What kind of humongous tasks do supercomputers do? What type of mathematical models can be so complex that it requires a computer close to $1B?
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The example of the recent use case: Machine Learning.
Albeit AI and ML sound super fancy (and in some way, is), the core concept of machine learning is “if I have billions of multiplications one after the other, and make them the *right number*, I can know if the input image was a cat”. But, for that, you need to “train” your ML, which means you need to update those billions of multiplications, thousands of times.
This requires tons of computing power. Supercomputers are equivalent of thousands of PCs, so they just do these multiplications much faster. Turns out just increasing how many multiplications you do really makes the algorithm “smarter”, so ML researchers keep adding more and more, so they need bigger and bigger computers.
Source: I do exactly that, in a supercomputer.
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