Updates
Later, 9:05 p.m. CT:
This is almost laughable. El Capitan took years to "construct," perhaps a decade, and has 44,544 GPUs (AMD, by the way) and is said by Wiki to be the largest supercomputer in the world.
Meanwhile, Wiki does not even mention Colossus among the largest supercomputers in the world: Colossus was built in 121 days; and is designed to max out at 1,000,000 GPUs. It went operational at 100,000 GPUs (Nvidia); and since then has reached 200,000 GPUs on its way to one million. And yet Wiki does not mention Colossus on its list of largest supercomputers. At least as far as I recollect.
Original Post
I'm disappointed. AI did not answer this question for me. I answered it for myself after a bit of work, but not much.
This is the question: what is the world's fastest / biggest / largest supercomputer? Elon Musk said his Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee, is the largest (which generally correlates to "fastest").
But yet Wiki has recently given the title to the largest supercomputer to El Capitan, pushing former #1, Frontier, to #2.
So, what is it? Who's right? Wiki or Elon Musk?
1. First data point: number of GPUs:
- El Capitan: 44,544 GPUs
- each computer node in the system contains four (4) AMD Instinct MI300A APUs, and each APU is equipped with six (6) XCD (eXtreme Compute Die) that serve as GPUs.
- Colossus: 200,000 GPUs
- began operating with 100,000 GPUs; now has 200,000 GPUs;
- expandable to one million GPUs which Elon Musk says he will do
- bragging rights? Elon Musk's Colossus
2. Time to manufacture these supercomputers (has nothing to do with the question, but is an important data point -- there's another metric that is not being tracked, that might be even more important, but more on that later):
- El Capitan / Frontier: took "several" years; perhaps as much as a decade all things considered.
- Colossus: 121 days
3. Speed:
- El Capitan, theoretical speed: 2.746 Exaflops
- Colossus, theoretical speed: 6 Exaflops (more than twice as fast) and that's with 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs.
- Colossus, as noted, now has twice that many Nvidia H100 GPUs, suggesting Elon Musk's Colossus might have a theoretical top speed of greater than 10 Exaflops or nearly four times or maybe even five times what El Capitan can achieve.
If John Cook's data is correct, and my analysis is not faulty, it begs the question: why is Wiki dragging its feet? Why is Wiki not calling "it" for Elon Musk?
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The Book Page
Time to re-read Thomas Merton's story of a Hindu monk in Merton's autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain: An Autobiography of Faith.
At any rate, the story is part of a bigger story of how a picture of a Hindu monk, by the name of Jagad-Bondhu ended up on the door of of a dormitory room at Columbia University back in the late 1930s. Besides being a great story, it's incredibly good writing.
The writing reminded me vaguely of Hunter S. Thompson, but different genres, different intensity.
