News U.S. Government Offers Nvidia A100 Nodes at Half Price

[Admin]

U.S. National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center files idle supercomputer nodes with commercial workloads.

U.S. Government Offers Nvidia A100 Nodes at Half Price : Read more

 

[bit_user]

"Using your time now benefits the entire NERSC community and spreads demand more evenly throughout the year, so to encourage usage now, we are ..."

Sounds like it's heavily directed at grad students. I'll bet there's a huge queue for getting some runtime, toward the end of each semester.

The discount must be due to having some idle time on their A100 nodes, right now. If you have a limited budget of compute hours, you're going to save them until you need them, which is probably going to be skewed towards the latter half of the semester.

... why the organization does not backfill its idle capacity with commercial workloads.

If this HPC GPU supply crunch were an ongoing phenomenon, then you might see something like that. However, the agency is tasked with providing resources to scientific researchers, not with serving the commercial sector or trying to turn a profit.

In offering a commercial service, there could come additional risks, such as more exposure to hackers, which is an added problem when you consider those jobs are running along side some classified government research jobs. You'd also have to do more clearance work to ensure that your commercial customers aren't from sanctioned entities, etc.

All in all, it sounds like more of a headache than it might be worth, especially if your existing users have the allocation of hours to use. Encouraging them to use their time now not only reduces node idle time, but perhaps more importantly reduces contention during those critical high-demand periods.

 

[bit_user]

BTW, we're seeing a growing trend of institutions shifting away from building their own supercomputers and towards simply renting time on cloud instances. Overall, this is a better solution, especially regarding idle resources. However, it would require the institutions to do some up-front negotiation and contract a certain number of hours, to avoid getting hit too hard, during crunch time. And it still might not be suitable for certain government research, such as NERSC supports.

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[3Cats3Boxes]

Indeed the government doesn't rent server space to commercial users, as there's quite a concern about potential competition between state-sponsored facilities and private entities of any kind, whether commercial, academic, or nonprofit. But as Congress and the administration continue to flesh out strategies to assist domestic startups that might otherwise be lost in the "valley of death," the chasm between R&D funding and commercial viability, through initiatives at HHS, DOE, NSF, etc., it would be a good idea to mandate a structure to monitor and make available at minimal cost the surplus compute resources available across our many publicly funded facilities (mostly, but not exclusively, at FFRDCs).

 

[bit_user]

Indeed the government doesn't rent server space to commercial users, as there's quite a concern about potential competition between state-sponsored facilities and private entities of any kind, whether commercial, academic, or nonprofit. But as Congress and the administration continue to flesh out strategies to assist domestic startups that might otherwise be lost in the "valley of death," the chasm between R&D funding and commercial viability, through initiatives at HHS, DOE, NSF, etc., it would be a good idea to mandate a structure to monitor and make available at minimal cost the surplus compute resources available across our many publicly funded facilities (mostly, but not exclusively, at FFRDCs).

Good points.

Quite a username, too! Welcome!
: )