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Comment by ousta | Hacker News Reader

I struggle to see any complexity into google approach - unlike bellard's one that is an amazing feat.

They basically pulled more machine to compute more. nothing really impressive. pretty much any dev with that computing power could have done it

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It's fairly impressive.

Keeping a single server online for 111 days straight at full CPU and RAM usage over 96 cores and 1.4TB of RAM is a good start. The fact that such a machine exists is already mind-blowing. Then add 25 more nodes running iSCSI, all out 24/7 for 111 days. Hell, just mounting 240TB on a single system is a good stunt, go ahead and try it and let me know it's not "complex".

And your last point kind of IS the point of their marketing: any dev could do it if they have the skill, and they'll rent you the hardware.

While those are interesting systems administration tasks, I believe the point is that the previous record was held by someone who used smarter maths (than the previous previous record) and vastly fewer computing resources.

I think that's the point they are trying to make; that doing this with GCP is super boring and easy.

Exactly. It's a matter of K8s configuration, which a devops intern can do in a few weeks probably.

Compare this with the Chudnovsky brothers, who built their pi calculating "supercomputer" from commodity parts in their NY apartment, back in 1992: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/03/02/the-mountains-...

(and being mathematicians, they also discovered novel formulas for speeding up their calculation)

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