally developed for video games and known as Graphics Processing Units or GPU's. Since Nvidia released their Tesla hardware in 2008 hobbyists (and others) have used GPU's to build personal supercomputers.
Here's Nvidias Build your Own page.
Or have your tech guy build one for you.
In addition Nvidia has very fast connectors they call NVLink.
Using a hybrid combination of IBM Central Processing Units (CPU's) and Nvidia's GPU's, all hooked together with the NVLink, Oak Ridge National Laboratory is building what will be the world's fastest supercomputer when it debuts in 2018.
As your kid plays Grand Theft Auto.
From IEEE Spectrum, April 9, 2015:
Nvidia Wants to Build the Robocar's Brain...
The stock had closed the previous Friday at $21.30. [multiply today's close, (May 29, 2025) $139.19 x 40 to account for the stock splits et voilà!: $5567.60]
Our first post on AI was December 2013's "Why Is Machine Learning (CS 229) The Most Popular Course At Stanford?"And with a few more posts in 2014, including:
it was off to the races. But this week's backward-looking recollections have to end:
June 11, 2019
Securitise Everything: Debits, Credits, Whatev
Yesterday FT Alphaville had three posts:
What a debut securitisation tells us about fintechThat grabbed my eye but rather than sticking to the topics at hand my mind wandered to Carl Icahn's time at Trans World Airlines.
Is Lufthansa an e-money issuer?
Can air miles points be securitised?
Old Carl had bought the storied carrier with unsecured junk bonds and famously proceeded to mortgage everything he could including one "senior secured" issue backed by collateral that included spare light bulbs for the planes. The TWA light bulb bonds.
TWA went broke, I don't know what became of the light bulbs, but combined with reminiscences of the copper trading glory days of 15 years ago I thought, "Uh oh":
That's Vasili Maksimov's "Everything is in the past" (1889), which the Russian State Tretyakov Gallery describes as:
.... "Everything is in the past" , where the artist shows us one of the slowly disappearing "nests of the gentry", tackling the themes of a elegaic country estate life, senility and irreversibility of time.....Yikes, I am not ready for samovars and knitting needles. "Hello fellow kids, what is new with blockchain?"
Although, come to think of it, maybe some tea would be nice.
