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It's not remotely a fair comparison, as typical scientific computing requires high-performance communication to run with any modicum of efficiency. It's not just a matter of scale---the architecture of a machine like this differs dramatically from AWS of a similar size. [Never mind the national security concerns.]


How, specifically does the architecture differ dramatically?


Generally Infiniband [1] or Omni-Path [2] interconnects between the compute nodes - extremely high throughput and low latency communication on the order of 100 Gb/s and 1 microsecond. These problems aren't trillions of completely independent operations which may work for cloud/distributed architecture. For these types of calculations compute node 6523 needs to know the data coming from compute node 2447 in near-realtime to continue working.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfiniBand

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omni-Path


Thanks for the detail. I can clearly see the benefit of a couple orders of magnitude less latency.




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