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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

With 2U, 4 Node, Dual Socket, and 128 Core CPU, you get up to 1024 Core or 2048 vCPU per Server Machine. We can now all enjoy our own cloud.

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The amount of scientific work that could be done with such a machine would be staggering, specially if it can be local. I use 2-10k cores on a daily basis, having a dedicated machine with 1k would make debugging large scale problems much faster.

> 2k-10k cores on a daily basis

could you tell more please? sorry, not in the loop on what a typical “scientific workflow” is like

Large-scale simulations of phisical systems tend to have a variety of length/time scales that require vast numbers of CPUs to model in a timely fashion. This could be anywhere from a few hundred cpus to tens of thousands. Fluid dynamics, solid mechanics, fluid-structure interactions, electrohydrodynamics, etc. simulation tools can all benefit from having a larger number of highly interconnected CPUs, we can simply resolve engineering problems better with more computational resources for better understanding of problems.

what language/frameworks orchestrate work across 10k cores? is that like, 10k threads? 10k processes?

It is not a single language. c, C++, Fortran are the most commonly used. The communication happens using one of many versions of the message passing interface [0] (MPI). MPI essentially spawns child processes and a communication ring between nodes using whichever interconnect is available (usually infoniband).

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_Passing_Interface

While melting the wires in your walls. How much juice would that pull when under full load?

3kw

^ roughly how much a clothes dryer uses, for comparison.

A lot of power, but nothing really abnormal. Most rooms in a house won't be wired for it but that's about all. You probably wouldn't want this much thermal output in a normal room anyway, not to mention fan noise.

In most parts of Europe the standard room socket has >= 3.6 kW

It could also double as a clothes dryer (put a cabinet with clothing racks on next to the server rack, pipe the hot air into it).

Honey, can you queue up a large simulation? Got a full load to dry again.

There are no 4P motherboards for AMD EPYC processors, they're all 2P because the of the number of interconnects per server CPU.

The OP was confusingly suggesting a 2U box with four distinct computers inside (4 node), each with two sockets. These types of systems do exist, and can help with volume density, but then you have to work a lot harder with regards to power and heat density.

I don't know what things look like now, but I recall hearing many stories a decade ago about datacenters running out of power and cooling when the volume was closer to 1/3rd full.

I understand your happiness, but using such a vague word as "cloud" is doing a disservice to this setup

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