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Comment by westoncb | Hacker News Reader

Would someone explain the purpose/origin of using 'compute' as a noun like this instead of a verb?

I don't know the origin specifically, but it's been happening for some time (~decades) in GPU & graphics circles.

We've had 'compute shaders' e.g., https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff4...

The purpose from this perspective has been to differentiate general purpose computation on GPUs from fixed-function pipelines and/or graphics-specific functionality. The history of using GPUs for general purpose computation involved a lot of hacking to abuse hardware designed for rasterization to do other kinds of calculations.

One keyword / search term you can use is "GPGPU" (which stands for general purpose GPU). Here's another article which might shed more light on the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General-purpose_computing_on_g...

* Also found this possibly relevant note: "When it was first introduced by Nvidia, the name CUDA was an acronym for Compute Unified Device Architecture" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA)

That's an interesting example of usage. I was actually familiar with compute shaders but hadn't connected it with the sort of usage we see in the headline.

So it seems like a big part of how it's being used is to refer to a generalized computation service—some 'function' you're given access to which takes arbitrary programs as a parameter.

Seems like there's often the implication that how the computation is performed is abstracted over and that more or fewer resources could be applied to it—though that's not necessarily there (absent in the case of compute shaders for instance).

Archived 2012 discussion invokes Oxford English Dictionary to trace the original use back several 100 years. http://www.techwr-l.com/archives/1206/techwhirl-1206-00295.h...

In those examples, however, the meaning is, in current usage, 'calculation' or 'computation', not as a measure of computational work.

> In those examples, however, the meaning is, in current usage, 'calculation' or 'computation', not as a measure of computational work.

So is the OP:

"We’re releasing an analysis showing that since 2012, the amount of compute [amount of calculation, amount of computation] used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.5 month-doubling time "

Without loss of meaning, title could be AI and Calculation, or AI and Computation

To be clearer, I should have written 'a calculation' and 'a computation', as in the examples of the older usage, 'compute' is a singular noun, referring to a specific calculation, and the acceptability of substituting, under current usage, 'compute' for 'computation' here (where the latter is shorthand for computational work or effort, rather than referring to a specific calculation), has no bearing on the usage five centuries ago - and nor does the usage five centuries ago have any particular relevance for today, given how much computation has changed since then.

I think compute stands in for computing power so `amount of compute' to me means `amount of computing power'. If I were to use the terms calculation or computation I'd pluralise them so you'd get `amount of calculations' and `amount of computations' from `amount of compute'.

I think a lot of people in the industry got that word in their vocabulary from its usage in “Amazon EC2” (Elastic Cloud Compute). It’s certainly been used before, but that was one of the first times I remember hearing it in that context.

I dont know the origin but some of my bosses and managers like to use compute to sound cool and fancy... 'We need to know the execution time and compute cost for this job'. Good luck tracking the 'compute' of our 'job' that uses like 10 AWS tools. ec2, rds, cloudwatch, s3.

‘Elastic compute’ (i.e. EC2) goes back to 2006.

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