Hacker News Reader

Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

How can they possibly keep the location of something like this a secret? There have to be thousands of people involved in building and maintaining it.

View on HN

Just because they aren't publishing the location in a blog post doesn't mean they are keeping it secret. It's simply not relevant info.

I don't see any sort of commitment to secrecy with this:

> The company declined to comment on the location of the facility or the cost

It's generally a common practice not to disclose addresses of your data centers, but they can usually be discerned with a bit of research. Journos aren't going to be that extensive.

Meta has a number of publicly-announced datacenter locations that were built and operated specifically by/for Meta. It's probably safe to assume it's located in one or more of those datacenters.

won't it just be a few racks of gpus in one one the existing giant data centers?

Super computers are much larger than a few racks of GPU's.

You could fit any of the TOP500 machines into one of Facebook's datacenters, couldn't you? With room left over to spare?

It's not like Facebook had to go hollow out the Moon to make this.

The largest machine in the top500 draws 30MW, which is getting to be close to the size of a Facebook or Google datacenter. All the rest are much smaller. Mostly people misunderstand the relationship between supercomputers and the cloud. Supercomputers are somewhat large and very specialized. Cloud datacenters are just enormous.

Many years back the military connected some 1700 PS3s to create the world's 35th most powerful supercomputer. That needed few racks and could do 500 tflops. One latest XBox can do 12 tflops sitting in your living room. Of course the supercomputers would also have gotten magnitudes faster since. But hope this gives some sense of physical size.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com