Hacker News Reader

Comment by Blammar | Hacker News Reader

It's $50 million. That's all. See https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/07/21/university-of-flori... for the numbers. It's probable the hardware is being offered at a deep discount.

The building and infrastructure will cost an additional $20m, covered by the University.

View on HN

https://lambdalabs.com/blog/demystifying-gpt-3/

According to ^, that's about 11 GPT-3s trainings worth in the cloud.

No one who's training GPT-3 pays those prices.

I dunno if there's a deep discount.

This is 140 DGX A100 systems. The advertised price for each DGX A100 is $199,000, so 140 of them is ~$28 million. It's plausible the networking, storage, cooling, power distribution, etc (i.e. everything but the compute nodes) could cost $22 million.

Yes, I think the 50 mil number was off. Add discounts, tax breaks etc., and we are talking less than sticker price for the whole setup minus real estate.

I'm in favor of getting high powered compute in everyone's hands, so this is great to me.

Why?

I mean, we already have (my old 2013 desktop would - I guess - compete with a cray 1 from the 1980s). What do you expect will happen if people get more CPU?

Better simulations? Successfully working on previously intractable problems?

But most people ie. not 'everyone' as the post talked about, is doing that. Most just want web browsing + LibreOffice stuff. Oh, and games I suppose.

The calculations we do nowaday are also completely different one did back in the 1980s. There’s still a lot you simply can not do on a home computer.

It's "anchored" by $50 million (of which half is support). But what does "anchored" mean here? The article also lists an additional $20 million from UF. I wouldn't be surprised if there was even more.

Its a $70M effort "anchored" by $25M cash donation and $25M in hardware. I've heard anchored used to indicate an initial "getting us started" donation at the beginning of a fund raising drive. Its easier to raise the final portion once you've got momentum and people think the project is likely to be successfully funded.

I'm glad they spent that $50 million on research rather than on next year's football program. Seems to be a decision most big state colleges would not make.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com