Family Sports Note -- Nothing About The Bakken -- January 27, 2024

Locator: 46665SPORTS.

The highlight of our world -- with regard to sports -- over the weekend. 

Yesterday in the cold and the rain, our granddaughter Olivia scored the only goal and the winning goal in the girl's soccer game.

Olivia is one of the team's captains, and the only captain returning from last year. The other two captains were seniors and they have moved on. Olivia was the first junior in the school's history to be named a captain -- at least as far as anyone can recall. 

The team won the Texas state soccer championship last year -- and Olivia was a big part of that accomplishment.

So, fast forward to yesterday in the cold and the rain, 0 - 0 at the end of regulation time. The only really, really big moment in regulation time was Olivia stopping an opponent's goal attempt. It was huge and quite remarkable. The goalie was "taken out" and the goal unguarded just as the opposing team took a shot -- and with an incredible run and dive, Olivia stopped the ball at the goal line.

In the 5-shot over time, it was 2 - 1 going into the fourth shot. The opposing team member kicked and miss. Olivia, pure serendipity, was our team's fourth of five to shoot. She scored; that ended the shooting at four attempts and our team won 1 - 0. 

Whoo-hoo! 

So, one incredible save and the winning goal. The team's captain with the only goal and the winning goal. How fitting.

But, wow it was wet, windy and cold. 

History OF US LNG Export Industry -- January 27, 2024

Locator: 46664LNG.
Locator: 46664DEFLATION.

This is an incredible piece of work by Stephen Stapczynski over at twitter / X.

Two milestones:

• the Bakken revolution
• Aubrey McClendon

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Inflation Watch

Again, at the "most expensive" of the six+ grocery stores in our local area.

Great marketing and loyalty rewards but at the end of the dau it's all about the supply chain post-pandemic. 

 I would argue that the price of Tide detergent is fairly "price inelastic."

The government's market basket when pricing Tide: $7.49.

The consumer's market basket when pricing Tide: $3.99.

Tell me again US inflation is running at 9%. This is classic deflation. Not disinflation but deflation.

One of the few places we won't see much (if any) deflation in the US in 2024: restaurant meals; airline travel; shares of NVID.

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A Second Language

The most commonly spoke language other than Spanish by state.

This is why I'm studying Spanish on Duolingo.

Energy Demand -- Three Mile Island -- Constellation Energy -- Crane Clean Energy Center -- January 27, 2024

Locator: 46663TECH.

Link here.

The WSJ:  December 15, 2023.

Some experts project that global electricity consumption for AI systems could soon require adding the equivalent of a small country’s worth of power generation to our planet. That demand comes as the world is trying to electrify as much as possible and decarbonize how that power is generated in the face of climate change.

Since 2010, power consumption for data centers has remained nearly flat, as a proportion of global electricity production, at about 1% of that figure, according to the International Energy Agency. But the rapid adoption of AI could represent a sea change in how much electricity is required to run the internet—specifically, the data centers that comprise the cloud, and make possible all the digital services we rely on.

This means the AI industry is poised to run the equivalent of a planetary-scale experiment, according to experts both outside and inside the industry. This has some of them wringing their hands, while energy suppliers are practically salivating at the expected increase in demand.

And then this:

Constellation Energy, which has already agreed to sell Microsoft nuclear power for its data centers, projects that AI’s demand for power in the U.S. could be five to six times the total amount needed in the future to charge America’s electric vehicles.

The power site is known as the Crane Clean Energy Center per Constellation Energy. It is to go online in mid-2028.

Alex de Vries, a researcher at the School of Business and Economics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, projected in October that, based on current and future sales of microchips built by Nvidia specifically for AI, global power usage for AI systems could ratchet up to 15 gigawatts of continuous demand. Nvidia currently has more than 90% of the market share for AI-specific chips in data centers, making its output a proxy for power use by the industry as a whole.

That’s about the power consumption of the Netherlands, and would require the entire output of about 15 average-size nuclear power plants.

Bloomberg Law: The NCLA -- January 27, 2024

Locator: 46662LAW.

From Bloomberg Law, January 27, 2024: 

Story Of The Day? January 27, 2024

Locator: 46661TECH.

Link here. 

From Forbes, September 11, 2023:

To understand the significance of Dojo, one needs to examine the existing milieu of AI processors and supercomputing. Conventional supercomputers, typified by NVIDIA's A100 GPUs, IBM's Summit, or HPE’s Cray Exascale, have been vital in scientific research, complex simulations, and big data analytics. However, these systems are primarily designed for a broad array of tasks rather than optimized for a singular purpose like the real-world data-driven AI computer vision that Tesla is designing Dojo for.

Tesla’s Dojo promises to revolutionize the AI processing landscape by focusing solely on improving the company's FSD capabilities. With this vertical integration, Tesla aims to construct an ecosystem that encompasses hardware, data, and practical application—a trifecta that could usher in a new era of supercomputing, explicitly designed for real-world data processing.

Historically, Tesla relied on NVIDIA's GPU clusters to train its neural networks for autopilot systems. Despite the lack of clarity in performance metrics such as single-precision or double-precision floating-point calculations, Tesla claimed to operate a computing cluster that stood as the "fifth-largest supercomputer in the world" as of 2021. Details are hard to come by but various commentators have put Tesla’s hoard of NVIDIA A100 GPUs at over 10,000 units, which by any stretch puts Tesla as having one of the largest training systems globally, and the company has been at this for at least 2 years now.

From wiki: 

Tesla Dojo is a supercomputer designed and built by Tesla for computer vision video processing and recognition.

It will be used for training Tesla's machine learning models to improve its Full Self-Driving advanced driver-assistance system. According to Tesla, it went into production in July 2023.

Dojo's goal is to efficiently process millions of terabytes of video data captured from real-life driving situations from Tesla's 4+ million cars.

This goal led to a considerably different architecture than conventional supercomputer designs.

Tesla operates several massively parallel computing clusters for developing its Autopilot advanced driver assistance system.

Its primary unnamed cluster using 5,760 Nvidia A100 graphics processing units (GPUs) was touted by Andrej Karpathy in 2021 at the fourth International Joint Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CCVPR 2021) to be "roughly the number five supercomputer in the world" at approximately 81.6 petaflops, based on scaling the performance of the Nvidia Selene supercomputer, which uses similar components.

However, the performance of the primary Tesla GPU cluster has been disputed, as it was not clear if this was measured using single-precision or double-precision floating point numbers (FP32 or FP64).

Tesla also operates a second 4,032 GPU cluster for training and a third 1,752 GPU cluster for automatic labeling of objects.

The primary unnamed Tesla GPU cluster has been used for processing one million video clips, each ten seconds long, taken from Tesla Autopilot cameras operating in Tesla cars in the real world, running at 36 frames per second. Collectively, these video clips contained six billion object labels, with depth and velocity data; the total size of the data set was 1.5 petabytes. This data set was used for training a neural network intended to help Autopilot computers in Tesla cars understand roads.

By August 2022, Tesla had upgraded the primary GPU cluster to 7,360 GPUs.

Supercomputer, 500, wiki.

Datacenterdynamics, 80 petaflops.

Bottom line: this is the kind of investment every EV automobile manufacturer will have to make -- and there are no less than a dozen EV manufacturers -- or buy the information from Elon Musk.

Ticker:

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, career, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or think you may have read here. 

All my posts are done quickly: there will be content and typographical errors. If anything on any of my posts is important to you, go to the source. If/when I find typographical / content errors, I will correct them. 

Again, all my posts are done quickly. There will be typographical and content errors in all my posts. If any of my posts are important to you, go to the source.

Reminder: I am inappropriately exuberant about the US economy and the US market.