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Comment by poisonborz | Hacker News Reader

Don't know why your're downvoted, this is valid criticism. EU just bought 500 mil worth of hardware from the US, no specific European innovation, apart from system management (ParTec Italy). But would be happy to be proven otherwise.

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It was probably more like system designed in Europe, made in China, assembled in Europe thing.

Sure, the HQ of the core component(Nvidia) is incorporated in US but that too is a multinational effort.

Who exactly were you going to buy equipment from? AMD/Nvidia/Intel are the only players in town.

China with SMIC and Huawei's Ascend 910C would be an example of what you do if you want to pursue strategic autonomy. It's like asking "who exactly were you going to buy a 6th generation fighter from?"

Without questioning this idea on political grounds, I am not sure if it would be at all possible for an Ascend 910C cluster to enter the supercomputer rankings. I could not find a public datasheet on this chip (would appreciate a link), but my impression is that it is an AI accelerator that does not target FP64, whereas TOP500 is looking at HPC (FP64) performance [1].

[1] https://top500.org/resources/frequently-asked-questions/

Until a year ago, few thought there would ever be a need for Europe to have strategic autonomy from the US in an area that was already solved by trade agreements. Presumably this project was conceived long before that.

Seems like it has 5 petaflops of compute from a SiPearl (French) designed Rhea-1

Edit: that might be speculative or a future addition cause they taped out less than 2 months ago https://www.eetimes.eu/sipearl-tapes-out-rhea1-processor-clo...

Which was delayed 2 years. I’m speculating this was supposed to be mostly or exclusively this but they needed a computer now. Or needed to spend the budget now.

So US supercomputers aren’t an achievement because they just bought chips from Taiwan and those aren’t also an achievement because they bought photolithography machines from ASML in Europe?

Since when are supercomputers anything other than just the ability to afford a lot of hardware?

Germany got European taxpayers to buy them US hardware. That's a fairly normal day in the EU.

US Hardware, with essential components manufactured in Taiwan with European technology.

Don't forget it's made in china.

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